I can't rule out the possibility that our machines will take our place someday, but that seems counter to human nature. We could build a machine with a "settling urge" or directive, but it wouldn't satisfy our own genetically-programmed desire to explore and settle. The machines can explore for us, but what's the point of also having them settle somewhere on our behalf?

In the weaker sense of machines preceding us, then absolutely, it's likely to be our machines meeting their machines first. First Contact isn't likely to be the warm-and-fuzzy meeting of organic beings as pictured in movies like Star Trek:First Contact.

I find the idea of machines replacing us less and less plausible as time goes on. The more likely development is that we'll continue to augment ourselves with technology--that is to say, like it or not, the Borg are the future. It's either that or choose to remain limited to only what biology can build, and I think that'd be wrong--the natural course of things is physics begets chemistry begets biology begets intelligence begets technology. We can't choose arbitrarily to stop at some stage. The Borg may be weird, but they're not unnatural.

Just for the record, to avoid outrage among persons of a certain political persuasion, I'm not advocating the Borg "collective". I doubt that outcome anyway, but in any case we can choose to avoid that particular fate. Enough humans will not want to lose their individuality that the technology won't head in the direction of enforced collectivism.

It has been a productive thread, Raoul, but it's not thanks to me. Space/Sciences really comes alive when you ask open-ended questions like that, and get everybody using their imaginations. The news is a vital part of SS, but so is dreaming.