There is a fundamentally ‘alien’ (meaning vastly strange and thunderously advanced) quality to living beings in general.

And thus there is something more directly accessible to us than our science-fiction fantasies of alien intelligence, which is the strange (and stranger) webwork that connects the living beings here emergent.

If there were an advanced intelligence directly available to human contact, I propose (from experience, not theory) that it is to be found not on other worlds… but on this one… in ‘the great between’ which, whether we choose to call it a field, a web, or even statistical data… is obviously a body of distributed intelligence more powerful than our wildest fantasies and our most sober analyses combined.

The obvious place to look for evidence of advanced nonhuman intelligence is not in outer space… but in the immediate web of relation in which we exist, participate, and from which our own senses of awareness and intelligence arise.

Let me also suggest that were we to contact aliens ‘from outer space’, their first concern would be diagnosing how we had failed to maintain a direct and active awareness of these matters.

I suspect we might be framed as approximately analogous to a child-species who burned their own minds in an accident involving the gross misapprehension of both the dangers and powers of representational systems… and were thereafter little more than bait for the mimetic predators that arise just as naturally in such cogniscia… as do maggots in rotting flesh.