There's no paradox. Technological civilizations destroy themselves relatively quickly. That's becoming painfully obvious.
On the whole, intelligence in nature is largely focused on predicting another animal's actions, and planning to take advantage of that foresight. The benefit of being better at that than your peers is immediately obvious in a hunter: predict, hunt, kill, eat. For things that aren't doing the hunting, more passive solutions can be optimal: evolving faster escapes, or natural defenses such as being very large take less energy, and can be developed much faster, when compared to the rather energy intensive process of maintaining a large brain and raising intelligent young.
We have the military capability to wipe ourselves out at any moment. The use of nuclear weapons has been discussed a lot lately, even nuclear first strike.
And when some natural threat arises — take the pandemic for example — we turn on each other and bicker. "Don't Look Up" seems quite plausible.
I don't really see how.
> human civilization is stronger than ever
I don't really see how.
> on the verge of expanding beyond the home planet
I don't really see how.
You didn't even understand my comment. I meant it's painfully obvious to me. It should have been obvious that I didn't mean it was obvious to everyone, but obviously some people can't see the obvious.
I could write a long essay on why we're not on the verge of expanding beyond our home planet, but I feel that it would be a big waste of time. I'm not going to change your mind, you're not going to change my mind, and that's one reason why humanity is ultimately doomed.
The reason that essay would be long is because you'd have to explain away so much progress from multiple independently operating space industries.
We have a handful of humans living temporarily in Earth orbit. We have precisely zero humans living permanently off planet. That's not much progress toward a self-sustaining space colony millions of miles away in an extremely hostile environment.
We don't even know whether the human body can survive long term in the much lower gravity of Mars. Life on Earth didn't evolve for that. The whole idea could be doomed from the start.
Launching rockets is the "easy" part. That's not progress. The hard part is living in space.
Not to mention, even if we could live in space, we're going to bring our own nasty instincts along with us to any other planet. The instincts that are causing us to destroy our ecosystem here and fight amongst each other. If we can't live on Earth with peace, harmony, and sustainability, in an environment that was practically made for us, then what makes you think we can live in another environment that's totally hostile to all life? We'd be sending a clown car to Mars.
In general, we have too many people filled with visions they've got from science fiction, and not enough of a dose of science fact. Perhaps the most realistic bit from science fiction is the part of "Contact" where they're debating whether to send a Christian or an Atheist on the mission. Then extremists blew it up anyway. That's our human reality.
We need a real godly or technological wonder (a real wonder, not something like fusion what is on the horizon), or maybe just humanity coming to reason and agreeing and uniting and doing the right thing (ok yes, now I am getting really ridiculous, the least likely to happen) to avoid that filter.
With a bit of luck humanity may endure though.. in the hundred thousands on medieval level with some more luck..