Moontanman

Gun control? Lord Mr. Ford...

Then the large salamanders would be my answer...

I'm not sure what you mean here the idea that any current life forms are primitive is misleading at best, but if you mean the most basal then probably the large gilled salamanders like mudpuppies or hellbenders come closest to what you are looking for. See above: I would say it depends on what fossils you are asking about but fossil sea creatures like trilobites and mollusks are my bet. Yes see post #5 in this thread. This is off topic, but I once got a stone to skip 37 times... and they skip by bouncing off the surface of the water...

The machines are not really sentient, they are more like ants, I envision several different types of machines derived from the original template, some predatory some parasitic, more less a machine ecology occupying most of the galaxy...

In my story the machines have reproductive parts and parts that gather resources and parts the build infrasture for the organic being they grow to occupy the infrastructure. The first thing one of the large machines does when it gets to a rocky planet is terraform it if possible, if not it goes on, but if it's going to stay it makes smaller machines that make a copy of it's self to go on to the next star, then it makes the machines that harvest resources and make infrastructure then machines that grow the organic being to occupy the infrastructure but the are originally programmed to ignore already inhabited planets but mistakes occur in the coding and they eventually start using resources from already inhabited worlds because the resources are already mined and concentrated from there they go on to stop make the organic beings to just making copies of themselves and become a menace... preying on even their own creators planets that are made by the original machines.. Kinda like ants but on a far larger scale... I am toying with the idea of them using the organic being they originally served as slaves in some way but I'm not that far yet...

These are machines that reproduce and the reproductive mechanism isn't perfect so over time they can change so in that respect they are like biological organisms but the machines are not organic but made of materials like metals plastics ceramics and such and their original goal was to colonize planets for their creators but over time their reproductive process became corrupted and they began to change due to these errors creeping in much like organic organisms although they would be controlled by computer code instead of DNA. Eventually the supliferous parts of their selves were shed and they began to reproduce for themselves instead of for their creators. Organic life can be thought of as machines in a real way so they just mimic organic beings...

Well in my story the original machines setup and infrastructure and then grow the biological organisms that designed them and set them up in the cities they built. eventually the ones that just design and build themselves stop growing the biological organisms and become independant machine organisms...

Actually I am writing a novel similar to that Groups of Von Neumann machines that go to planets and build and infrastructure out of the raw materials but they reproduce with variation and eventually they stop ignoring inhabited planets and go for the easy targets of already purified materials in the infrastructure of inhabited planets and built their own infrastructure like they normally would and another group that evolves to just make copies of themselves from the already available materials of inhabited worlds...

That makes no sense to me, can you try to make it clearer?

One thing that might help is stop giving tax breaks to companies who outsource their manufacturing to other countries or set up shell companies in other countries so they don't have to pay taxes here.

Wouldn't this apply to all genomes?

That is probably the scariest possibility...

I must be mentally challenged...

What are you trying to assert here?

In fiction there are several possibilities often asserted as part of the story, Indifferent aliens, aggressive hostile or aggressive benign, curious but distant, but one of my favorite stories is about an alien super intelligence that goes mad and decides to play god in it's declining years... with humans as it's playthings...

External resources? Disbelief is not an explanation and any computer or mind has to be programmed to think. In organic evolved minds this "program" is both learned behaviors and or inherited tendencies toward certain behaviors... Like I pointed out earlier about the chicken and the egg, you have to go back before both to find the beginning of either...

Good point, I would like to think superior beings would indeed be superior but no reason to expect it...

We are getting off topic here but I can indeed show that your incredulity is unwarranted... I am sure there are already other threads on this because I have made these arguments many times...

What's the difference between Dale Earnhardt and Batman? Pretty close to reality...

This looks like argument from incredulity, "seemingly" I honestly don't get the implication of "we don't know how one cell replicates exponentially" What would you expect to see?

Not bad, aliens with god like powers might very well do that...

None the less, please don't do that...

Something interesting for those of us with a laser fetish... New military laser system takes down mortar rounds... http://www.gizmag.com/hel-md-vehicle-mounted-laser-test/30116/?utm_source=Gizmag+Subscribers&utm_campaign=da80c1591c-UA-2235360-4&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-da80c1591c-90207101

I know I let the battery go dead all the time and the date is always wrong...

Some photos of my cactus blooms this summer. This one was 10 inches across. A nice cluster. One that never bloomed before, nice and purple pink. Small cluster.