Imagine a single-celled organism, an amoeba. It knows nothing of itself. It has no self. It is a nucleus surrounded by cytoplasmic jelly, responding to external stimuli that cause it to stretch, move, feed. Compelled to hunt by chemotaxis, of no volition of its own, it carries out this process time after time, ingesting what it can until, upon reaching a certain level of stored energy and size, it reproduces, tearing itself down the middle to create almost identical copies.

Imagine a collection of these cells, similar to the amoeba but now bound together, a unified collection of mitochondrial energy-factories that know nothing of each other yet could not survive, if that is the right word, without the others. They work in unison, again prompted by and responding to stimuli to move, consume, reproduce. They compete against other such groups.

Now scale up this collection to include cells of such a specialised nature that they form different organs, each contributing part of the process that maintains the whole. This mass of cells, taken individually, knows nothing of itself, and yet on the macro scale they form a creature that grows, that flies, that hunts, that builds, that breeds, that competes.

Now imagine one of these collections forms a being that achieves an amorphous and ill-defined state of consciousness known as 'sapience'. Suddenly this mass of cells, each one refined over the aeons to feed, to reproduce, to compete, this mass of cells that if divided and parsed through with the finest of electron-microscopes would reveal very little of the greater organism it contributed to, this mass of cells is part of something that can consider itself alive and contemplate what it means to possess a self.

A billion billion parts, tiny beyond reckoning, building together into something self-aware.

But why stop there? If billions of parts come together to make a single individual, what happens when there are billions of individuals? What happens when these individuals, interacting with each other, feeding, breeding, competing, form a complex in which each operates as only a minuscule part of the greater whole?

What if these individuals form part of a greater consciousness, an awareness of which they are, ironically, unaware?

And what if they carry this awareness with them when they seed the stars? Or could it be that the awareness carries them?

What if such an awareness encounters a world where another such awareness is developing?

They feed. They compete. They fight.