Even swarms of self-replicating robots.

If alien civilizations exist, they may have opened a Pandora’s box.

It may sound far-fetched, but self-replicating probes from an alien civilization could become a serious nuisance to budding societies like ours. While this is pure speculation, we have an ace in the hole: China’s new massive radio telescope might be capable of detecting swarms of alien probes, also called von Neumann probes, at relatively vast distances from our sun, according to a recent study shared on a preprint server.