He travels around the galaxy to uncover information about the Fermi paradox (see below). Malenfant travels in a prototype fusion engine to the Kirkwood Gap and discovers an interstellar teleportation device. The self-replicating spacecraft are named Gaijin (Japanese for 'foreigner'), after their discovery by a Japanese observer on the Moon. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us. We can therefore program for massive and destructive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Their activity is potentially an immense threat, as Malenfant notes in an earlier speech: 'A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. The Manifold series contains four books, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Manifold: Origin, and Phase Space.Īlien activity is discovered in a Kirkwood gap the aliens are identified as self-replicating machines ( von Neumann probes). Although it is in no sense a sequel to the first book it contains a number of the same characters, notably protagonist Reid Malenfant, and similar artefacts.

It is the second book of the Manifold series and examines another possible solution to the Fermi paradox. Manifold: Space is a science fiction book by British author Stephen Baxter, first published in the United Kingdom in 2000, then released in the United States in 2001.

Baxter manifold