It’s worse than that. 99.9% of all species that ever existed have gone extinct. Human extinction is a near-certainty, unless we can colonize other planets. Right now we can’t even respond to a pandemic or climate change, so even putting the huge technological problems aside we can’t seem to organize as a species to deal with actual problems we already have.

Individual lifespans are too short for human beings to plan and implement large-scale projects that no one working on them will live to see finished. Hard to get motivated about a distant future that doesn’t include us, even worse when fewer people have children to think about.