I got some writing done and read some of "Engine City." The hierarchy of alien intelligences in MacLeod's "Engines of Light" trilogy is strangely plausible. Complex, computer-like lifeforms arise on asteroids and comets, built on a substrate of extremophile bacteria. Planets themselves develop their own bacteria-based minds, but since they're subject to tectonic stress they fail to reach the intellectual maturity of their smaller cousins. (Natural selection in the Asteroid Belt and Oort Cloud is achieved by random outgassing; only the smartest chunks of sentient rock avoid bashing into one another.)
Compared to the asteroidal "gods," terrestrial-style intelligence is downright primitive. The quietly omniscient "gods" lurking in deep space, annoyed by our radio pollution, eventually decide to get rid of us by emailing us plans for faster-than-light spaceships. Human communities obligingly take off for a prearranged "Second Sphere" of stars, each with its own retinue of conspiring "gods."
I like this scenario because it utterly overturns what we think we know about biogenesis. What if far-flung "networked" intelligence can arise long before nodal, meat-based intelligence, gaining an unimaginable head-start on our own attempts to "go wireless"?
Certainly, a sufficiently advanced intelligence could be effectively invisible and still span light-years. Conversely, it could be appallingly obvious. But would our "carbon chauvinism" allow us to recognize it as anything but some seemingly natural stellar phenomenon (i.e., the chatter of quasars)?
For all of our vanity, we might be cosmic vermin -- if that. Somewhere, someone unthinkable might be reaching for a big can of Raid . . .
In my stereo:
"Music for the Masses" (Depeche Mode)
"Watermark" (Enya)
"Fables of the Reconstruction" (R.E.M.)
"Ambient 1: Music for Airports" (Brian Eno)
"Louder Than Bombs" (The Smiths)
Site of the day: Mark Monlux's Lurid Paperback Cover of the Week
"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."
--H.G. Wells, "The War of the Worlds"
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