intelligent life in the cosmos

a molecular automaton. a gene's way of making copies of itself whose only true goal is to also make copies of itself, and so on and so forth, we are connected under the skin in ways we can scarcely comprehend. the oneness of life is an inevitable product of evolution and descent from a common ancestor, because we were all one together at some time in the past, against all the others not like us and extinct now, till the first living organism on earth, one of many competing origins to be sure, one design among many but even those a mere drop in the bucket against the myriad possibilities doomed to fail early on as the pieces sorted themselves out. there are only so many ways to build a replicator out nothing, except a young planet with carbon compounds and a newly birthed core belching compounds and seeking to insulate itself from the angry cosmos. these replicators early on and until now in fact, had no idea of exactly what they were doing, a trait which no doubt suited them to advantage, because it still seems that life's tentative consciousness of its own existence seems a mere epiphenomenon in the search for widely distributed berries, a desire for a better hand axe, and a conviction that plenty of clever talk and opportunities to laugh will land a mate and in and of itself make a replicator a better replicator. if healthy brains are an indication of a good replicator, perhaps because the empower the bearer to build a barbed-wire fence or dig row after row of trenches for irrigation, feats equally wonderful as the first good hand axe, we might share brothers and sisters out there in the cosmos after all, because sexual selection is such a common phenomenon out here on this planet that it seems inevitable to be repeated out there, ad nausem, with forked tongues on alien beings and strange sounds filling pale blue methane atmospheres as lovers cry to exchange genes and build the next generation and so on and so on through every galaxy in the hubble field, though perhaps just once per galaxy still an amazing number of times, out there.