Avi Loeb has suggested that humans themselves may be 'intelligent, self-replicating and self-repairing autonomous probes' built by an advanced alien civilisation, arguing in a new essay published online that our biology could be the product of extraterrestrial synthetic engineering rather than a purely natural evolution on Earth.
Loeb, the high-profile Harvard astronomer who now chairs the UAP Science Advisory Council for the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and other US intelligence agencies, responded publicly to a question from a university student in France. The student had asked him about the classic von Neumann probe idea: if a technologically superior civilisation sent out self-replicating robots capable of travelling at just one per cent of the speed of light, the Milky Way could be 'colonised' in a few hundred thousand years.
