Re: your "creator beings", I think we cannot say for sure, but where is the evidence? It's an extraordinary claim with almost nothing backing it. You make a po

Re: your "creator beings", I think we cannot say for sure, but where is the evidence? It's an extraordinary claim with almost nothing backing it. You make a point here: > What’s the relationship between a Petri dish of bacteria and a person? Imagine a culture of penicillin reasoning how it came to be. But the difference between ourselves and bacteria is that we can reason about things other than our immediate surroundings; and about magnitudes other than those we live in. If bacteria in a Petri dish developed intelligence, curiosity about the world, and some sort of scientific method, might they not discover there is a world outside their Petri dish? Maybe they would get many things wrong, but wouldn't they be able to indirectly determine at least some things about the wider universe (the lab!), even if they never get to meet us? And wouldn't they be able to develop some tools to finally observe the human beings in the lab, at least partially? And finally, wouldn't they be able to think "hey, these scientists are not the gods of the sacred Protozoan Book, they must be made of the same building blocks as we are!". We're talking intelligent bacteria who go to university and publish papers, mind you. I don't think there is any evidence about the hypothesis that life is a single occurrence, like a basket woven by Travis Jungroth. It could still be true, but I think it's one of the least interesting starting points to think about the universe. It's somewhat like solipsism; maybe it's true, but it leads nowhere -- and we cannot tell, anyway.