[Elizabeth Childs meant] that our very distant ancestors, the mammals who
>co-existed with the dinosaurs, might have developed an instinct to fear
>all giant lizards....
Cool, I like being romantically speculative. {8^D
Speaking of which, consider: we normally think of scientific discovery as something that happens one day, in a lab, with far-side caricatures of guys in white lab coats with test tubes, etc. But we have before us now a discovery which is taking place slowly, over 40 years: the incredibly mind boggling evidence that our species is evidently drifting around this big old galaxy...alone.
I used to feel this conclusion was far too sad to be true, but now I realize
how cheerful this is: aaaaallll thaaat stuuuuuff out there, is ours. If we
just go out there and take it. No need for any star wars, space death lasers, none of that. Just go and move in. What could possibly be better than that?
Join our Extropians SETI team. If you set it as a screen saver, it does get out of your way. Quit wasting all those CPU cycles. Even when you are doing something on your computer, about 99% of the cycles are no-ops. spike