I’ve been having fun on a new social media site called Quora. Quora operates on the StackOverFlow principle. People pose questions and others answer. The act of asking of sincere questions, even silly ones, seems to take the wind out of troll sails. Political sites quickly degenerate into primate poo tossing contests. I enjoy pitching poo with the best of them but I demand wit, verve and humor with my insults. Sadly, these qualities are the first to go when vicious trolls tear into partisan believers of any persuasion. Honest political conversations have never been easy. I remember screeching, mostly left-wing, university harridans shouting down heretics forty years ago. I’m sure they would have burned them at the stake if the option had been available. Still there is something about the question that makes people put down their torches and give a heretic a break.
A good question and answer session is like a connect-the-dots cartoon. For example Javed Qadrud-Din observed when responding to the question:
That aliens might be billions of years ahead of us and
we would be unable to recognize the evidence of their existence, and such evidence would instead appear to us as aspects of the nature of reality itself.
I thought about this and responded:
Your observation that some alien intelligences could be billions of years ahead of us and may, “appear as part of nature,” made we wonder what might qualify as a manifestation of such beings. It goes without saying that super advanced beings with real immortal ambitions will be somewhat bummed with mere matter. If our, admittedly primitive physical theories hold up, it looks like in the very long run, e.g. 10100 or more years, all matter will decay and space will expand into an unimaginably vast void with a temperature indistinguishable from absolute zero. All matter and energy based sentience will be snuffed out: everything, absolutely everything dies. What’s left in such a universe? Only Dark Energy survives and prospers. Cosmologists have noted that we appear to live in a Dark Energy dominated universe and the domination started fairly recently, within the last two billion years or so. If intelligent life evolved somewhere in the cosmos six or seven billion years ago that would be plenty of time to advance to the point that such beings could insert themselves into the only durable part of our universe: space itself. So perhaps the accelerating expansion of space is the “part of nature” that gives away the presence of such highly evolved beings.
We may be living in a Dark Energy Entity Cosmoscene. It’s unlikely that beings able to alter the entire observable universe are going to make contact with pitiful little poo throwing naked apes.