1. Presumably, if post singularity species want to be found, they will, and if they don't, they won't.

2. We can't talk scientifically about such entities, as if they exist, they can pretty much manipulate the scientists into concluding whatever they want. Science studys the natural order - a species whose technology is equivalent to magic will be functionally just as 'supernatural' as though they were genuinely so.

3. If a post singularity alien society doesn't want us to detect them, they may well also not want us to detect other pre-singularity aliens, so in that case, that window for easy detection becomes 0 years wide. Given post singularitans who don't want to openly reveal themselves, the possibiltiy they want to censor pre-singularity civilizations is proportionately higher than that they want to let the little fish communicate unhindered and hide just themselves, and both alternatives are higher than the chance they want to facilitate pre-singularity civilizations meeting even while they hide.

Are you going to grab the polls by an ankle and bang them repeatedly against a concrete floor? Cause I'm totally down with that...

He's paraphrasing Pascal's wager, and Pascal was one of the first people thinking logically about probability. Pascal wanted an example of how you should treat situations where one outcome was infinitely better or worse than all the others. Even though Pascal was religious, no one is really sure if he came up with the argument to try and convert people, or just as an example of the kind of situation where infinity was part of probability calculation. Hopefully, people don't change their beliefs because of Pascal's Wager anymore, if anyone really did.

Now Kurt Godel, who was probably a better mathematician than Pascal, had three great proofs. The second is famous for showing, as just one interpretation, how Provability in a formal system is different than Truth, and people often say that proof alone revolutionised the 20th century in the same way as Einstein. Godel's third proof is a demonstration of the existence of God, using Modal Logic. It avoids the glitches in Pascal's proof. Anyone who passed a good college course in Symbolic Logic can spend about a year studying some of the detailed areas of Modal Logic, really just picking up all the notation basics and such, and then follow Godel's proof and come to their opwn conclusion. I don't recommend bothering, as once you don't need faith to know there is a God anymore, you just need yet more faith to believe that Heaven is not just a place for six or seven old guys who were very good at math, and nobody else.

The way which can be pointed to is not the true Way.

This is a logical fallacy, one heavily promoted by Carl Sagan among other atheists, but still just plain wrong. Science doesn't hold that everything must have an origin. If it did, the Steady State theory of Cosmology would have never been seriously considered and the Big Bang would have won out automattically before anyone ever actually gathered evidence. Instead of giving Penzias and Wilson a Nobel, we would have just yawned. The real issue is, for the particular way we think the universe works now, it has a first moment of creation. That doesn't mean the alternate theory wasn't scientific.
      Further, most people who believe in God specifically believe He is eternal and has no first moment of creation, so if your proof was actually logical, all you would have proved is that the kind of God most people don't believe in cannot exist. That's about like proving that people are wrong to believe in four sided triangles. Who actually does? But, hey, this is slashdot, where you can get a +5 insightful for devastating a straw man.

It's widely recognised legally that awarding a patent IS giving a monopoly on the use of an idea, BUT for a limited time, and with other requirments such as disclosure. What the European court seems to have the most trouble with is an entity getting all the benefits of a patent by invoking some other form of "Intellectual Property" that doesn't have the same limitations. That's not as good as excellent laws in each specific area of IP, but at least it's something.

It's not just a matter of "obscure related topics", as you put it, although you're quite right, obscurity will definitely matter in many cases. It's also an 'artifact of language' issue, where the various sides on an issue may use different names for the same topic. For example, it's become a widepsread tactic for the right wing to call the Democratic party the "Democrat Party" instead. Google for that phrase, and you will see an enquiry offering the user a chance to search for Democratic party instead and most of the initial links will come up with the name "corrected". Wikipedia uses a disambiguation page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_party to offer the searcher various choices for the same phrase. Note that a disambiguation page is an external way to try and fight bias (in this case, at least). It exists outside the articles, and has to be created separately where somebody thinks it's needed. So another good question is: Is the use of such disambiguation pages proof that articles aren't being corrected for initial bias internally, or just a second line of defense in the overall struggle to reduce bias?
          Interested readers might note that the disambiguation page explains in a fairly simple way that the phrase "Democrat party" is an epithet when used for the US party, but if the reader doesn't know what an epithet is and clicks that link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithet they have to read through over a dozen paragraphs to find out that there is a contemporary usage of the term and that while Shakespeare and Homer used epithets without meaning to be insulting, abusive or derogatory, the modern useage is all of these things. So much for being unbiased.

Email has a human form factor appropriate for non-audio human communication.

Email is a direct decedent of chipped-stone and clay-tablets. Humans' need a language (audio, visual ...), and society needs records and documents.

IOW: Written email (stone, clay, paper ...) will continue to evolve, until societies crumble and humans go extinct.

What is the next step in societies creating records and documents for transmission (print-share-keep mail, telegraph, email ...)? Maybe we will call it eGraph or ether-image, but the basic human purpose/need will be continued.

There conceivably could be an infinite number of "parellel" universes, but there's a real philosophical problem with that. So long as we use the real physicists definitions and not something out of Stargate SG1, those parallels will always remain undetectable. SF writers tell stories about interacting with other universes - physicists define them in ways that show they can't be interacted with to be verified.
          An untestable idea isn't part of science. If it can't be disproven, it's philosophy or religion or something instead. An infinite number of untestable ideas is even worse. Philosophers get to whip out Occam's Razor at that point. If I claim that there is not only a God, but 7 different orders of angels totaling 144,000 beings working for him, those numbers are still simpler, in the sense Occam's Razor usually means, and so are to be preferred as a hypothesis. The same goes for a Million gods with an avarage of four arms each and a bunch of hidden cyclic time periods totalling quintillions of years for them to do their work in, or any of those models with a reasonably sized bunch of gods, and maybe some giants, dwarfs, dark elves, ninja turtles piza delivery robots, a billion clones of an invisible pink unicorn who died for your sins, riding on a gigantic fiberglass replical of L. Ron Hubbard, and so on. Just about any other idea looks preferrable to an idea that postulates an infinite number of unverifiable consequents.

Letting nature control population means relying on one or more of nature's methods. These are also known as War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Human choices of control are preferrable if they beat nature's. By beat, we could be talking about "less wasteful", "kinder", or somehow "ethically fairer", and the exact conclusion will vary depending on which we emphasize. In fact, we could be trying to balance many such goals. You may be arguing from some definition of "ethically fairer", "less wasteful", "less arbitrary", or some other standard. So if you really want somebody to tell you what's faulty about your proposal, until you can explain what you are trying to accomplish better than by just letting nature take its course you don't really have any logic behind your claim to refute. Without that understanding, your proposal is an emotional argument disguised as a reasoned conclusion.
            Knocking out aging actually has relatively little effect on population growth in some ways, for example women still stop having fertile eggs at menopause even if they typically live much longer. How many of those opportunities to fertilize an egg actually get used has a direct effect on population that is really larger than any possible additional lifespan.
          (Yes, try the math. Increase the lifespan to a blisteringly worst case full 800 years, which would be about the average if we assume nobody dies of anything except violent accidents and deliberates such as being struck by a bus or shot in a war, and add some additional worst case for population assumptions such as that most of the people who kill themselves either do it early or wouldn't do it at all if they had their health. Assume ALL fatal diseases are cureable, and all people enjoy a biological age of about 25 for as long as they live, but women still stop being fertile about 45 to 50. Now instead assume current longevity prevails, but take the worldwide reproductive rate back up to about 4.2 children per generation, add that we can somehow feed all those kids for a few generations and so the rate can (temporarily, from a long enough perspective) stay that high, and now guess which group eventually gets bigger than the other way.).
          By the way, surgical sterilization is seldom reversable. The usual effect is that closing off the tubes (for either gender) triggers internal scarring and often within a couple of years an autoimmune reaction sets in which causes the eggs to become infertile or the sperm to not fully form. The odds of a pregnancy resulting from a successful reversal are as low as 20% for the most common methods of female sterilization, although there is a procedure involving simply banding the tubes with clips or rings and doing no cutting and this gives odds as high as 70%. Male sterilization reversal has slightly better odds than that, but this assumes the surgeon did the original procedure with an eye towards eventual reversal, the reversal can include more than a simple reconnection but be followed as necessary with a complete epididymal repair (with a doctor who can determine on the fly which of three different procedures should be used after he or she actually gets in there) and the auto immune reation didn't happen. We're talking about a great success rate if you have one of a few dozen extremely skilled doctors who can do that work, but those guys are a bit like heart transplant surgeons - they don't grow on trees, and they don't come cheap. If you pay a doctor public clinic wages to bulk sterilize poor people, he or she won't be a doctor with that sort of success rate on reversals. You're making something sound simple and reliable which is actually pretty much experimental rocket science, and nobody should get sterilized with the idea that it can reliably be fixed if they change their mind or circumstances..