Just about any animal on Earth larger than a flea has some way of experiencing and navigating space. We are hard-wired for it. We are not quite equipped for "space" that goes out 13 billion light-years or possibly forever. This is why "Science" Fiction needs to do away with real space and make the Universe a more comfortable size. Of course, it helps if all the "aliens" speak good English and differ only by the shape of their ears. Nothing out there is even as weird as an Octopus. This is another thing that is hard-wired in humans: face recognition. Star Trek now seems ancient. These days we want to turn it into a "game" - an immersive experience where we can feel a bit "immersed."  It feels even more "real" if people can talk to us ( massive multi player games). This tweaks another hard-wired function of the human brain: to have our existence recognized. Without this, we are not a "person." Modern "VR" pla...

  The "evolution" we taught in school presented confident progress all way from the mysterious beginnings of microorganisms to the triumph of the human form. If we remembered any of this, we walked away with an image of "evolution" that would conveniently fit into the idea of "God" secretly working behind the scenes to create a "Scientific" worldview that was satisfyingly also "religious" - depending on your comfort level. If, for some reason, we dug deeper into this concept, we quickly ran into the idea of " punctuated equilibrium ." There is no long, steady progress. It proceeds in fits and starts. Worse yet, almost all species seem to vanish at some point along the line. There is scant evidence that "better" versions replace the ones that die out. We do see trends toward bigger versions, but here too, evidence is thin. When I first ran across the idea that evolution proceeded in this way, I imagined populations b...