tar

imatfaal, So once you consider rocks and ice chunks floating around in the galaxy about a metre in diameter, out further than a ly we are not liable to build any light gathering equipment able to "see" them illuminated by starlight. Dark matter could just be ordinary matter, to small and far away to see. And hypothetically if the grid tube Idea is used and the tubes were long enough and narrow enough and precise enough and built exactly parallel to each other, it would not matter how far away the object you were directing the grid toward, was, the light coming down two tubes a foot apart would hypothetically, with an extreme precision granted, be the light coming from two locations on the object, a foot apart. Regards, TAR (too small)

SwansonT, Well, granted. The point being that a photon now and one later, coming from the same general direction is "built" into an image. Similar, in a way, to the way a human percieves. Filling in the blanks, completing the image, completing the pattern, with just a few pieces of info. At very large distances the photons that headed in this direction are an exceedingly small percentage of the photons released by the item, and we could easily be mistaken about the image we build, based upon the few that get to our equipment. I was wondering a few days ago, based upon considerations brought up here, whether it would be useful to construct a flat grid that had small black tubes for light absorbtion with a ccd at the end of each tube. Photons coming in from directions other than the direction the tube array was pointed in, would be absorbed by the sides of the tube and only ones coming directly down the tube would reach the ccd. If the tubes were very long and very straight and very thin, only photons from an exact direction would be sensed. A very large array of this could be built. And multiple arrays of this nature could be built and pointed in the same direction, and the info gleened by the ccds could be combined with other devices of the same sort, pointed in the same direction, by communication and computer programs to "build" an image with the photons coming from just that direction. Regards, TAR In real time.

SwansonT, Well thanks for the math, so I can put my hands on the keyboard. But if you don't consider a trillion suns but just one at a million lys, there are just a few photons a sec hitting that square cm. For items smaller and less photon emitting prone than a sun, that are a million lys away, a photon from it would come along onto that square cm, only once in a long while. Still would come along, but not in a regular enough way, that we would notice, without careful record keeping and "image processing". Rare enough to "miss" the import of. And as well the photon coming from a million lys away is old news, and represents an electron falling from an energy level some million years ago. The item which launched the thing has done a million years of evolving and emitting photons in the mean time. To a certain degree, the old thing we imagine is releasing the photons that we see today, is more "real" to us, than the actual items a million lyrs from here, in that direction, that we will not get sight of, or news from, for another million years. Enoughly real to consider what we see a million lys from here as existing and happening now. I am considering that the photons that are bathing us from all directions, are the real aspects of those far away emitters, as far as we are concerned. The photons that are hitting our eyes are our connection to the thing, and that connection is happening now. You can't actually get to any vantage point that would be realer than those photons we are getting tonight. The galaxies that we see tonight in the configuration we see them in, is how they are configured, now. Even though they have actually had quite a long time to actually have gotten into some other configuration, by now. Regards, TAR

Strange, You are probably right.. In some ways, light has emergent properties, that exhibit characteristics, when hoards of photons are considered, that are not present in a single photon. You cannot really grasp flock behavior by considering single bird characteristics. And so trying to grasp light behavior by looking at single photons is probably not sufficient. Still a flock would not be a flock would single birds not be behaving in some manner. They each have certain abilities and limitations, which direct and constrain the behavior of the flock. And so, what light can do, or not do, has a certain relationship to what a single photon can or can not do. In some ways the photon is an impulse that travels from place to place, like the ripple in a pond. Riding or being the electrical and magnetic wave that it is. The particle/wave duality is not unlikey to be present in a single photon. It does not take a hoard of photons to have characteristics that a single photon can not suggest or act as a basis of. Perhaps a photon is to light, as an electron is to electricity. Electricity moves through a wire as an impulse. Power getting from one end of a wire to another, without an actual electron making it from one end to the other. Like the hanging steel balls where you drop the one against the five and the one on the other end pops off. A photon transfers its energy to the first electron it encounters, which happily releases another photon in quick order. All happening at scales so tiny and quick we can not grasp the speed of the exchange or the number of exchanges it took to get the impulse from there to here, over vast distances at the speed of light. SwansonT is right. I am not grasping the scale. Regards, TAR The curtain on the window moves when the door opens. And moves again when it shuts.

SwansonT, Well the 10 to the 43 photons per second, I would imagine is in "all" directions. Enough I am sure to create the heliopause and solar wind and such within the solar system. But once you get out to comet land there are probably not incredible numbers of photons hitting per square cm per sec. Or maybe the number is still incredible, but would wain as you went out a couple light years to the distance of a neighboring star, Still large though, since enough photons are coming from that neighboring star for me to see it with my little eyes, but it does not seem to me that distant stars from many galaxy diameters away, in other galaxies are likely to send too many photons per second into my eye. The numbers are immense, but the distances are vast, and the diameter of the imaginary sphere around a way distant star that intersected with the Earth would be quite large, imagining the scalewise. I am thinking that the numbers per second are diluted twice, once by the distance and once by the time. Imagining how infrequently a photon would be released again on exactly the same path, from the same atom, and how far behind the second one would be, from the first. But you are right, that we don't see an atom, we see a star, which is more like a wall than a a point, when it comes to places that a photon could come from, toward our eye. Still, the basketball blocks the original photons, and the new ones released are coming from the basketball not the star. At that point, you would not know if the energy that boosted an electron up a notch in one of the basketball's atoms, was from a nearby star, or a neighboring galaxy, or a galaxy cluster 250 million light years away, or from a quasar that emitted the photon that boosted the electron up, which was shining when the universe was a quarter of its age...or even it could have been a photon stretched to radio frequency that came from when the universe was first transparent. In anycase, the basketball blocks your view and absorbs the photons coming from stuff behind. I am wondering now about a photon emitted from an atom in the center of Sun. Does it make it out? Or does it hit an electron in another helium/hydrogen atom and boost it up a notch, allowing it to fall back down and release another photon, which may or may not travel outward, as it has just as much of a chance to randomly head toward the center again. Regards, TAR

SwansonT, No, you are right, I was not appreciating the scale. However, although the single atom could be receiving and emitting a million photons in a second, that particular atom, as a point of origin for a photon, has a large amount of directions in which it can cast its photons. Even if you considered the amount of atom size areas you could paint on the inside of a basketball, an atom emitting photons from the center of the basketball, at a million per second, would have to emit photons for quite a large number of seconds, to ensure that one photon has reached each of the atom sized areas painted on the inside of the ball. So for that one atom to send a photon to a particular atom a mile away, would be only a very small chance occurence. A hundred miles away even less. A light year away, would not be likely at all. I suppose in pointing out that I am not considering the scale, you are saying that even though the one atom has little chance of sending a photon in the direction of an eye 250 lys or 250 million lys away, there are many many atoms in a given star, and since we see a star, it has to be producing so many photons, that the rest of the universe, in ALL directions is awash in them. Heard once that the light of a match (given provided oxygen) on a new moon, could be seen from Earth at night. Suppose that means that the scale of photon emissions from even that small collection of atoms at the tip of the match, is immense. For my little eye is very far from the moon. And for me to see it, means that the same number of photons from it are bathing EVERY area the size of my lens, at that Moon-Earth distance...continually, for the whole duration of the burn. That is a lot of photons, indeed. Regards, TAR

Additionally, considering this geometrical constraint on viewing far away things, one can "visualize" the effect of a relatively small item "between" your eye and a more distant item. If the item is not transparent, a photon won't go through it. The item will absorb the photon. You cannot see through a wall. Even fog creates a visual barrier to photons, absorbing and scattering them, to where the original photons coming from a distant item, never reach your eye. Such is the condition we face when attempting to peer beyond the Milky Way in the direction of its center. We can not see past the dust and stars and black hole in its center. No photon makes it through from emitters directly behind. Geometerically speaking a non transparent item the size of a basketball, placed directly infront of your eye, blocks every photon coming from the entire large percentage of the universe that lies behind. A basketball placed a mile away blocks a very small percentage of the universe from view, but whole far away planets could fit behind it, and whole further away galaxies as well. Seems the same behavior would exhibit itself considering a dust particle a light year from here. No photon coming from directly behind it gets past it, effectively blocking a cone shaped section, (starting from the dust particle) of universe from our view. This reverse shadow would move as the particle or the eye in question would move...but the photons we do see, coming from any quadrant of space, are just the "survivors" among the population of photons that started out coming in the direction of our eye. Then there is the larger population of photons, that started out, going in some other direction. Regards, TAR

So, When it comes to an atom, 250 million light years from here, dropping an energy level and releasing a photon in the exact vector direction that would take the point particle photon to Earth, the odds are very small that such a particle would make it to a cone or rod at the back of your tiny eye, here on Earth. The angular size of the lens of a person's eye, or even a 150 inch telescope, at the distance of 250 light years is very very tiny. Makes me think that dark matter might indeed be releasing photons, just not enough of them in this direction, for us to get a continual supply from the same source, enough to say we see the thing. For instance, say I had the ability to launch 10 photons, each in exactly the direction I wanted to launch them. What are the odds that even one of them would hit an alien eye. Such hypothetical eyes are so small, angular size wise, that the odds are much better that the photons would travel to some electron clouding around some atom somewhere, and boost it up to another energy level, and never be detected by a sentient being's equipment. So there could be "dark matter" about that would earn its name by the simple fact that it never got any of the photons it released to go in the right direction to hit a human's equipment. Regards. TAR

Strange, Well that is good to know. It releives the problem of considering the impossible situation of the impulse going out in all directions. But why "random"? If an electron is on its way around the nucleus of its atom and looses a photon of energy, would the pulse not be more likely to "go out" in the direction corresponding to the "side" of the atom the electron was on at instant it lost the photon? Additionally the question still remains as to how expansive the wave front of a photon that has gone out in one direction, is. That is, does the wavefront expand in a spherical way in that direction, as the analogy of a wave on a pond would? In a hokey cartoon of the double slit experiment, the waves that proceeded from the emitter went out in an expanding circle, and once through the slit, out in an expanding circle again. In an analogy of photon flight in 3-D space, this would give us back the original problem of the energy of the photon getting dispersed to less than a quantum's worth. Unless the "shot pattern" of the photon was limited to a certain arc area. But even that would cause the same conceptual problem, because once you got far enough out, the arc area would be massive, and the pulse would be dispersed over the area, again to less than a quantum's worth at any given electron sized location it could potentially "hit". So I would imagine the photon, having gone out in a particular random direction, would not spread out, but retain itself in some particular sized packet of energy, that would exist in a particularly sized area of space, in that direction, one moment, and exist in a similarly sized area of space a little further along that vector, the next moment...until it "hit" an electron in an atom in that "path" and boosted it up an energy level, thereby ending the flight of that particular photon. If this model is true, do we know the "size" and shape of the packet of energy that is a photon? Regards, TAR

Was in the middle of reading a thread on the double slit experiment and sometimes the discussion was about photons and sometimes about electrons. Seems to me an electron is a different thing than a photon. In school I learned that an electon would drop from one energy level to another and release a photon of light of a particular wavelength and amplitude that was always a multiple of a single quantum of energy. What I never was told was what direction this pulse was released in, and always imagined it was going out in all directions like a 3-D ripple similar to the ripple in a pond caused by a pebble dropped into it. But if a photon can not be divided into a smaller than one quantum package, how can it be "going out" in all directions? It would quickly be divided in an inverse cubed way to an energy less than one quantum, projected in any particular vector. The collapsing of the wave function suggested by the "arrival" of a photon, at an observer, suggests that the energy imparted on the electron at the arrival end, boosting it to a higher energy level, is now NOT available in any of the other directions the spherical wave was expanding into. The direction exactly opposite the direction in which the photon was felt, is now devoid of a pulse which it contained an instant before the wave collapsed. Or does a photon actually get released in a particular direction? Regards, TAR

MirceaKitsune, In your Earth/Mars example, I was thinking that the two states, that of Mars life and that of Earth life where not both happening, because the light coming from the Sun was either of the type that satisfied the life on Earth model or of the type that allowed Mars life to emerge. Therefore both states did not exist or do not exist at the same time. Just the state that is consistent with the actual history of and current frequencies of light eminating from the actual Sun. So the universe is already observing itself. The balls and the walls are already in place and have been since the big bang. The bouncing is continuing and a large number of possible states have already been decided and we are at the one point that is consistent with ALL previous interactions. Regards, TAR So, there are not observers unique to each state, as that the whole universe must and will agree on whether the cat is alive or dead, once the box is opened.

jimmydasaint, Was trying to figure out the mideast issues at work a few weeks ago, with a coworker. Another coworker mentioned that two guys in New Jersey are not likely to fix it. I suggested that perhaps things like the MidEast are affected by just the fact that others are watching and others care. It is said that evil only exists when good men do nothing. In regards, to this thread, about a higher intelligence watching, or observing us, I am thinking that we sort of have that, in the body of each other, and a sort of collective consciousness that keeps an eye on things. Putin in affected by the world's disapproval of his actions. He is strong, he has armies at his command, but he is not operating in a vacuum. You and I are watching. A higher intelligence, the collective consciousness of humanity is watching. It steps in whenever things get out of hand. Sure we have wars, but they usually are to stop someone from behaving improperly on some level or another. Personally, I am very concerned about the mutulation of the clitoris that Isis is promoting as part of the Caliphate plan. So sexist, so stupid, so cruel and demeaning. So NOT the way to go. Makes me want to protect those women from that abuse. Makes me want to fight a war on their behalf. Perhaps the "observer" is us. And we step in when stepping in, is the thing to do. Regards, TAR

All and anyone, Still not smoking. Seems I have quit the habit for good. Just drove 1500 miles with my wife (who smoked at rest areas from time to time.) Used to smoke quite a bit while I drove. Did not need it, or miss it. It is just not an option. And there really are a whole lot of other ways to feel good. For anybody that has just quit, hang in there, it does get easier, and you don't fret about it as much as time goes by. I have learned to live without the nicotine, and everything is fine. Consider from time to time, how easy it would be to light up and enjoy a cigarette, but...it is just not an option anymore. Regards, TAR And anyone that does smoke, and would like to not...try not smoking for an hour on Saturday morn. Learn what it is like to NOT be high on nicotine...its really something like being high on nicotine...without the costs.

Captian Panic. Had not thought of the fast flowing side river problem. I had thought the only problem with my plan would be if I was below sea level (which I was not in New Jersey.) I was a pretty good swimmer, and I never thought of water as an obsticle, more of a savior, providing something to drink, and a "path" to follow. Even rivers with rapids, often have less violent areas where a wader/swimmer could pass. Although it is likely that wild rivers would present many places where following them is not going to be easy, as you said, going through gorges and over cliffs, and through impassable brambles and thick undergrowth and swampy land and such. In Maine, near the eastern most point of the U.S. (not including the far western Aleutian island that is so far West it actually is at an extreme Eastern position) we crossed a bridge into Canada (Campobello) where F.D.R. summered and were on a pebble beach where the high tide went right up to an embankment with heavy brush and brambles on it. At some places the beach was only 12 feet wide and I was concerned that we should hurry back to where we accessed it so the tide coming in would not force us into the nearly impassable bramble (Bay of Fundy has near 30 ft tides and things change rather quickly). We referenced a rock and found the tide was going out, so relaxed, but the point being, that certain combinations of terrain and flora are NOT condusive to passage. It is likely that my plan (or tip) would not be executable in all cases. Regards, TAR

Leaving today for a siteseeing trip to Maine. When I was a boy, a friend of mine's dad was lost forever hunting in Maine. I was reminded of a time I was lost in the woods, near the lake where my friend and his lost dad had stayed in the summer. I was traveling a trail back to the old iron mines that I had traveled often, but had left the trail, lost the trail, and my bearings and had no idea which direction would take me home or back to the trail. The sky was cloudy so the Sun was not apparent. Moss on the trees did not seem to give me a good North indication. I did not know if I was traveling in circles or in the right direction or the wrong. Then the "tip" occured to me. "Go down hill". My thinking was, that whether the plan would take me home was not important, but it "had" to take me to civilization, because eventually I would find a creek bed and if I followed it downhill, a stream, and if I followed that downstream a river, and that an ocean and following the coastline, one "had" to hit a city or a town. More than likely the plan would have one run into a road or a bridge or a house or a town, long before the river or the ocean...so I headed down hill. I found a small stream and followed it to a swamp. I followed the swamp border around to find its outlet and soon recognized it was the other end of a swamp I knew as "second lake". I was found. So, the tip is, if you are ever "hopelessy" lost in the woods, and have exhausted all other methods of finding your way, go down hill, and keep going down hill until you find water, and then follow the water to civilization. Regards, TAR

PeterJ, Well, perhaps to address properly the thread question, one must already accept the duality, to witness the thing. That is to say, that in a block universe, where everything is happening at once, the present has two separate, but related components. That which is happening now, everywhere, and the effects of such on everything else...later. Consider that star three lightyears from here, and a cluster of galaxies 250 million lys from here. There is something happening now in both locations. The effects of such will not be felt here for three years in the one case and not for a quarter billion years in the other...but we are considering the meaning of the "new" spectral lines coming from the galaxy cluster "now". It seems a dualist understanding is required, to properly hold the place in ones imagination. Regards, TAR We can make the proper transformations, but we can do nothing when it comes to understanding the universe, without consideration of space and time. Odd you should find so basic a pair of intuitions, so unrequired.

Mike, Anthropic principle, in some regards, is a truism, as pointed out by some in the article. Of course we are going to fit the place that we are in and of. If we had no hands, we would not have handwriting experts. Sort of obvious. But since its so obvious that it is this universe that we fit, it is more of a mental experiment, than anything else, to consider what the universe would be like if this or that constant was at a different level. If wishes were fishes we would all have a wonderder day. But changing a parameter mentally and imagining the consequences is not likely to be accurate, and has no chance of being actual. For if a constant were to be different, then that would have been a factor in the way the universe was and is, and everything, and I mean everything would have adjusted to fit. WE would not be the same, is the normal consideration. Better to think that NOTHING would be the same, and leave it at that. We have very little to do with what goes on in the bedroom of a stranger on the other side of the world. We have almost nothing to do with what goes on in a cave on a planet on the other side of the Milky Way. And its complete whim to consider what it would be like if the universe were different than it is, because it actual is not different than it is. It is rather exactly as it is, and everything fits nicely, already. How we would be, if this is not the way the universe is, is a non usefull thought. And an impossible happening. Regards, TAR And we already are conscious of it, so of course it is possible for life and consciousness to emerge within it, given the parameters within which it has happened. If anything had been different, things would have gone differently. But they went this way. So this is where we are, and there is no other place and time that would or could be this way AND have us in it. Sort of a truism. We can imagine anything we want, but only what is actual actually fits and follows all the rules. What we imagine does not have to fit, because its not actual, has no consequences and effects nothing and could be incorrect, because we make up the rules, and do not have a way to run a thought through all the parameters that reality subjects to an actual thing. The difference between the waking world and a dream world. But, to your thread points, to consider the world void of consciousness, and human consciousness most specifically, would be rather ignorant of the facts. Regards, TAR

Studiot, Nice, I didn't get it the first time. So I hope that answers the OP. We have the trig/geometry method. (Studiot) The integral calculus/trig method. (Daedalus) And the goofy, sort of geometry peicemeal get you close but requiring integration to finish method.(TAR) Regards, TAR

Studiot, So anyway, what is your answer, by your triangle method, to the original blue area question? Daedalus already gave us the exact answer, that you get through integration, my approximation using my method was close, and would have needed integration to get to the exact answer because I still had the little peice under the curve that I just had to approximate. What number do you get with your triangle method? That is, does your method work to get an exact answer, or is integration the only way to go? Regards, TAR

Actually, upon doing the check, its a .865 or so square, where the corner would be on the circle. So abandon my method. Although there still is an integral problem to do with my method concerning that area between .5 and .586. That .086 wide slice that runs up from the x axis to the circle is the difference between the blue area had the problem stated .586 and the blue area as it is at .5. And so if you were to solve the problem the geometric way, as if it had stated .586, you would be close to the correct answer and you would just have to add the area of this slice, which is mostly rectangular at .5 x .086, with just a little area left under the curve, that could be figured with integration. So anyway. Nevermind. My check did not work out. The square root of 8 is 2.8284, the square root of .5 squared plus .5 squared (.5) is .7071 and the difference between the two is 2.1213. Where we (I) needed it to be 2 for the method to work. Sorry again, my edit is not working right. I typed .865 and meant to type .586. All, I get about .3116 using my method. What do you get Daedalus? Studiot? metacogitans? What is the answer? Regards TAR This isn't a homework question, is it?

Not answering the question, about integrals, but solving the blue area question, one could take a geometric approach. The radius of circle is two units and its area can be calculated by pi r squared. The area of the square that encompasses the circle is 16. The difference between these two areas is the area that is within the square and outside the circle. One quarter of this difference is between the circle and the axis. Then, looking at this area you see three areas. One in blue, another the same shape as the blue invisible up agaist the y axis, and a third area which looks from the scale of the drawing, as if it might be a square, drawable as if .5 x and .5 y would be a point on the circle. If this is true, which we could check by seeing if the difference between the diagonal of a .5 by .5 square and a 2 by 2 square is 1, then the problem would be solved by taking away .25 from the area we figured is between the circle and the axis, and dividing the remainder by 2. Regards, TAR I meant to say 2 not 1, as the radius is 2 and 2 , which is the portion of diagonal from 2,2 to the origin within the circle, would leave a certain distance between the circle and the origin, which would be equal to the hypotenuse of a .5,.5 right triangle.

PeterJ, I am with Kant in considering that time and space are the two a priori intuitions that are not reducable into subdivisions or any sub concepts or components. They cannot be explained in terms of other things, because they themselves are the concepts upon which all other concepts are built. We all already know exactly what we mean by time, even though we cannot explain it, in terms of some other thing. We all already know exactly what we mean by space, even though we cannot explain it, in terms of some other thing. I am not taken at all with Fred Champion's attempt to describe the universe without the use of the concept of time. He might as well also attempt to describe the universe without the use of the concept of space. Even a physicist would agree that spacetime is what we are talking about, when we talk about everything or anything. The ontology of matter is, in my estimation built on the concept of space and that of time. Position if you will in the two regards or ways that we all recognize the place and the changes that go on about it. Position in space and position in time. The electron spinning about the nucleus, the molecules piling up into mountains and seas, the planets orbiting their sun, the suns orbiting their black hole that is sucking in "matter". I don't think we can say much about anything without already agreeing upon space and time. But we can synthesize a lot of concepts and understandings starting from those two a priori considerations. Regards, TAR

Well Fred, i will agree that the universe has not been in this arrangement before, but I think it is rather useless to consider that things which are cyclical are not cyclical. Perhaps we should call in the saying "for all intents and purposes" at this juncture. As for the universe being a certain way now, that it was not before, I would like to point out that the differenciation between how it was before, and how it is now, requires the passage of time. And the distances between various elements of the universe, require time for light to transverse. It is generally accepted, that the light from a star 3 light years distant from here, left that star's environment 3 years ago, and is entering our eye tonight. It took time for those photons to get from there to here. There are more on the way. The ones we see next second are a light second away. The interaction that you talk about, between elements of the universe, takes time to occur. If it did not, everything would happen at once, and that would be the end of it. Regards, TAR

Fred, You brought up the correctly running clock. "Consider two clocks. One runs correctly, the other doesn't. Determine if one runs slow or one runs fast. If time is a real thing, you should be able to determine which one is not running correctly." The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years. Divide that into portions if you like. And those fractions would be segments of time. The whole time since the beginning is 13.8 billion years. That is a certain amount of the time it takes the Sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way. The Earth goes around the Sun a certain amount of times while the Sun goes around the center of the Galaxy once. There are a certain amount of days in a year, and hours in a day and minutes in an hour and seconds in a minute. And a Cesium atom has a certain "beat" and the beats of a certain transition within the atom occurs a particular amount of times in a second. I don't know about something never being in the same place twice. We were at the big bang, and we are still where we were then. And there is nothing in the universe, whose components were not here at the start. So here we are. Where we were 13.8 billion years ago. At least we are in the same neighborhood. Besides we are somewhat insulated from the motion of the Sun around the center of the Galaxy and the Earth around the Sun, and the rotation of the Earth. Enough to go to New York one day, return home, and go to New York again, some other day, and cross the same street, go to the same room in the same building as you did before...last time. Regards, TAR

Mike, A crystal, and the roll it gets on is certainly an important initiative, or at least happening, that is most likely an important consideration in abiogenisis, in that it brings form and structure to a mixture, that is otherwise, "lifeless"/ But back to the "higher life form", that the thread question is referring to. What would be the "initiative" that would have brought the higher life form about? Would it not necessarily be, something like the initiatives that brought about single cell organisms, and life on Earth? No magic is evident or required to have established life on Earth. No magic is likely to have been available for the higher life form to have developed. By rule, the higher lifeform would have had to evolve from chemicals and crystal formation, and found a way to grab form and structure, from a universe that otherwise is headed toward entropy, same as life on Earth did. The higher lifeform would have just had more time to evolve, or had some special advantage to institute a form and structure that fit their environment better than we have managed so far. This is a possible thing, but not a likely thing, to have developed in the manner you are aluding to. The higher life form, would have to have been subject to reality same as us. Can not have developed "outside" of reality. Being so, they would have concerns, same as every lifeform on Earth, surrounding their own sustanance and survival. Altruism on their part, would have no real reason to extend to Mike Smith Cosmos, as they would have their own family and species and planet and solar system to be concerned with. Probably their own balance of power, choices between good and evil, and politics as we have. So, even if a race or species, or type of life, had the time and conditions to evolve beyond where the human species has evolved, it is unlikely that they have done it completely separately from us, and at the same time, done it in a manner that would have them be concerned with our well being. Regards, TAR