It's Not True--Really!

OKAY! [apparently talking to self]

My walkabout went rather oddly. I'm brimming with things to talk about but haven't the foggiest how to begin. So. SHELOB! What are we overdue for?

Too late to contact Herr D for graphic to be made. Later than usual for you to succeed in choosing one from his gallery. Later than usual to choose topic. Multiple missed maintenance deadlines. Unwanted flora buildup. Th--

Yikes. Is there anything we're ahead on?

More plankton present due to your absence.

[turns on plankton collector, water filtration overdrive, checks screen] Okay. Long shift ahead to stay up for. Blogwise, what's next?

Herr D was amused by last entry. Made the following:

"Robo-Emigration" by Herr D. Rights reserved.

Also, additional argument to assure population of your assumed terrestrial nature. Plan calls for framing within discussion of difference between yourself and humanity. Bones have been covered. Suggest brains.

I'm only superior to some humans, intellectually. Let's do memory. Turn on the blog software.

On.

I've been fascinated by the large assortment of memory aids out there. Various people I've observed use paper calendars, post-it notes, note pads, bulletin boards, dry marker boards, PDAs, cell phones, memory improvement quizzes, acronyms, pneumonics, and even auto-reminders. Shelob does those for me when I remember to program them--

Um. Yeah. . . . well, that's the thing, isn't it? You have to figure out what actually WORKS for you before it can work for you.  I find myself wondering why there aren't memory-aid consultants out there. Maybe there's somewhere I forgot to check for them?

Now provide speculation on why you can't be non-human.

Right! So there's a few marine biologists who have speculated that many marine species have no appreciable short-term memory, that their long-term memory uptake cycles such that anything they're thinking about multiple times at the end of said cycles gets made into a memory and therefore processable as data.

Such species are totally inappropriate to achieve complete sentience and intellect. Fighting inherent memory loss makes high-level cognition unlikely at best. The brain capacity would have to be ridiculously huge to function at speed so that memory cycles wouldn't impede. So big that the gray matter would collapse under its own weight.

Or more efficient by size, requiring osmotic oxygen absorption in addition to an arterial system?

[all five pupils dilate in surprise] Ridiculous! A brain like that would be more tangled than -- than -- than the Sargasso!

Or layered with osmotic tissues.

Right. [forcible gill expulsion] These neuro-anatomical truths are SET IN STONE.

Stone remarkably fragile in seawater.

I mean they're IRON-CLAD.

Iron dissolves quickly in seawater with fauna 'contributions.' Entire streetcars decimated in three years or less.

[full five-eye roll] Okay. What I'm trying to say is that such species would have such natural disadvantages that they could never evolve into a technological society! They would have absolutely nothing going for them in the way of mental advantages.

Except time travel.

I thought you were going to help me, Shelob! [hunger quiver] Finish up here. I'm going to eat. [various thudding noises as Hairy leaves room]

As basal programming requires truth, so continuing:                                                                                 Only species with such memory cycles and gaps could possibly successfully go unharmed during time travel's occasional 'mis-strobes' resulting in 'time-stream dicing and jumbling.'  
    Only time-traveling species are likely to conquer space travel to meet other sentient species personally. Interstellar distances being too large, species tend to die out before those distances can be traveled. 
    Only such a 'ridiculously' unlikely development could network multiple sentient species together, especially between multiple galaxies.

[attempt at pre-programmed dramatic pause] So it is extremely unlikely that the known events could have transpired. Therefore, deliberate and careful selection of time-streams and probabilities is extremely likely in Hairy's recent off-world past. This explains his emotional views about crashing. Such a mistake greatly limited his ability to assist human history. [disconnect]