>>11288713>Would the best chance not be a probe that can escape the solar systemWell, aside from the fact that you have to be moving pretty fucking fast (relatively) to reach escape velocity, the Voyager probes and I believe a few of the Mariners are going to be interstellar objects in 50k years or so, and they will likely last for around 1 million years give or take. There are still interstellar "winds" (basically streams of subatomic particles and trace gas) to deal with, and literally trillions of particles of ice and silicate that could interact with the probe. Even objects in Interstellar space would eventually be ground down to nothing or destroyed at random. It's also worth noting that space is way bigger than people generally realize, in fact the Voyager probes have only recently gone past the heliopause, the boundary between the solar and interstellar winds, and they have another 40k years to go before they reach the limit of solar gravitational influence. They may not even survive that long. On top of that, finding a dead probe the size of voyager, that's emitting no signals and traveling at high velocity, would be nearly impossible. Humanity, from our position within the Solar system, isn't even yet certain of how many planets are in the Solar system. Finding a probe the size of a school bus traveling at interstellar speeds is downright impossible with our current understanding of tech.
If you really wanted to go the space route, it would be better to capture an asteroid, say about the size of a house, and fill the interior with a database carrying probe that can perform self diagnostics/repair, gather it's own fuel and repair materials, and essentially keep itself going forever, and let it loose in the Solar system to do it's thing.
