Incidentally, that's exactly how I see my humans.

Um, why is my comment grey?

Not sure why you listed Iain Banks among the authors warning of robots, his whole Culture is based on the concept of cooperating humans/machines. Other than the occasional grey goo/smatter outbreak, I can't remember any occurrence of threatening robots in his books.

Inexplicable forces? Fascinating.

Why would you share a link that bolsters my argument, instead of yours? I objected to your ridiculously childish claim that ET life, should it exist, would be inherently deadly for terrestrial/human life. Mr. Stross merely points out that it is improbable that we could consume the produce of ET organisms, just like I…

Nowhere did I say that alien ecosystems couldn't impact us negatively, I said it is naive to assume that they must. Kind of pointless to answer, when you obviously can't follow the argument.

Nothing 'stands', last time I checked the whole world is populated, including South America or Australia. But that's a false analogy anyhow, since all life on earth shares the same roots and co-evolved since the abiogenesis. ET life could be dangerous or neutral to our own biology, fact is that we will not know until…

Umm, since we know only of one planet that harbors life, we neither know how common or rare abiogenesis is, nor do we know about compatibility. There might be billions of blue marbles out there, maybe teeming with life, maybe sterile, maybe compatible, maybe not.

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

So many things wrong with your comment, wouldn't know where to begin.

"... but what if that much time is what it takes for the development of intelligent life"?

That's false analogy. It would be more correct to ask whether there is any civilization on this planet that didn't get in touch with any other.

All earthlings are terr'ists.

Von Neumann probes wouldn't stop at 'billions', necessarily. Even without FTL travel, if some ET civilization sends out a probe to the planets of some neighboring star to replicate there and, in turn, send out, say, 10 offspring to the next 10 stars, and so on, you'd have the galaxy mapped out in maybe 100 million…

But we know pretty well how it wouldn't look like, which is what we can observe across the galaxy. So far all major observable objects are pretty well explained - which of course doesn't mean that some couldn't be better explained with some theory based on ET engineering. Time will show.

Why not? If there are countless civilizations out there, but all handicapped by the restrictions of general relativity, at least some of them would at one point start large scale system-engineering or send out self-replicating probes.

We should still observe large-scale engineering projects around other stars, or robotic von Neumann probes.

The term 'monoculture' doesn't refer to 'culture', it describes systems that have very low diversity. It originates from the field of agriculture and I use it in its more systemic sense.

I'm not making a political statement, I'm merely sharing an observation. If you don't perceive the developments that I described, then I can only suggest you need to look harder.

"Superhuman Breath – Ability to inhale and exhale huge volumes of air [....] allows Superman to hold his breath for extended periods in airless environments."