Originally posted by Nereid
If baryonic matter comprises but 4% of the Universe, aren't we then just the pond scum?
Perhaps all the real aliens are made of dark matter, or even dark energy? Perhaps we aren't where the action is at all! Maybe there are billions of Type III analogue civilisations in the dark matter halos of galaxy clusters, all communicating via a CDMA-like encoding of neutrino streams, and tapping into dark energy for sustenance.
In the Great Shapley Supercluster Library, there is a one paragraph entry (in a dusty tome, on a high shelf, in one of the 25 billion 'back buildings' rarely visited) describing a curious observation about a barely detectable deviation from thermodynamic equilibrium of some mote in the baryonic part of a minor galaxy in the outer regions of the Virgo cluster; the para concludes (translation) "probably just another observational error"