I believe I can understand how one could stretch the idea of “intelligence” that far. Makes some sense.

As for me, when I refer to “intelligence” I’m including a prerequisite what you can “sentience”, and emotional component. Since emotions boild down to “am I safe or not” I would think for my definition that intelligence would require a sense of self and an ability to sense ones surroundings.

Where my version breaks down is where I agree an ant is smarter than hell, and that an ant is a collection of atoms which have followed DNA marching orders and turned into an ant. Or that my DNA, carefully nurtured and groomed, as turned into me (obviously an intelligent organism).

You’ve given me something to ponder – thanks a lot.

What’s a molecule?
A combination of other things bonded together to form something new.

The same forces that let us think, form molecules and bond them together. An atom or a galaxy – or even a thought and a working mind are just developments of energy being drawn together in unique ways.

An ant has vast intelligence in its way. So does a drop of water or a human being. The fabric of space itself is just an energy construct held in place between other forces.

Intelligence is the systematic building up of energy into more complex structures. Sentience isn’t so clear cut. We see it with ‘dumb’ animals. Some seem like robots and others already show signs of human like reactions that are more complex.

And what is this complexity? It’s a field of energy with a certain data set impinged within it.

That’s what the next big discovery is. We know 100,000 cell phone signals can be bouncing around us, yet only one has the impinged signal to trigger our phone. Same is true with how our minds collect data. We look around and pass over some things while others we observe.

Why do we observe some things and not others? Because our consciousness is a field that has embedded signals and those “catch” on things just like the cell phone signal does for the right phone. It seems “random” to us, but it’s not random at all. Its’ “scooping” up more data and embedding it in with other like signals.

So, intelligence is everywhere. I guess the faithful could call it God and scientists would call it a fundamental nature of how energy interacts.

That’s intelligence. The lowest, simplest form of energy possesses it as does the most complex.

Walt Disney, were he still with us, would depict it in cartoon form as a little mesh net that keeps scooping up more and more things which makes it more complex and able to do more stuff.

Humans are complex mesh nets. But we’re always just beginning – even though we think we’re the top of the galactic food chain..

Getting back to relativity, we see that there will always be something smaller or larger than us – by infinite magnitudes.

There is no right answer or one way of viewing it. Each of us have different tools to work with and are forced to see things in totally unique ways.

As I said, I can’t decipher your concept of the Universe and intelligence. You seem to say that intelligence is a shared quality which is distributed across the Universe, and idea for which there doesn’t seem to be any empircal evidence.

I won’t be here, but I don’t think that I’ll miss the experience.

The ‘fabric’ of the universe is simultaneously everywhere. Everything, everywhere is no larger than a trillionth of a nanometer or a trillion squared light years – or whatever your perspective will permit. Consciousness develops new ways of interfacing with the energy and the frame of references infinitely morph.

Is intelligent life here and now?

Yes. At least what passes for intelligence. Even that is infinitely relative.

Then it is everywhere and timeless.

One can imagine relativity of intelligence like a rubber band stretching into every corner of existence. No part is untouched.

Also, do we know yet even what questions we should be asking? Should it be “How is it possible, in all the vast universe, that earth could be the only place where life developed?”

Or maybe the question is, “How is it that, against fantastic odds, life managed to develop on earth?”

The only honest answer I can offer is a rather unhelpful “I dunno.”