one of my favorite topics is the future of humanity, especially over, say, then next million years. it's interesting that most science-fiction movies have humans meeting other animals that look similar to us, usually living on planets, flying around in space ships.
in many ways, i think this is unlikely.
frankly, biological life forms are the least suited for space exploration and long term existance. why? because they're fragile, have short life spans, and are limited in their physical and mental capacity. assuming that it's possible to figure out the essence of intelligence and then create it in a more advanced substrate (such as an electronic medium), it should be possible to create a lifeform that could live for a very long time, duplicate itself and/or its knowledge over large distances via electromagnetic waves. in addition, you could create all kinds of custom senses that would be natively integrated with the organism, going way beyond our basic complement of ears, eyes, nose, mouth and skin.
another bonus would be that it wouldn't have any particular constraint live on a planet. if you think about it, living on a planet is probably one of the most restricting and pointless thing to do. planets are gravity wells that require loads of energy to do simple things, they're blocked from direct access to stuff like solar energy, and they have a pre-configured trajectory. living natively in space would seem like a better thing to do.
one way to live in space would be to seed it with an outward-expanding, self-replicating shell of probes that would move close to the speed of light. the probes would act like a passive substrate, with transceivers for sending and receiving electromagnetic life forms. the life forms themselves would then move between the probes via electricmagnetic waves (such as lasers, radio, etc.) at the speed of light. the lifeform would thus expand into the universe at about the speed of light.
you can view the probes as neurons and the lifeforms as pulses between them. sending the probes out is like building the brain, and sending the lifeforms out is like discharges between the neurons.
1:18:31 AM 
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