Welcome to Gaia! ::

Here's a journalist's take,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2241753.ece

and here's a more reputable, though less transparent, source,

http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/-kwd=nj-2f5/1367-2630/9/8/263/njp7_8_263.html

What do we think?

Yeah, I've given up reading random comments on the net, it confirms my antisocial bias far too much.

It is very interesting. I want it to be true, that the magellanic clouds are some sort of local god, so that's how I answered the poll redface but yes, more data is needed to find out what the real deal is.

I was most surprised by the fact that research in space had turned up something genuinely interesting, rather than just more lame astrophysics and a larger catalogue the effects of weightlessness-on-people.

Its a cool idea. Probably the first guy there was Olaf stapledon in his 1937 book, the starmaker (start of chapter 13).

It also reminded me of the airsphere and behomthaurs of Iain M Banks in 'look to windward' and the dead 'god' in some of Philip K d**k's stuff ('god is dead, we found his corpse orbitting blah blah blah').

This is a long way from them making us though. It seems like in this universe life might be easy and prevalent. Which reminds me of Banks talking about the gas giant life in (I think it was) 'excession' and then later 'the algebraist'.

Plus, if exogenesis does in fact turn out to be the why-of-it, then it increases the odds of encountering the sorts of life with which we could find common cause.

jestingrabbit,
I have vague recollections of starmaker... was that the book wherein the entirety of the universe converged into one uber-being which then cast its eye upon itself? I've reading 'look to windward', but not the others.

One of my odder hopes is that consciousness is an emergent quality, and that someday the meme-sphere will be sufficiently complex to allow our ideas themselves to carry a consciousness independant of our own. Perhaps it is already (though I doubt it), but I find it interesting that the entire C. Elegans genome (around 100 million base pairs) takes less storage space than the windows XP operating system. The XP OS is larger than the main "OS" for a worm even if you take into account the multiple mitochondrial DNA floating around inside one of these worm's cells. Isn't that just crazy?

We could go out on a limb for a bit, and think about ideas as being analogous to neurons. And there are a few ways we could encode the idea of a neuron firing: The one that springs first to my mind is when one person changes an idea that they hold because of something they've heard from another person. The utterance that causes the change arises from some other idea so the analogy isn't so horribly stretched. Under this scenario an idea must have some ability to change without completely losing its identity in the process, but I'm not certain that's terribly far-fetched either.

In any event, there are, of course, all sorts of ways that the analogy doesn't hold... but I still like to think about it.