Intelligent Robotic Planetary Explorer.

In 2025, NASA began a program to launch a series of probes to planets in the local stellar neighborhood. Four planets were chosen over a period of 2 and a half years out of 3484 planets discovered in a 90 light-year range. These four planets discovered by the terrestrial planet finder station were thought to have the most likely conditions for life according to many measurements concerning star-planet distance, planet mass, size, crustal composition, atmospheric composition, presence of water, and climate.

In 2193, the Earth had sent many hundreds more probes as deep space programs began to become privatized by industrial and commercial space programs, and by this time the original four probes had already landed all their robots and beamed back all the information that the robots discovered. All intelligence was scrutinized carefully and scientists on Earth has concluded that all four of those planets did indeed have life, however two of them were in very early and primitive stages of evolution, and the other two had some intelligent beings, but none of which were close to developing advanced culture, tools, technology, communications, or civilization. Nothing more intelligent than dinosaurs.

By 2208, alien planetary exploration was routine. The vessels could travel farther faster and more cheaply than ever before. Far Far faster. By 2288, one private corporation funded a group of scientists who achieved the fastest speed in history of any man-made object, .893C (83% the speed of light). Within a few decades of launching, the probe had already arrived at its destination, within the life time of the scientists who had sent it.

Thousands of probes had been sent to very deep reaches of space, cataloging many interesting species, complex ecologies, some of which almost mirrored that of Earth's. Almost .01 percent of the stars in the milky way galaxy had been explored by 2400.

However, none of these planets have yet to turn up to show existence of advanced alien intelligent civilizations.

One hoax had been committed in face of this to respark people's enthusiasm for exploration, scientists had claimed to have discovered ancient ruins of an advanced civilization that had apparently annihilated itself during a small version of what we would consider a nuclear war. Two nations developed nuclear fission explosive weaponry. One nation fighting over resources and global domination dropped 3 bombs on its enemy nation across a vast ocean, the other nation retaliated with 3 bombs. Most of the population survived but the infrastructure of their economies had been severely crippled. Their climate changed as a result of the detonations, soon their crops failed and starvation set it. Afterwards, only a handful remained to form small tribes of a few hundred which fought for the remaining resources. Eventually the entire species went extinct. The scientists claimed this civilization existed 80,000 years before the rise of humanity and so their radio waves would have gone silent long after we developed SETI (the program to detect alien radio signals from alien worlds).

Apparently, all the photos, video, and the entire mission was faked. Everything down to the archeological finds of alien libraries and cities. The entire mission was nothing more than an elaborate and expensive hoax.

One private company eventually merged, bought out, or defeated all its competitors and became the standard corporate planetary explorer. It was managed by a group of entrepreneurs who had more concern with commercial viability for space exploration. Selling planets and scientific information as opposed to learning and providing knowledge of the cosmos for the benefit and intrigue of anyone. This tended to be for more effective for the use of space exploration because it inspired competition and innovation much more quickly, effectively making space exploration and technology advance faster.

This company called SPOC developed a "Henry ford" method of mass producing cheap and simple yet highly robust vessels, engines, robots, and shuttles that could self maintain and self repair. They also borrowed many systems in alien biology to design nano technology to further their efforts.

Above is an example of the probes and vessels used. On the top middle is a very small signal boosting probe whose soul purpose was to stand directly in the middle of the distance between the probe on the planet and Earth to boost the signals using a hydrogen fusion power planet to fuel its systems.

On the top left is the explorer package itself. The cone shape opposite the blue glowing ion exhaust is the impact shield to take hits from micro meteorites and larger particulate matter in space as the ship plowed through at speeds approaching the speed of light. It would be powered by an anti matter reactor and burn metallic hydrogen to maneuver as well as ion drives as a redundant propulsion system. Attached to the side of this massive spacecraft are four little shuttle-shaped landers (depicted directly beneath the Explorer Package). More on those later.

Below the Impacting Cone is a bronze colored barrel shaped probe known as an a satellite network pod. It is designed to get into orbit of the target planet and begin launching a series of communication and probing robotic satellites. These satellites would scan the terrain of the entire planet's surface to determine the best landing site that promised the best scientific finds. It would study the weather patterns, tidal dynamics, geology, and basic planetary understanding to program the probes and robots to become used to the environments before they landed. The barrel itself would eventually come out of orbit and attempt to land on the surface. If it failed on entry of the atmosphere it would help the mother probe adjust the programming of the landers to enter safely. If it landed successfully it would launch a series of airplane type robots that would fly across the planet to determine if there was complex macrolife on the surface. If it did not find macro life on the surface or air, the mother probe would plan to launch its spider probe.

After determining the best location to land, the mother probe's artificial intelligences would plan to launch the saucer shaped (copper silver copper colored) lander which would enter the atmosphere (or attempt) detach the heat shield, and release a robot on the end of a parachute. This spider shaped robot would inflate a lighter-than-air balloon on its back that had genetically engineered algae in the skin of the balloon to provide carbohydrate energy to run the hardware. This robot would rove on the location and along rivers and lakes from 1 to 4 months gathering information to determine if microbial life exists on that world. If it did find microbial life, the mother probe would plan to launch 2 of its 4 shuttle-shaped landers. If the spider probe failed to find any microbial life the mother probe would plan to just send 1 of its 4 large landers.

If the spider finds microbes, the mother probe plans launch dates for two shuttles to land on the surface. In each of these shuttles (capable of refueling with hydrogen from water on the surface and launching from the surface to dock with the mother ship) are a host of robots. Two large robots would have a set of smaller robot it is capable of deploying that are simpler and expendable for more dangerous exploration. Both large robots are very different from one another, one is designed primarily to explore the deep ocean and the other is designed to explore the surface and the air. The water probe is somewhat similar to the ROVs used to explore Earth’s oceans. It’s capable of withstanding pressures of 10,000 atmospheres. It can deploy up to 10 smaller eel-like probes to explore small crevices and dangerous rough surfaces and 3 large barracuda-like probes that are much faster and more maneuverable than the host robot for scouting and general surveying. It can capture samples of small life forms and possible interact with intelligent beings that live on the sea floor with a comprehensive linguistics learning software. It can operate independently for up to a year without surfacing however it has to be tethered to the surface by a booiey to transmit radio to the mother probe in space since radio cannot travel very far through sea water.

If the first lander lands without fail, the second lander is launched to land immediately afterward and to the same location so that the robots can team up because it is proven that robots tend to have higher survivability when working with other robots of comparable intellect and cooperation skills.

The surface exploring robot will poke and prod the caves of the planet and dense marshes or rain forests to find complex animal life since the aerial probes could not detect any animals on the naked surface. The walker robot is equipped with a set of dispensable simpler robots that can be deployed to survey risky terrain or scout ahead of the robot.

If intelligent life is found, the robots will attempt to learn their language and communicate. There are also components and information storage devices that could allude to the origin of the robots and point the aliens who try to dismantle and study the robots towards the direction of Earth.

If no advanced life is found, the robots will continue general study and initiate studying the planet to determine its commercial and economic viability for resources and future human colonization. Both robots will attempt any repairs to themselves and launch from the surface after as much information about the planet can be discovered. The robots and probes on the planet and in orbit will regroup with the mother probe, make repairs, and begin doing flyby probing of the moon, and the other planets in the system to determine their commercial viability.

Finally, it will depart that star system and attempt to journey back to Earth Solar System Space Stations with biological samples from the planet. The samples and data will be studied for future return missions. Either the probe can return to Earth or venture to another alien planet if the risks are low enough and the information return is more worthwhile and repeat the entire process.

On each planet, a satellite will remain in permanent orbit, a probe will remain on the surface, and another probe on its moon. These machines will continue to harvest energy from the environment and the sun and transmit data streams across the radio frequency dial to alert any passing alien explorers to the existence of Earth’s civilization.

Every single piece of hardware, every single robot, every large component of the ship will have inscriptions on it similar to the plaques and gold discs placed on the PIONEER space probes and Voyager satellites that left Earth’s solar system for any aliens to discover in the distant future and learn of the presence of humanity. However, these amount of information in the data storage drives will contain a much vaster amount of information about human culture, civilization, art, history, language, music, more pictures, more sounds, holograms of humans from different cultures doing different dances, movies of the first moon landing, our biology, the biology of the Earth, our evolutionary path, our psychology, our poetry, our television, our operas, and samples of DNA from Stephen Hawkins, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, Maria Telkes (pioneered the use of solar energy), Chien Shiung Wu (disproved the law or parity conservation), and Helen R Quinn (who led research in progress of understand quantum mechanics and quantum particles late into the early 21st century). Perhaps if the aliens were intelligent and sophisticated enough they could successfully clone these humans and the robots and holographic AI would be adequately equipped and capable of raising them as normal humans if an environment suitable to human life can be constructed.