I'll take cold and heartless over obviously delusional. Remember Darwin's distaste for his own depiction of nature surviving by 'tooth and claw"; and remember Sam Harris's summation: "“Either God can do nothing to stop catastrophes like this, or he doesn't care to, or he doesn't exist. God is either impotent, evil, or imaginary. Take your pick,"

Disagreements should be stated and defended. This is a discussion.

We are untold millennia behind our Keepers (technologically, biologically, psychologically, etc.). There is no catching up. The Keepers are surely quite different from the actual Visitors. What sort of civilization is indifferent to Time?

@racocn8

WTF? Keepers and Visitors, who is delusional here between us?

Goodbye.

At least a response, better than just giving Samuel Johnson links.

Not sure I would want to live in your universe though. Doesn't sound like a pleasant place.

Good one! I actually was worried that this was an exam and I might flunk out.

I like 7? And I ran out of questions after that.

Originally I had 6, and then I remembered the Fermi paradox which remains unanswered and fits in a way with some of the other questions.

@mercurymerlin those are not bad questions, it's just too much work for one posting. What if it is break down in single question, get feedback, establish conclusions and then move on to the next. Just a thought....

@IamNobody

Yes I was thinking it is too much all in one post, too much to get to grips with all at once. So perhaps I might try posting them at a later date or in another way, one at a time?

There are some common threads across the questions though, and what kind of answer you give to one might change other answers. Also I was thinking perhaps some different style of presentation might communicate better, I don't mind the exam-style thing which I was playing with here, but it could seem a bit aggressive and as if there are implied set answers to be marked out of 10.

Whereas my intention is to ask open questions, I feel there are quite a few possible wrong answers but maybe no clear right answer to several of them; I can see possible partial answers to some of them but it depends which direction I look from perhaps.

Q7 the Fermi paradox I really struggle with; the best I can see is possible ways to get further towards beginning to search for answers, but I'm sad this might not be in my lifetime that we make any real progress.

@mercurymerlin if you break it down to single questions then you will be surprised on the broad type of answers you would get. You will still have to weed out the not so serious, funny, ironic or even mocking type of responses. Then, on the good side of the fence you may get feedback that will make you go -"mmmhhh, I didn't see this one coming!!".... Anyhow, Fermi's thought is called a paradox for a reason and it will stay unsolved until another civilization existance is confirmed beyond any doubt.... In any case, it would be even more interesting to find out if he really established the premises of his paradox as "lack of evidence vs high probability". He was a serious formal physicist with a broad knowledge of probability. Did he really meant "high" probability or his words have been embellished along the way for dramatical purposes? The probability does exists, therefore the paradox but we have to wonder how high is high?

@IamNobody

I might try that, rephrase and post separately one at a time, and see what results.

I'm not a big fan of "mocking" responses, that seems gratuitous even if I'm being dumb or attention-seeking. No need for it; anything else is fair game but respond to someone with random snark?

Fermi's question was semi-serious I suspect, it is a solid question though which we only have guesses about so far, but is puzzling. If we do discover any form of life similar to ours, water-carbon based or even chemosynthetic, on Mars or Europa or anywhere, we might start to have more than a sample of 1 as to possible life.

Until then... It is the only question which makes me wonder if we could be in a simulation, because in that circumstance we might be the only instance of technic civilization. But, that contradicts other things we observe, or it looks like it does.