> My only rebuttal (if I'm to take an opposing position), would be that different organisms have different clock-cycles, an example would be organic life, hummi

> My only rebuttal (if I'm to take an opposing position), would be that different organisms have different clock-cycles, an example would be organic life, hummingbird metabolism versus elephant or whale metabolism. I don't know if their brains are also faster, but since their reaction speeds do seem to be connected to their metabolic rate, it's probably the case. That's a fair point. I think the comparison would have a somewhat similar conclusion, perhaps not as dramatic though. Either way, "clock speed" / "number of clock of cycles" is only one way to analyze such a system. Another important aspect of an intelligent system is the computational complexity of each node in the system and their ability send "messages" back and forth. For a brain, we could look at the neuron. My limited understanding is that neurons are actually pretty complex from an information processing standpoint, despite the implied simplicity we see with artificial analogs such as the neural nets used in machine learning. I can't imagine what sort of naturally occurring entity would be able to function as an analogous "node" of a galactic brain, or even what sort of messages could be used do to do complex information processing. Stars don't look like they could fulfill the role. In terms of "information processing" I don't think they really do much. Anyways, it is all very interesting. It is probably possible to have a much larger and very different "thinking system" than what we find on Earth, although I'm not sure what it would look like. Bu I am skeptical that such a system could span the enormous distances between stars. By the way, you should check out book The Black Cloud [1]! It is a fun science fiction story that explores this idea. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud