The joy of science is not the discovery of some grand universal truth; it is, instead, the discovery of new questions with answers that are both tantalizingly close and unexpectedly complex. It’s a well-accepted theory that things such as intelligence have arisen from something as basic as complexity; the discovery of extrasolar planetary systems has—in recent decades—gone to show that things are far more complex than we once imagined. It is commonly accepted that if things grow in complexity, it would be reasonable to guess that intelligence (provided that conditions are right) could also arise. When things get complex, and continue to do so, fractal things begin to happen. Stuff gets interesting and almost playfully improvisational. This leads me to think that perhaps we are nearly alone in the known universe, but things don’t have to (and won’t) remain that way. Life and even intelligent life might be in the process of brewing out there, somewhere…complexity, as we understand it, is building up. The interactions of gravity and mass and lots and lots of dust might be working, at this very moment, to provide future humans with future company (provided that we humans don’t dumb ourselves to death, as the current state of US-American politics shows we are hell-bent on doing.) If we dumb ourselves into biological oblivion, we won’t discover our actual role in the state of things as they will be. It’s likely, that in the future, we might come to a greater understanding of the universe. Our idea of Nature might expand to include the full range of Nature, which will—of course—involve the far away parts of local environment. We’ll come to understand just how a star farting and burping way over there might actually help to drive planetary weather way over here. We may (if we don’t dumb ourselves to death) learn to go over there and watch something that mirrors the process of our own birth and in doing so, we may see the emergence of an eventual intelligence…or at least an eventual biosphere. Ironically, it’s in the “dead” and “lifeless” places that such things may be discovered. Perhaps the reason we haven’t discovered intelligence out there is simply because we’re assuming too much and looking in the wrong places. Maybe we should model intelligence on the possibility of such a thing arising in radically alien environments. Maybe we should be looking at infant stars and infant star systems, and simply waiting. That’s my take. Patience always reveals something surprising, interesting, and—quite often—hilarious! (What’s more hilarious than an insect or a crustacean or even a bird, revealing the warped “sense of humor” possessed by the process of evolutionary process. For evidence of this, simply watch birds of paradise mating rituals and you’ll see the makings of absurdist humor at work. Watch cockroaches and there is a 102% chance that such creatures will do something to completely annihilate the human ego. And perhaps this is why we’re only searching in a limited range of environments for intelligence. If we extraterrestrial “cockroaches,” we’re also likely discover, yet again, that we aren’t what we think they are. But on the flip-side of that, we’ll also discover that we’re not unique, and thus, not alone.) * * * I thought of such things while listening to an episode of Nova on PBS and fiddling around with an image of salt on a sidewalk. A ringed planet and its moos came out of that. (The ringed planet is actually derived from a photograph of snow and ice [with bird footprints in it] I captured last week. Oh, and yeah, Jango Fett's backpack makes its appearance here as "spaceships" going over there. And, as always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week.