One interesting techno-signature a civilization that happened hundreds of millions of years ago would be odd mineral deposits.

It's never the Silurians, but it's fun to pretend we found something interesting.

Q: What was the hardest debugging problem you had?

A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.

Learning new and weird things builds brain elasticity and vocabulary for you to express new ideas. I always recommend people to learn FORTH, or Lisp, or APL. Learn to think with different paradigms.

Well… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.

You could work on the Voyager project.

Now that you mentioned it, I’m thinking about the Three Stooges

Or Billy Idol: “In the midnight hour, she cried Moe, Moe, Moe”

He's very wrong.

It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.

It's a tragedy some of our best minds are dedicated to that, and digital surveillance so their corporate masters can sell better targeted ads with a higher click-thru rate.