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Yes we can! But be sure to RTFM!

Because rovers are PR stunts. Real work gets done from orbit. We already have a map of the underground water reserves of Mars, we even have a clear picture of water snow (we know it is not CO2 snow). All of these results brought from ESA orbiters. Sadly, ESA lacks the public relation office that NASA has...

If the aliens are just at the level of fungus, it would be hard to discover them in the first place, moreover their existence wouldn't matter much anyways.

Terrence McKenna makes the claim that psilocybin mushrooms are actually an intelligent network of beings, and can communicate with humans because of the psilocybin molecule's ability to mimic human neurotransmitters. It's fairly weird stuff, but if you look at it as science fiction ( or psychedelic fiction? ), you being to understand the difficulty of communicating with an intelligence vastly different than yourself. We are just beginning to understand that dolphins understand grammar, yet we have no idea the mechanics of their communication. They can spontaneously invent sophisticated, synchronized, two-dolphin performances for a research scientist, so it's fairly obvious that they are capable of having complex conversations about aquatic acrobatics, at least.

Anyway, here's Terrence, channeling the mycelia network: "Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds. You as an individual and man as a species are on the brink of the formation of a symbiotic relationship with my genetic material that will eventually carry humanity and earth into the galactic mainstream of the higher civilizations.

Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the lo

Back in 1978 Robert Anton Wilson predicted that we'd be "immortal" by now. Boy, did he get a serious reality-fucking about a year ago.

whoa... you totally remind me of this dude on the futurehi.net blog I used to visit (until it got too overly hippy-druggy-spiritual and shit). Very trippy. :-)

Mass Produced Carbon Nanotubes

7 meters per minute!

Future Hi

Well, its like the asteroids are going to disassemble mars with solar panels and stuff.

I even found this somewhere else online (surprise surprise) called Matrioshka Brains http://futurehi.net/planetp/mbrain1.html. A quick wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_Brain brings me the following quote:

"A Matrioshka Brain (or MB) is a hypothetical construction of immense computational and physical resources using a star (usually at its centre) as a power source. It is conjectured but not proven to be physically feasible. It is reasonable to assume that such a construction under currently known laws of physics would be valid."

I am still left feeling confused, and even more so that some people have wayyy too much time on their hands.

ObList of Culture ship names