But why even make the puzzle to begin with?
And it doesn’t really explain why everyone looks humanoid because their life seeding started at a much earlier stage and just apparently hoped evolution would do the rest of the work. You can’t start with an amoeba and expect it to evolve into something that looks like a human but may or may not have ridges or spots on their head. That’s ludicrous.
I would think the puzzle is a sort of trial to ensure that their seeded race(s) were sufficiently developed to gain something from that message, insight into their origins and/or more philosophical questions that we as humans are still striving to answer.
As for the humanoid forms everywhere, yeah you absolutely need to suspend your disbelief a bit for that. Still I think it’s the only in universe explanation for it no?
Sure, but as the episode itself showed, that didn’t happen on at least one planet that had a puzzle piece, so it was a very weird gamble to make.
I think The Inner Light has problems too, but that attempt at the idea of keeping the memory of a race of people that went extinct alive worked so much better.
