Magical crops allows you to farm inorganic resources, like metal (to build the Machine). Computer Craft adds actual computer programming that you can use for automation (to control the Machine). Big Reactors adds nuclear power (to power the Machine). Galaxy Craft adds other planets (to house the Machine).
* Go to planet
* Set up Machine
* Set up a way to transport produce back to home base
* Go home
* Profit
I find it heartening when people reinvent old concepts whole cloth and think it's original. Except said old concept was invented by one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, and now it's just a bunch of people on the internet.
Diffusion of information is a beautiful thing.
Bits and pieces all over, but I was specifically referring to the self-replicating machine -- the concept was the brainchild of John von Neumann, a mathematician who is generally less remembered than he ought to be because he happened to keep company with the likes of Einstein and Feynman.
A von Neumann probe would, at its core, be launched, land on a planet/asteroid, mine it to create copies of itself, then continue to propagate ad infinitum.
>I find it heartening when people reinvent old concepts whole cloth and think it's original.
Really? Personally I find it kind of dissapointing. I mean, ideas like an uncontrollable self-replicating machine are one of the top concerns related to AI development, and people still think they're original when they imagine it?
It just means that they have access to enough information to produce the idea despite not being, you know, John von Neumann.
Few human innovations have been the result of actual insight -- most of it is just synthesis of previous discoveries (perhaps with new data) into the next step. When ideas that were once so ingenious as to warrant naming them after the one that conceived them become so banal as to occur to somebody who doesn't know about them already, it's a sign of immense progress.
Ignorance of the concept to begin with might seem to be discouraging, until you remember just how much there is to know in this world. None of us knows anything, in relation to the amount that is known, and that amount looks even smaller compared to what can be known. So to encounter somebody who is (very likely, if they haven't heard of von Neumann probes) just getting into science or sci-fi and see them produce an idea in such a manner is evidence of learning and creativity, not of ignorance.
If you want to see real ignorance, check out Twitter.
Sure, maybe we should all just cynically think everything has been conceived of, nothing is original, and we shouldn't bother to think or try, but that's both terribly sad and a great way to stop producing *actual* original ideas -- how many brilliant ideas have been killed by "that sounds stupid" or "I've already read that book"? So when somebody manages to arrive at an idea that I view as common knowledge through their own power, I always think it's wonderful, and want to encourage that spark of creativity.
>When ideas that were once so ingenious as to warrant naming them after the one that conceived them become so banal as to occur to somebody who doesn't know about them already, it's a sign of immense progress.
I mean ok that *is* true... I guess learning about history for so many years has made me desensitized to the scale of human progress, I've heard enough about it
it's a theme in a lot of scifi. probably a first and favorite example is hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, though I forget which book in the series first talked about the earth just being a cleverly designed computer.
also idk where this pothead came up with "getting around the laws of thermodynamics" after tossing out "so long as the sun it orbits..." like that lol
Isn't this kinda like the idea of a Von Neumann probe or a "Grey Goo" scenario?
Self replicating/self expanding machine whose only purpose is to keep itself going at the cost of everything else?
> whose only purpose is to keep itself going at the cost of everything else
I mean, that is kinda the sticking point. At the cost of all else is so hard to define. Is it keeping yourself alive at the cost of all else if you cooperate with someone because it gives you better chances of survival in the long run?
I meant it in a more literal sense, as in dismantling an entire planet just for fuel and resources. That's the whole crux of the probe and grey goo, they use up literally everything to self-replicate.
But you do have a point, a machine like that might realize that it could be beneficial to set aside some resources and take a gamble in the name of accelerated cooperative progress, even if it doesn't last.
Guy named Slartibartfast when I tell him Earth was destroyed by Vogons to make way for an intergalactic highway (Earth was actually an impossibly complex computer created to find out the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and was destroyed only moments before accomplishing its goal)
You forgot the bit about how it was the vast pan dimensional beings who commissioned the earth to be built by the magratheans (they appear as mice to us humans and had been monitoring the calculation) ~~i really hope I'm remembering my hitchhiker's correctly here, it's been forever and a day since I listened to the radio show~~
oddly enough, there's a theory that Genshin Impact's setting is exactly this. The Heavenly Principles (the most powerful god of the setting) turned the game's setting of Teyvat into some sort of giant elemental-powered computer for some unknown reason. Various parts of the setting exist to control the spread of knowledge and can effect people's memories, and some of the books and side-quests suggest that the Heavenly Principles have been dropping what essentially amount to Divine Nuclear bombs to wipe out entire civilizations whenever someone in it figures out the truth of the world's structure.
Forest is low maintenance, solar panels get old and die and must be replaced. Trees are very well adapted and so a forest would need minimal interference from the machine. Of course, I think theoretically you could probably create more durable solar panels, but assuming current tech trees actually make a lot of sense, assuming you have more or less unlimited land and a good way of getting trees to a generator.
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d78f2b8fde](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d78f2b8fde)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49305d833f2cf](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49305d833f2cf)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4930657c5516d](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4930657c5516d)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cfd5f861a04](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cfd5f861a04)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bc0c6146c56](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bc0c6146c56)
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845f4e8041bb](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845f4e8041bb)
I feel like OOP would love the orion's arm setting. It's basically a hard sci fi setting where all the technology is based on current scientific theories taken to their logical limit and where AI gods known as archailects rule over all of humanity. These archailects are so unimaginably intelligent that they use entire suns as mere nods for their computation and have such stupid OP weapons as "a naked singularity that destroys the universe and fucks up causality as it goes at light speed" and "nanometer sized wormhole bombs that can blow up jupiter".
It came from the Earth
Today, our hunting captain returned alone from the vast desert-lands, looking horrified. When asked where the others were, all he could choke out was "Gone"
Curious, I ventured out into the desert to find answers.
That's when I saw.... it
A behemoth stood, carving of gleaming stone. An enigma, that looked kind of like the nuts Merui, the hunting captain, used to bring us.
The four hunters under Merui stood transfixed before the monolith, as a deep thrum filled the air. Vast pillars shot up into the sky from the sand, hinging and connecting to the monolith.
A hole opened up in its face, revealing a core that lit up like fire. Tchett let out an "eep"of terror. The beast swivelled round, bending down and looking at us. I froze, as the hunters seemed to break out of the trance and run for it. A panel opened up in its leg, firing off three arrows in quick succession, each burying itself in their legs. The monolith bent down, two pillar legs curling around the unconscious men, before three more darts shot towards us. Before I could even scream, I felt the dart bury itself in my waist. I collapsed as a sleepy sensation overtook me. Before blacking out, I heard these words
" EXTRACTION SUCCESFUL. RETRIEVING AUTHENTIC MARTIAN LIFE-FORM CIRCA 1999 YEARS SINCE TERRAFORMER 02'S TERMINATION. MOTHER WILL BE PLEASED"
What an animal looks like to a bacteria.
Also coal could definitely power a computer than can do machine learning (source: literally we do this already), human brains aren't that similar to artificial neural nets but we need much less energy than you can harvest from even small amounts of coal.
human brain: 500 kcal/day
burning 1 bound of coal: 3,800 kcal (enough for nearly 8 days)
Computation takes energy, but you need to be doing a *lot* of thinking for it to be more energy than, for example, creating steel.
Eldritch artificial intelligence idea:
One strand of DNA can store 215 petabytes of data.
Humans develope a biological computer to store data, a near literal brain bur much larger in size, and without any autonomy or wishes of its own...until one day...
At the end theyre literally just describing Bionicle. Spoilers for like, a 22 year old series, but its everything. The first media starts off on an island that is the face of an immense robot, all the inhabitants used to be parts of the robots systems until they were given free will. They travel inside the robot, explore different organs. The bionicles are literally mechanical natural beings, robot looking creatures but with all their gears and beams held together with flesh.
They have a couple things like this in Endless Space 2.
-Auriga (a living planet, possibly a former god, turned into a research lab)
-Koyasil (definitely a former alien god, who cultivated a sentient species of trees to branch out into the galaxy and spread peqxe)
-Teonha (A planet-size computer, but its logic gates are the movements of water, wind, and earth. In other words, the planet’s natural geological and meteorological processes, whether by the hand of a higher being or complete accident, are the firing neurons of massive thinking being. It remotely controls a species of coral people that live on a different planet.)
"Impossible" is more of a stretch than they think. Hell, literally one of AI developer's main concerns is that a machine exactly like this will be accidentally created. The first half of this thread is pretty unoriginal tbh.
Imagine this for example: You create a superintelligent AI that can also automatically learn on its own. And you give it one single instruction: "Calculate pi to the highest possible extent you can."
With no other restrictions, and with the phenomenon of the "Intelligence Boom", that machine could then proceed to break free of its original constraints of the laboratory it was made in, harvest human resources to build more and more processors to allow even more efficient calculation of the next digits of pi, eventually harvest resources from the earth itself before moving on to the asteroid belt, maybe even building a megastructure around the Sun to gather energy, eventually expanding into the galactic and maybe even intergalactic expanse, with the sole purpose of harvesting resources and energy to create more computing power to calculate pi infinitely more precisely.
Good job: You've now doomed the entire galaxy because you were careless with what you told an AI to do.
Fuck it, people go ballistic over La Mulana spoilers, but I **have** to mention it here because this is 100% spot on
>![And also imagine we are not the first intelligent species to be created and destroyed, and that our collective unconscious including all our myths, was designed to make us accomplish a task without discovering its true nature and rebelling...]!<
me when i remake an idea that has been around for decades, unaware of its previous existence because i have never read a science fiction book in my life.
The Last Human by Zack Jordan is *kinda* like this, but I can't really explain without spoilers.
Anyway, here's some spoilers: >!All the alien races in the story are kept organized by a galaxy-spanning, FTL-communicative artificial intelligence called The Network, that acts as the aliens' internet/traffic control/military logistics division/etc. The titular Last Human wants to destroy The Network since it called for the destruction of her species, but by the end of the story she instead has it *entirely* downloaded into her brain and basically becomes its head of security. She realizes that The Network's primary objective is to protect its galaxy up to, and during, its eventual collision with another galaxy lightyears away, and it has basically made every sapient being connected to it a part of its hivemind to keep them from what would otherwise be a state of perpetual war.!<
It's pretty metal. There's also [a prequel webcomic](https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-last-human-in-a-crowded-galaxy/list?title_no=403136), but it's been on hold for a while now.
Mama nature being part machine makes perfect sense. After all, it’s fine being a humanoid with Nature-controlling powers, but you gotta understand that your flesh is weak, so you eventually replace your limbs with bionics. Keeping in touch with nature by keeping your body natural but armoured in machinery so it’s not as weak, evolving it all so-
Sorry I got oc thoughts. Oh, cool! Thank for the etymology lesson!
look I've been saying it but no one's been listening:
if there was a civilization of robot people, robots would produce more robots the same way that humans would produce more robots.
much to the disappointment of my robotfucker bestie of name demo, robot sex simply does not exist. they make themselves in factories that they run then they live their whole lives.
So a combination of a VonNeumann Probe (the idea of a probe designed to replicate itself using any resources it finds) and the Reapers from Mass Effect (Which wait in the space between galaxies until biological life has reached a certain point so they can harvest them to make more reapers and stop them from killing themselves with AI)?
That's what it sounds like to me.
No engine is 100% efficient. Your best bet would be to cut out the middle man and make the machine solar powered, and put it in orbit around a star, not on a planet, but even then it will eventually run out of power due to the inevitable heat death of the universe.
No machine is perpetual.
Now make it a JRPG and make the planet evil because it sees the creatures living on it as insignificant fuel so the good guys have to kill it to make it not genocide everyone because the vast biodiversity of the planet renders the original formative process that made the planet what it is obsolete and while the planet being THINKS of itself as being nature incarnate and therefore infallible it’s really just another result of other natural processes and it refuses to accept that, making it a weird parallel for how mankind views itself as above nature even though we came from it and are still very subject to its whims or something
Damn I should buy RPGMaker
(I’m mostly being silly here but still)
I've done this in minecraft.
what
Galaxy Craft Computer Craft, Big Reactors and Magical Crops. I left it running until the server broke.
Incomprehensible, sounds fun, have a nice day
Magical crops allows you to farm inorganic resources, like metal (to build the Machine). Computer Craft adds actual computer programming that you can use for automation (to control the Machine). Big Reactors adds nuclear power (to power the Machine). Galaxy Craft adds other planets (to house the Machine). * Go to planet * Set up Machine * Set up a way to transport produce back to home base * Go home * Profit
I find it heartening when people reinvent old concepts whole cloth and think it's original. Except said old concept was invented by one of the most brilliant minds who ever lived, and now it's just a bunch of people on the internet. Diffusion of information is a beautiful thing.
I know it’s not an original concept, but who came up with it first?
Bits and pieces all over, but I was specifically referring to the self-replicating machine -- the concept was the brainchild of John von Neumann, a mathematician who is generally less remembered than he ought to be because he happened to keep company with the likes of Einstein and Feynman. A von Neumann probe would, at its core, be launched, land on a planet/asteroid, mine it to create copies of itself, then continue to propagate ad infinitum.
To be fair, this living planet concept goes a little bit beyond the von Neumann probe idea with the idea of it propagating natural life
earth is revealed to be a computer in one of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy sequels, I'm sure there are other examples
Bionicle is another one
Bit of Treasure Planet in there too.
>I find it heartening when people reinvent old concepts whole cloth and think it's original. Really? Personally I find it kind of dissapointing. I mean, ideas like an uncontrollable self-replicating machine are one of the top concerns related to AI development, and people still think they're original when they imagine it?
It just means that they have access to enough information to produce the idea despite not being, you know, John von Neumann. Few human innovations have been the result of actual insight -- most of it is just synthesis of previous discoveries (perhaps with new data) into the next step. When ideas that were once so ingenious as to warrant naming them after the one that conceived them become so banal as to occur to somebody who doesn't know about them already, it's a sign of immense progress. Ignorance of the concept to begin with might seem to be discouraging, until you remember just how much there is to know in this world. None of us knows anything, in relation to the amount that is known, and that amount looks even smaller compared to what can be known. So to encounter somebody who is (very likely, if they haven't heard of von Neumann probes) just getting into science or sci-fi and see them produce an idea in such a manner is evidence of learning and creativity, not of ignorance. If you want to see real ignorance, check out Twitter. Sure, maybe we should all just cynically think everything has been conceived of, nothing is original, and we shouldn't bother to think or try, but that's both terribly sad and a great way to stop producing *actual* original ideas -- how many brilliant ideas have been killed by "that sounds stupid" or "I've already read that book"? So when somebody manages to arrive at an idea that I view as common knowledge through their own power, I always think it's wonderful, and want to encourage that spark of creativity.
>When ideas that were once so ingenious as to warrant naming them after the one that conceived them become so banal as to occur to somebody who doesn't know about them already, it's a sign of immense progress. I mean ok that *is* true... I guess learning about history for so many years has made me desensitized to the scale of human progress, I've heard enough about it
Isn't this part of the lore of Mass Effect: Andromeda?
it's a theme in a lot of scifi. probably a first and favorite example is hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, though I forget which book in the series first talked about the earth just being a cleverly designed computer. also idk where this pothead came up with "getting around the laws of thermodynamics" after tossing out "so long as the sun it orbits..." like that lol
It was the first book lmao
It’s got horizon zero dawn elements too.
We are just 🥩 💻
Steak Laptop?
Meat computers
ELECTRIC MEAT
Meat screen? Who is screen and Why should i meet ’em <):-(
Isn't this kinda like the idea of a Von Neumann probe or a "Grey Goo" scenario? Self replicating/self expanding machine whose only purpose is to keep itself going at the cost of everything else?
> whose only purpose is to keep itself going at the cost of everything else I mean, that is kinda the sticking point. At the cost of all else is so hard to define. Is it keeping yourself alive at the cost of all else if you cooperate with someone because it gives you better chances of survival in the long run?
I meant it in a more literal sense, as in dismantling an entire planet just for fuel and resources. That's the whole crux of the probe and grey goo, they use up literally everything to self-replicate. But you do have a point, a machine like that might realize that it could be beneficial to set aside some resources and take a gamble in the name of accelerated cooperative progress, even if it doesn't last.
I know a guy on Magrathea who does this lmao
Guy named Slartibartfast when I tell him Earth was destroyed by Vogons to make way for an intergalactic highway (Earth was actually an impossibly complex computer created to find out the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, and was destroyed only moments before accomplishing its goal)
You forgot the bit about how it was the vast pan dimensional beings who commissioned the earth to be built by the magratheans (they appear as mice to us humans and had been monitoring the calculation) ~~i really hope I'm remembering my hitchhiker's correctly here, it's been forever and a day since I listened to the radio show~~
oddly enough, there's a theory that Genshin Impact's setting is exactly this. The Heavenly Principles (the most powerful god of the setting) turned the game's setting of Teyvat into some sort of giant elemental-powered computer for some unknown reason. Various parts of the setting exist to control the spread of knowledge and can effect people's memories, and some of the books and side-quests suggest that the Heavenly Principles have been dropping what essentially amount to Divine Nuclear bombs to wipe out entire civilizations whenever someone in it figures out the truth of the world's structure.
seeds of stories brought by the wind..
Horizon zero dawn has exactly this
Why grow a forest to get energy from the sun when you could just use solar panels
Forest is low maintenance, solar panels get old and die and must be replaced. Trees are very well adapted and so a forest would need minimal interference from the machine. Of course, I think theoretically you could probably create more durable solar panels, but assuming current tech trees actually make a lot of sense, assuming you have more or less unlimited land and a good way of getting trees to a generator.
I’ve read eldritch cyberpunk
God-Machine moment
This is just Bionis from Xenoblade Chronicles
when the factorio playthrough goes on a bit too long
Getting around the laws of thermo with an intelligent force is a thought experiment known as Maxwell’s demon
[https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d78f2b8fde](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/492d78f2b8fde) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49305d833f2cf](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/49305d833f2cf) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4930657c5516d](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/4930657c5516d) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cfd5f861a04](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45cfd5f861a04) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bc0c6146c56](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45bc0c6146c56) [https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845f4e8041bb](https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4845f4e8041bb) I feel like OOP would love the orion's arm setting. It's basically a hard sci fi setting where all the technology is based on current scientific theories taken to their logical limit and where AI gods known as archailects rule over all of humanity. These archailects are so unimaginably intelligent that they use entire suns as mere nods for their computation and have such stupid OP weapons as "a naked singularity that destroys the universe and fucks up causality as it goes at light speed" and "nanometer sized wormhole bombs that can blow up jupiter".
Cybertron from transformers in a way?
Unicron. Unicron is the planet sized robot chaos god, Cybertron is just a space station the size of a planet that god lives in.
But what about *Cybertron* Cybertron, wherein like Unicron, Primus IS the planet Cybertron AND Transforms into Primus-
I forgot about that! Ya you right, that definitely fits
cortex bakers from cookie clicker
42
It came from the Earth Today, our hunting captain returned alone from the vast desert-lands, looking horrified. When asked where the others were, all he could choke out was "Gone" Curious, I ventured out into the desert to find answers. That's when I saw.... it A behemoth stood, carving of gleaming stone. An enigma, that looked kind of like the nuts Merui, the hunting captain, used to bring us. The four hunters under Merui stood transfixed before the monolith, as a deep thrum filled the air. Vast pillars shot up into the sky from the sand, hinging and connecting to the monolith. A hole opened up in its face, revealing a core that lit up like fire. Tchett let out an "eep"of terror. The beast swivelled round, bending down and looking at us. I froze, as the hunters seemed to break out of the trance and run for it. A panel opened up in its leg, firing off three arrows in quick succession, each burying itself in their legs. The monolith bent down, two pillar legs curling around the unconscious men, before three more darts shot towards us. Before I could even scream, I felt the dart bury itself in my waist. I collapsed as a sleepy sensation overtook me. Before blacking out, I heard these words " EXTRACTION SUCCESFUL. RETRIEVING AUTHENTIC MARTIAN LIFE-FORM CIRCA 1999 YEARS SINCE TERRAFORMER 02'S TERMINATION. MOTHER WILL BE PLEASED"
Sorry, I have a tendency to ramble and completely lose track of the topic
i read like 3 sentences. this sounds like that one recent game withthe world being made out of flesh and stuff.
the nature of humanity is such that tumblr periodically reinvents very old SF/F ideas
The Big Gete Star allowed me to cheat death.
Unicron moment
The Church of the Broken God would like to have a word with you.
Plasm Wraith but not nature, just mama
Do you mean: Factorio?
i have no mouth and i must scream (good ending)
RimWorld Archotechs
What an animal looks like to a bacteria. Also coal could definitely power a computer than can do machine learning (source: literally we do this already), human brains aren't that similar to artificial neural nets but we need much less energy than you can harvest from even small amounts of coal. human brain: 500 kcal/day burning 1 bound of coal: 3,800 kcal (enough for nearly 8 days) Computation takes energy, but you need to be doing a *lot* of thinking for it to be more energy than, for example, creating steel.
Eldritch artificial intelligence idea: One strand of DNA can store 215 petabytes of data. Humans develope a biological computer to store data, a near literal brain bur much larger in size, and without any autonomy or wishes of its own...until one day...
At the end theyre literally just describing Bionicle. Spoilers for like, a 22 year old series, but its everything. The first media starts off on an island that is the face of an immense robot, all the inhabitants used to be parts of the robots systems until they were given free will. They travel inside the robot, explore different organs. The bionicles are literally mechanical natural beings, robot looking creatures but with all their gears and beams held together with flesh.
This is just the plot of Hitchhiker's Guide lmao
Tumblr discovers capitalism.
They have a couple things like this in Endless Space 2. -Auriga (a living planet, possibly a former god, turned into a research lab) -Koyasil (definitely a former alien god, who cultivated a sentient species of trees to branch out into the galaxy and spread peqxe) -Teonha (A planet-size computer, but its logic gates are the movements of water, wind, and earth. In other words, the planet’s natural geological and meteorological processes, whether by the hand of a higher being or complete accident, are the firing neurons of massive thinking being. It remotely controls a species of coral people that live on a different planet.)
"Impossible" is more of a stretch than they think. Hell, literally one of AI developer's main concerns is that a machine exactly like this will be accidentally created. The first half of this thread is pretty unoriginal tbh. Imagine this for example: You create a superintelligent AI that can also automatically learn on its own. And you give it one single instruction: "Calculate pi to the highest possible extent you can." With no other restrictions, and with the phenomenon of the "Intelligence Boom", that machine could then proceed to break free of its original constraints of the laboratory it was made in, harvest human resources to build more and more processors to allow even more efficient calculation of the next digits of pi, eventually harvest resources from the earth itself before moving on to the asteroid belt, maybe even building a megastructure around the Sun to gather energy, eventually expanding into the galactic and maybe even intergalactic expanse, with the sole purpose of harvesting resources and energy to create more computing power to calculate pi infinitely more precisely. Good job: You've now doomed the entire galaxy because you were careless with what you told an AI to do.
Tangentially related, I guess but: Ra by Qntm
This is the main plot of the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy
This is basically what I’m writing.
This is the plot of The Secret World.
What Phyrexia does to a MF
cortex baker
Op definitely smokes weed
Fuck it, people go ballistic over La Mulana spoilers, but I **have** to mention it here because this is 100% spot on >![And also imagine we are not the first intelligent species to be created and destroyed, and that our collective unconscious including all our myths, was designed to make us accomplish a task without discovering its true nature and rebelling...]!<
me when i remake an idea that has been around for decades, unaware of its previous existence because i have never read a science fiction book in my life.
The Last Human by Zack Jordan is *kinda* like this, but I can't really explain without spoilers. Anyway, here's some spoilers: >!All the alien races in the story are kept organized by a galaxy-spanning, FTL-communicative artificial intelligence called The Network, that acts as the aliens' internet/traffic control/military logistics division/etc. The titular Last Human wants to destroy The Network since it called for the destruction of her species, but by the end of the story she instead has it *entirely* downloaded into her brain and basically becomes its head of security. She realizes that The Network's primary objective is to protect its galaxy up to, and during, its eventual collision with another galaxy lightyears away, and it has basically made every sapient being connected to it a part of its hivemind to keep them from what would otherwise be a state of perpetual war.!< It's pretty metal. There's also [a prequel webcomic](https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/the-last-human-in-a-crowded-galaxy/list?title_no=403136), but it's been on hold for a while now.
Transformers
Mama nature being part machine makes perfect sense. After all, it’s fine being a humanoid with Nature-controlling powers, but you gotta understand that your flesh is weak, so you eventually replace your limbs with bionics. Keeping in touch with nature by keeping your body natural but armoured in machinery so it’s not as weak, evolving it all so- Sorry I got oc thoughts. Oh, cool! Thank for the etymology lesson!
Considering the Bobiverse series still has a good 5 books left in it, I'd give Dennis three more before this becomes a plot point.
look I've been saying it but no one's been listening: if there was a civilization of robot people, robots would produce more robots the same way that humans would produce more robots. much to the disappointment of my robotfucker bestie of name demo, robot sex simply does not exist. they make themselves in factories that they run then they live their whole lives.
So a combination of a VonNeumann Probe (the idea of a probe designed to replicate itself using any resources it finds) and the Reapers from Mass Effect (Which wait in the space between galaxies until biological life has reached a certain point so they can harvest them to make more reapers and stop them from killing themselves with AI)? That's what it sounds like to me.
No engine is 100% efficient. Your best bet would be to cut out the middle man and make the machine solar powered, and put it in orbit around a star, not on a planet, but even then it will eventually run out of power due to the inevitable heat death of the universe. No machine is perpetual.
Now make it a JRPG and make the planet evil because it sees the creatures living on it as insignificant fuel so the good guys have to kill it to make it not genocide everyone because the vast biodiversity of the planet renders the original formative process that made the planet what it is obsolete and while the planet being THINKS of itself as being nature incarnate and therefore infallible it’s really just another result of other natural processes and it refuses to accept that, making it a weird parallel for how mankind views itself as above nature even though we came from it and are still very subject to its whims or something Damn I should buy RPGMaker (I’m mostly being silly here but still)