Funny you mentioned ants. I think that’s a great analogy. I was talking to someone the other day about ants. Watching the traffic on the interstate, the people at a concert, the people in the hallway at work… ants, we’re all ants, telling ourselves we’re so unique and feeling like that one brilliant flash of light at the center of the universe, yet as we tell ourselves this we go marching one by one, conforming quite strictly to our roles.

I had thought what differentiated us was our consciousness, and how we use it to try to slice and dice everything into compartments mentally, so that we can imagine ourselves as being in the “in” or “good” compartment, politically, socially, economically, intellectually… and even more important, imagine others as being in the “out” compartment, backwards, uncool, hayseed, out of the loop, unenlightened.

I once overheard a table of schoolteachers in a very animated conversation about the square footage of their houses, the size of their SUVs, and the positions their husbands held at their respective jobs. Each trying to convince herself and the others that they were anything but ants. Then they finished their lunch and went marching out on the trail through the door, one by one.

And so I think, maybe that consciousness which we use to delineate ourselves mentally (total ego joke that it is) isn’t what makes us so different than “lower” forms of life. Maybe the ant with its little micron brain thinks it’s super unique and special, too. It certainly isn’t conscious of how the entire community functions as one large organism, or even what’s over that next rock pile. It might bathe in its feeling of uniqueness and feel like the center of the universe, marching along all the while.

Hang on a sec, I’m gonna close my eyes and make the world disappear…

Since we on the cusp of that bend into the Singularity, anything with a 50-day head start would already be there. And then 50 years after that the goal of the intelligences is to make everything in the universe hyper-intelligent. (smart nano-bots swarming around the universe turning all matter in its path into more nano-bots)

So if indeed there is something smarter than us, they wouldn’t be hiding from us. They’d be too busy turning us into them. So I think if there were something in the universe smarter than us, they wouldn’t be very close. They’d have to just be so far away that they haven’t gotten to us yet.

On the other hand, maybe 50-years out we wouldn’t go the make the whole universe intelligent route. Maybe we’d respect other life forms and give them their space and try not to interfere. I dunno.

But you’d also have the dilema we attribute to the white-bearded God. If they are super smart, they could obviously help us out… cure Aids, hunger, etc. But they’re not. Why not? … They may have their reasons. The US has its reasons for not curing hunger even though we technically could.

… and on and on.