All biological cognitive minds which exist for a fleeting moment in a 20 billion year old universe make cognitive inferences. Most of these cognitive inferences are wrong and are a synthesis of an infinite series of mistaken inferences based on the inability of a biological cognitive mind to understand the complex organization of information in 20 billion years of natural law, cause-and-effect, and self-organization.
In other words, to say this more simply, and to keep this post short, the world we live in is a product of evolution of a primitive cognitive space; life, as we know it is an illusion; a world created out of an epic human quest for survival, knowledge and self-awareness, mostly based on mistaken inferences.
All life, viewed from the human cognitive mind, is an illusion that is only real to homo sapiens and those infected by this self-generated "reality", based on the serial history, conditioning and synthesis of cognitive inference in a vain attempt to understand 20 billion years of cause-and-effect.
Most of us, the author included, struggle to keep vBulletin tuned and forum users to frequent our virtual communities; and in context, have little hope to understand 20 billion years of science and natural law. Someday, humans may simply be the "maintainers" for machines who will have cognitive abilities in excited silicon that will far surpass cognitive abilities in homo sapiens. Who knows?
Unfortuately, these machines will more-than-likely be built and bootstrapped with the same wrong inferences that infect our biological cognitive spaces. This is simply the limitations of biological and carbon based life as we "know it". In closing, because science and technology have only emerged in the past few hundred years of a 20 billion year history, this is only about 0.000000001 of the history of the universe as we know it. There is a long way to go and much to learn. I would say Earthlings are doing OK, considering their relatively short emergence in the cosmos.
Yes, as the original poster
[from the vB boards] stated, "we are the bad aliens".....