I recall reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
“Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes — with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other.”
If you scale out to a civilization view, and imagine ourselves as Tralfamadorians —they perceive time in four dimensions and they don’t experience life sequentially the way humans do. They see every moment of a person’s existence simultaneously, the way we’d look at a mountain range. So when they look at a human, they don’t see a snapshot of someone standing on two legs at age 40. They see the entire lifespan stretched out at once — I would bet money that our human civilization would look very much like slime mold.
