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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

None of them.

Humans have always believed that we are headed for imminent total disaster. In my youth it was WW3 and the impending nuclear armageddon that was inevitable. Or not, as it turned out. I hear the same language being used now about a whole bunch of other things. Including, of course, the evangelist Rapture that is going to happen any day now, but never does.

You can see the same thing at work in discussions about AI - there's passion in the voices of people predicting that AI will destroy humanity. Something in our makeup revels in the thought that we'll be the last generation of humans, that the future is gone and everything will come to a crashing stop.

This is human psychology at work.

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If you look at timescales large enough you will find that plenty of extinction level events actually do happen (the anthropocene is right here).

We are living in a historically excepcional time of geological, environmental, ecological stability. I think that saying that nothing ever happens is like standing downrange to a stream of projectiles and counting all the near misses as evidence for your future safety. It's a bold call to inaction.

Obviously this is all true. There was an event in the 5th century that meant we had no summer and all crops failed for 5 years, we all almost starved then. And that was only the most recent of these types of events.

It's not that it can't happen. It obviously can. I'm more talking about the human belief that it will happen, and in our lifetime. It probably won't.

"nothing ever happens."

The observation is, humans tend to think that annihilation is inevitable, it hasn't happened yet so therefore it will never be inevitable.

In fact, _anything_ could happen. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

If you need cognitive behavioral therapy, fine.

But to casually cite nuclear holocaust as something people irrationally believed in as a possibility is dishonest. That was (and still is) a real possible outcome.

Whats somewhat funny here is is if youre wrong, it doesnt matter. But that isnt the same as being right.

> Something in our makeup revels in the thought that we'll be the last generation of humans, that the future is gone and everything will come to a crashing stop

And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right.

> And yet there _will_ (eventually) be one generation that is right.

Most likely outcome would be that humans evolve into something altogether different rather than go extinct.

The Fermi Paradox might want to have a word here...

Particularly considering the law of large numbers in play where incalculable large chances have so far shown only one sign of technologically-capable life —— ours, and zero signs of any other example of a tech species evolving into something else or even passing the Great Filter.

The Fermi Paradox overestimates the likelihood of intelligent life outside of earth. We haven't even found hard evidence of life anywhere outside of our planet. There's not even a verifiably hospitable planet for water-based lifeforms anywhere within dozens of lightyears from earth. Even if a hospitable planet exists within a range we can one day get to, unless it has the same volcanic properties and makeup as earth, it's most probable that life itself never even developed there.

Even where life may have developed, it's incredibly unlikely that sentient intelligence developed. There was never any guarantee that sentience would develop on Earth and about a million unlikely events had to converge in order for that to occur. It's not a natural consequence of evolution, it's an accident of Earth's unique history and several near-extinction level events and drastic climate changes had to occur to make it possible.

The "law of large numbers" is nothing when the odds of sentient intelligence developing are so close to zero. If such a thing occurred or occurs in the future at some location other than Earth, it's reasonably likely that it's outside of our own galaxy or so far from us that we will never meet them. The speed of light is a hell of a thing.

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