Hmmm, maybe I'm doing the blogger thing right now, I don't know....anyway, I was going to offer some ruminations on the machine culture thing.  It is generally accepted that, down towards the center of the Milky Way, there is an advanced machine culture.  How did this come about, you ask?  Well, the first thing you have to remember is that this old galaxy is really, really old.  Time is older than you can imagine.  And, as biological species rise up from where-ever they rise up from, they evolve in physical ways, and in what I suppose we can call spiritual ways.  The most ancient species have  evolved beyond the purely or merely physical....they have transcended to a higher plane.  When they do this, they usually leave behind their machines, to mind the store.  Now, think about how the water swirls down a toilet bowl....things get sucked to the center and then are gone.  Same thing with a spiral galaxy, like ours.  The older peoples have been sucked down towards the center as time goes by, so most of the leftover supermachines are down there near Mother, the big black hole that dumps stuff out of this phase of the multiverse, and into another.  Got that?  So when a race, like maybe this poor human race, gets good enough with technology to leap between the stars, eventually it is going to encounter the left over machines of our forefathers.  You may remember that someone on this blog previously has in fact been rescued, after his spaceship exploded, by a machine culture.   And he is now selling churros, and maybe hotcakes with maple syrup, at a the Free Market on an Insect Empire frontier moon.   Stay tuned for another exciting episode.