Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

What would it be like for mankind to encounter a million year old consciousness? Forget the fact that it might be alien. After a million years of evolution, damn near anything is possible. Technology so finely integrated with the biological as to enable it forms of sentience and motor manipulation we can't even imagine. How would we communicate with such beings? Beings who as far as we know have transcended the crude limitations of spacetime and corporeal embodiment. Beings who would only appear to us as irrational anomalies or surreal externalizations of collective madness inside our own self-contained zeitgeist. That will be the greatest problem for a super-advanced species--how to translate its experience and its thoughts into a mode we lower conscious lifeforms can even grasp. Would it have anything more than a momentary interest in us---we mere fleeting ephemera of interstellar molecular processes?

It's difficult to imagine a completely self-sufficient archailect having any personality at all (much like the universe itself). Having a communicative disposition seems to fall out of the inferior(?) status of interaction with and reliance on others. Of course, this rules out transapient entities that might accidentally develop schizophrenic-like disorders or multiple internal divisions competing or arguing with each other. Remains to be seen whether self-replicating technology can suffer from mutations like classic biological life.

AI version of Isaac Asimov's sci-fi story "The Last Question". My nephew Justin told me about it two months ago at our family reunion. It's a great story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgTHei56a4M