p class="MsoNormal"span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"Every mind on Earth capable of understanding the problem was confused. Without the usual UFO ambiguity, incontrovertible evidence had arrived of extraterrestrial life. That is to say, extraterrestrial intelligence. Or, at least, incontrovertible evidence. But of what exactly? It … she? called herself Fanny Mae. And that was just the beginning. The incontrovertible evidence was an identifiable object, a sphere almost 6 meters in diameter, which didn't fly – it had just appeared one day. And from time to time various attempts to draw attention had made a door appear that let one human enter. Results varied. Some of the humans had talked and been replied to in the same language, but the words didn't make much sense. Not to say that no-one was entirely clear on what was the object and what was the occupant. Sound recordings only played back the human side of the conversation, leading to speculation that Fanny Mae 'spoke' by direct stimulation of the auditory nerve. Or something. Most of those that had talked with Fanny Mae agreed that she was doing her utmost to break down the barriers to communication, but that she was either unable or unwilling to reproduce the way humans looked at reality. The dominant hypothesis was that in fact her primary purpose was to change the way that humans looked at reality. And that she approved of general semantics. Of course, both hypotheses were hotly contested, but nevertheless Science and Sanity went through several reprints. And then, as suddenly as she had appeared, Fanny Mae was gone. A month later Francine Gor/spanspan style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"é, who had been on the waiting list to try and obtain an audience with Fanny Mae, carefully arranged a jug of water teetering next to her computer while it was writing to her back-up disc, left her daughter in her playpen close enough that she could reach the water but not close enough that she could electrocute herself and then went to make lunch. When she came back a year of her work was irrecoverably lost./spanspan style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;" Over the next several days she was increasingly apprehensive about whether she had done the right thing, until she noticed that her daughter's guppies had acquired some odd behaviour. When her daughter fed them, only 9 of them would come to the surface to eat some of the food, then they would disperse and a different group of 9 guppies would come to feed, and by the time they had done that 6 times, all the food would be gone. There were 42 guppies. Feeling vindicated that her intuition had been correct that her research could lead to some very destructive applications, she changed tack and never mentioned to anyone what she had been working on./span /p