Is Humanity Ready for First Contact?

[Anomalocaris]

In my opinion any technological civilization much more advanced than ours would certainly have carried out extensive genetic and cybernetic modifications to its individuals to allow something like a borg like thought and data interchange, as well as to tailor or enhance health and other desirable attributes.  Such life would be much more complex than the pure biological organisms from which they were made.

They would therefore be a higher life form.

I suspect very advanced civilizations would consist of just a few super individuals, each consisting of a vast interconnected network semi-biological amd cybernetic nodes.  Each biological nodes might be a highly edited and modified versions of an individual from the original biological species that gave rise to this advanced civilization.  These now form something similar to cells in the super organism.

Gotta ask...why would you thnk that?  Nothing you've just described is actually -beyond- vanilla biological systems.  There's no need or reason to engineer yourself as such, in and of itself....and ofc you could simply, biologically, be as such.

How do we apply the "higher" title?  Just sounds different, but not as much as some think...to me.

it's not clear to me what the limit of "biological" system is. But it seems to me electronic systems can surpass it by orders of magnitude in both complexity and speed of execution. So the merging of electronic and biological system would count as an increase in sophistication unattainable through conventional, as in classically biological as oppose to technological or cybernetic, evolution in much the same way that prokaryotic cells could not attain the sophistication of eukaryotic cells, and thus eukaryotic cells represent a distinct increase in sophistication over prokaryotic cells.