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Description
"...And while the Human technological progress didn't stagnate per se, their curiosity definitely did. The sciences - those not entire swallowed by posthumans - became the hobby of bored colonists, cross-training themselves just to do something useful. And they were not going to sit around idly, waiting on the promised megaprojects of stellar-scale 'scopes in the Myridian.

In such an environment, starwisps - light («10 kg), kilometres wide probes made from conducting mesh, riding beams of microwaves, were the main source of Human information gathering. Relatively cheap, even the youngest colonies could launch them in the dozens, and a single swarm of starwisps could travel for thousand of lightyears before relativistic erosion finally fried some non-redundant hardware.

While dedicated, robust interstellar probes could achieve similar cruise velocities as starwisps and had much longer ranges, economies of scale meant that except for dedicated missions, groups of starwisps, acting as focal plane arrays, were almost always better for the same energy expenditure. Most of the early Human exploration of the galaxy happened through such starwisps and it was such a mission which first found evidence of another intelligent - though very different - spacefaring civilisation, the Aesin."

"Starwisps are, once fully deployed, kilometres across and use a conducting mesh to ride microwave beams or transmit information back to their civilization. While early starwisps were boosted using only microwave beams, modern launches typically make use of a high-thrust, initial antimatter-drive tug to achieve considerably higher cruise velocities at the cost of considerably higher launch costs."

Description
"...And while the Human technological progress didn't stagnate per se, their curiosity definitely did. The sciences - those not entire swallowed by posthumans - became the hobby of bored colonists, cross-training themselves just to do something useful. And they were not going to sit around idly, waiting on the promised megaprojects of stellar-scale 'scopes in the Myridian.

In such an environment, starwisps - light («10 kg), kilometres wide probes made from conducting mesh, riding beams of microwaves, were the main source of Human information gathering. Relatively cheap, even the youngest colonies could launch them in the dozens, and a single swarm of starwisps could travel for thousand of lightyears before relativistic erosion finally fried some non-redundant hardware.

While dedicated, robust interstellar probes could achieve similar cruise velocities as starwisps and had much longer ranges, economies of scale meant that except for dedicated missions, groups of starwisps, acting as focal plane arrays, were almost always better for the same energy expenditure. Most of the early Human exploration of the galaxy happened through such starwisps and it was such a mission which first found evidence of another intelligent - though very different - spacefaring civilisation, the Aesin."

"Starwisps are, once fully deployed, kilometres across and use a conducting mesh to ride microwave beams or transmit information back to their civilization. While early starwisps were boosted using only microwave beams, modern launches typically make use of a high-thrust, initial antimatter-drive tug to achieve considerably higher cruise velocities at the cost of considerably higher launch costs."