The moments that could have accidentally ended humanity

You're looking for balance of "saving the world" (i.e. our responsibility with civilization and all lifeforms) and "enjoy your life". Clearly if everyone is concerned exclusively with enjoying their lives (i.e. hyper-hedonism), society collapses; that's deeply irresponsible. If everyone is also hyper-focused on self-propagation of our species with zero regard to our actual experience as conscious beings with rich inner lives, then clearly there's the risk of indeed making our inner lives much worse than they could be.

A system I've seen recommended here to think about it is (I've seen it related to Ikigai, a Japanese concept): you need to find a balance between your needs and experience, your skills and potential, and what's good for society at large (in a soft max-min).

I think overall, however, if we give it a little thought it's easy to find something aligned with our interests and potential that can really make a good impact. If you're interested I recommend the Effective Altruism community for a take on this (they're largely focused on more tangible things like Earning to Give) and 80000 hours. In all likelihood, just by being a functional member of our society (and giving what you can), if you don't work for some obviously evil enterprise (idk, making hyper-addictive things, oil field discovery, or something like that), you're probably helping society.

I encourage a different path as well: if you can program (or develop technology) and you're entrepreneurial (many people around here?) you can most likely make something that will make a good impact on society and even civilization at large. Furthering education with online tools, making educational games (or otherwise that promote growth and reflection), making tools more accessible, ... , improving the robustness and reliability of our systems, ..., the list goes on -- why not fulfill your potential to the best you can? Invent the future, Hack the planet.

> A nihilist is a man who judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing, feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos – at the same time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.

Where is Nietzsche's nihilism in what you describe? How is your peer's worldview nihilistic when they place a high value on the effect of your potential actions on the world?

Surely for a nihilist, "to have made an impact" is a non-goal.

That does not mean I don’t sometimes feel the guilt of not being apart of something that drives humanity forward, though, even if all I could contribute was working the website that raises awareness instead! I just know what I’m capable of, but the reality vs the ideal is the philosophical struggle here for me.

I instead try to make conscious investments to try and move things forward and make personal choices consciously to issues like this as best as I reasonably can.

I still feel guilty sometimes I’m not working on something like raising the perception of the safety of nuclear energy ya know

Who says you can't enjoy work in a different field, e.g. medicine? Perhaps you can even combine those skills with computer programming. E.g. build an exoskeleton that makes partially paralyzed people walk again.

In what capacity I don’t know. I’m pretty convinced we are overlooking geothermal energy in the USA at least. I often wonder if we could both relieve potentially dangerous pressure bellowing Yellowstone while simultaneously harnessing its geothermal energy for example

But alas, I think the reality is I lack the expertise to even talk about this with any authority

I wonder if anyone's ever calculated the optimal parameters for a disease to end humanity

In essence, the idea of us being among the first in our galaxy is compatible with the notion that intelligent life forming is so scarce that there's only ever going to be just a couple civilizations in our galaxy or that we're alone; because if life is so common that our galaxy would have (for example) a hundred intelligent civilization spawning events, then the expectation is that half of them would have been before us, and it would be a really, really unlikely that all of them are on Earth-like planets younger than us and none of them are on the multitude of Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like planets older than us.

Also, given all the time-consuming steps required for life to form, "around the same time" would optimistically mean something on the scale of +/- a million years. Like, if the protozoic era took 0.1% more or less, that would be a difference of two million years; so if some civilization was much older or much younger, then the difference would be much more than that, and if we encounter a planet that's +/- hundred thousand years of progress, that mean that we really progressed at a remarkably coincidentally equal starting point and pace; and if we encounter a civilization that's just a thousand years of technological development ahead or behind, then that would be a so unbelievable coincidence that I'd consider that some kind of intelligent designer is required to explain it.

The concept of simultaneous discovery happens because the discoverers share an environment where the prerequisites for that discovery appear at the same time; this would not be plausible for civilizations forming naturally through evolution without any contact or influence between them, that would work only if they're e.g. intentionally designed and "planted" on planets by some previous civilization.

Well maybe could say "one of":

We recall that the big bang was ~14 billion years ago.

Our solar system was made ~5 billion years ago (very rough arithmetic) out of the results of an exploded star. The star may have exploded ~7 billion years ago. In that case it may have been a first generation, hydrogen star and took ~6 billion years to form, make heavy elements, and explode (and make more heavy elements).

So, that makes our star a second generation star and our solar system, from an exploded first generation star, one of the first.

If all that is true, then, okay, "we are just among the first of civilizations ever".

Space is very good at that. Easy to end up in places that are not practical to reach. Over time things change.

Like, if there's a scale of catastrophic events that goes from 0 to 10 where 0 is no big deal and 10 is human extinction, then the worst events humanity has ever seen are somewhere below 1 on that scale and absolutely horrific mass death is something like 2/10 - because the gap between the damage required for that and damage required for extinction is so much larger than the gap between no big deal and worse mass death than we have ever seen. Arguably the worst damage that life on Earth has seen is the dinosaur-ending asteroid, and IMHO a fraction homo sapiens (though perhaps not our civilization) could survive even that. A full scale USSR-USA exchange in 1960s might perhaps kill most people in the northern hemisphere and perhaps cause a nuclear winter decreasing crop yields with an associated famine - but if just a fraction of people in South Asia and Africa and South America survive the famine while the North nukes themselves to radioactive glasslands, that's very, very far from extinction.

Killing half of humanity would literally be an unprecedented level of horror, but it would not end our civilization; killing 90% of humanity would likely end our civilization-as-we-know it but would not end our species, that would bring us to the population level that Earth had in 1700s; and killing 99.99% of humanity would definitely destroy our civilization but it would "just" push back our population growth to the numbers we had ~70 000 years ago - horrific for every individual, but still not an extinction event.