Visions of the Future by Joe Haldeman, David Brin, Greg Bear, Kevin J. Anderson, Ben Bova, Hugh Howey, Robert Sawyer, Ray Kurzweil, Martin Rees

this basic desire. They carried simple messages meant to be deciphered by other beings long after the authors were dust.
    “Anyone out there enough like us to be interesting would certainly do the same.
    “And yet, if self-reproducing probes are the most efficient way to explore, why haven’t any already said hello to us? It must mean that nobody before us ever attained the capability to send them!
    “We can only conclude that we are the first curious, gregarious, technically competent species in the history of the Milky Way.”
    The logic was so compelling that most people gave up on the idea of contact, especially when radio searches turned up nothing but star static.
    Then humanity spread out beyond Mars and the Inner Belt, and we stumbled onto the Devastation.
    Ursula brushed aside a loose wisp of black hair and bent over the keyboard. Putting in the appropriate citations and references could wait. Right now the ideas were flowing.
    The story is still sketchy, but we can already begin to guess some of what happened out here, long before mankind was a glimmer on the horizon.
    Long ago the first “Von Neumann type” interstellar probe arrived in our solar system. It came to explore and perhaps report back across the empty light-years. That earliest emissary found no intelligent life here, so it proceeded to its second task.
    It mined an asteroid and sent newly made duplicates of itself onward to other stars. The original then remained behind to watch and wait, patient against the day when something interesting might happen in this little corner of space.
    As the epochs passed, new probes arrived, representatives of other civilizations. Once their own replicas had been launched, the newcomers joined a small but growing community of mechanical ambassadors to this backwater system—waiting for it to evolve somebody to say hello to.
    Ursula felt the poignancy of the image: the lonely machines, envoys of creators perhaps long extinct—or evolved past caring about the mission they had charged upon their loyal probes. The faithful probes reproduced themselves, saw their progeny off, then began their long watch, whiling away the slow turning of the spiral arms.…
    We have found a few of these early probes, remnants of a lost age of innocence in the galaxy.
    More precisely, we have found their blasted remains.
    Perhaps one day the innocent star emissaries sensed some new entity enter the solar system. Did they move to greet it, eager for gossip to share? Like those twentieth century thinkers, perhaps they believed that replicant probes would have to be benign.
    But things had changed. The age of innocence was over. The galaxy had grown up; it had become nasty.
    The wreckage we are finding now—whose salvage drives our new industrial revolution—was left by an unfathomable war that stretched across vast times, and was fought by entities to whom biological life was a nearly forgotten oddity.
    “Uh, you there Urs?”
    Ursula looked up as the radio link crackled. She touched the send button.
    “Yes, Gavin. Have you found something interesting?”
    There was a brief pause.
    “Yeah, you could say that,” her partner said sardonically. “ You may want to let Hairy pilot himself for a while, and hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look.”
    Ursula bit back her own sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in humans, adolescence didn’t last forever.
    At least not usually.
    “I’m on my way,” she told him.
    The ship’s semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as she hurried into her spacesuit, still irritated by Gavin’s flippance.
    Everything has its price, she thought. Including buying into the future. Gavin’s type of person is new and special, and allowances must be made.
    In the long run, our culture will be theirs, so that in a sense it will be we who continue, and grow, long after DNA has become obsolete. So she reminded herself. Still, when Gavin called again and inquired