To send you back any information, your probe has to either send back something physical or use the electromagnetic spectrum. If you send a probe with no manufacturing capacity, then it either has to carry all the fuel, shielding, and redundancy for both directions of the trip, or carry a very large radio and its much larger power source. That's gonna be really, really heavy. Probably heavier than the manufacturing machinery. So you would want to be able to manufacture just so you could report back.
Once you have the manufacturing stuff, you might as well build a bunch more probes. Each generation of will start from the furthest range of the previous generation, with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors.
A probe with a generalized manufacturing capability can also do other interesting things on station. If it's smart enough, it's more like a colony than a probe... and it would probably have to be that smart anyway. A probe with no manufacturing capability can only report back, and then you have to send something all that way again if you want to do something interesting at the destination.
I'm not sure the whole project is worth it, though.
And, with very high probability, the reason we haven't seen or heard from anybody isn't that they haven't gotten around to "viewing our Earth television programs" and responding. It's not even that they don't want to talk. It's that there's nobody out there. I don't understand the desperation that leads people to come up with increasingly farfetched ways to hide from that obvious conclusion.
Like you said, if you want it to do "something interesting," like building a colony, we're not talking about probes anymore. But even then, it seems like mass producing the would be faster.
Consider - you're clearly going to be getting somewhere faster if you accelerate for 50,000 lightyears and decelerate for 50,000 than if you accelerate for 5, decelerate for 5, build a probe, accelerate for 5, decelerate for 5, build a probe, etc., 10,000 times. In the end you're going to be covering less distance if you go directly (because you're not zig-zagging from star to star), you're going to be reaching a higher maximum velocity (you're going to be accelerating for a longer length of time), and you won't have to wait to manufacture probes along the way.
Once you have the manufacturing stuff, you might as well build a bunch more probes. Each generation of will start from the furthest range of the previous generation, with all the knowledge accumulated by its predecessors.
A probe with a generalized manufacturing capability can also do other interesting things on station. If it's smart enough, it's more like a colony than a probe... and it would probably have to be that smart anyway. A probe with no manufacturing capability can only report back, and then you have to send something all that way again if you want to do something interesting at the destination.
I'm not sure the whole project is worth it, though.
And, with very high probability, the reason we haven't seen or heard from anybody isn't that they haven't gotten around to "viewing our Earth television programs" and responding. It's not even that they don't want to talk. It's that there's nobody out there. I don't understand the desperation that leads people to come up with increasingly farfetched ways to hide from that obvious conclusion.