the astronomers ask the cloud how its lifeform originated, it replies that they have always existed. One of the characters suggests this is incompatible with the Big Bang theory.

The cloud announces that another nearby (by the cloud's standards) intelligent cloud has suddenly stopped communicating and may have vanished. This has apparently happened many times before, often in conjunction with attempts to understand if there is a super-intelligence even more powerful than the clouds, and is a long-standing