Thanks for this, I'll definitely take a look. My concern always, as you point out, is falling into crackpottery territory. Hopefully being acutely aware of that serves as an inoculation to some degree.
I should also state, I certainly find the concept of life on other planets extremely fascinating. However as I said above its insufficient to give clarity to some of the more fundamentally existential questions around our existence.
I should also mention - there is quite a bit of discussion on 't Hooft's work on StackOverflow, including heavy participation by 't Hooft himself. I don't have any pointers handy, but they should be fairly easy to discover with a minimal amount of searching.
