This is a cool idea, thanks for telling us about your Galileo Project. To me It doesn't seem to have much implication on our own origins / religions and species though, which I don't think conventional science really knows much about, even with everything we know about genomes. What we learned still raises even more questions about the possibilities of lost civilisations and ancient technologies.

I would hope we might have an open mind to the possibilities there, when we are looking for extraterrestrial connections, and are not getting distracted by looking only for maybe the special case of extraterrestrial AI.

Also, as a systems Engineer, I would be interested to know what will be the criteria used to validate / verify "proof" of actual interaction. I suspect what might come out of the study could be highly arguable, some choosing to believe, others not. After all, if an AI was intelligent enough to be enacting the zoo hypothesis, wouldn't it also be intelligent enough to know exactly what we are up to, and deliberately avoid interacting?

Imagine instead of us as adults planning and conducting experiments to see babies and dogs interacting, this would be more like us as the babies and dogs, trying to plan an experiment to see adult humans interacting, it seems to me.

Cosmic amusement might be the reaction to look for.

Happy birthday btw :)