[cyberlurker]

Kurzgesagt has many videos on this topic. In one video, they point out we may actually be in the right place at the right time and could be one of the first civilizations. This seems egocentric at first, but if you consider how chaotic the early universe has been and how relatively calm things are in the last billion years, it does make sense.

Also, I learned recently that we don’t have as much time with Earth as I originally thought. We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable. I imagine most civilizations get snuffed out like this.

[pfdietz]

The past survival of livable conditions on Earth is no guarantee they will persist for very long in the future. There's observer selection bias to consider. For example, the O2 level in the atmosphere could drop below that needed to sustain higher life. As I understand it, there's been no feedback mechanism identified that stabilizes O2 at current levels, so the persistence of adequate oxygen over the last 500 million years could just be an unlikely accident.

In the absence of burial of photosynthesized materials atmospheric O2 will disappear in a few million years as reduced materials are exposed by geological processes and then oxidized. So, the time constant for O2 fluctuations is rather short.

If and when we spread into the galaxy, we may find many planets where livable conditions were snuffed out before intelligence could arise. In our own solar system, both Mars and Venus may have been more habitable than Earth earlier in the history of the solar system, but now are forever ruined.

[palata]

> We have a few hundred million years to figure out how to colonize other planets or live in space before Earth becomes radically different and potentially unlivable.

Hmm... at the rate we are going, big parts of the Earth (a big slice around the Equator) may well become unlivable for human beings in a couple of decades.

I get the idea that it won't mean that the Earth will be unlivable for all organisms, but from what we know, a sufficiently advanced civilization only needs a couple hundred years to destroy itself.

[richardw]

And AI is likely a binary outcome. It’s either very good for us or not, and it won’t take a million years to figure out which. We were in caves not long ago.

[bamboozled]

Very little to no evidence that AI is a “binary outcome”.

[richardw]

Very little to no evidence that continuously increasing intelligence will maintain the status quo indefinitely, on a scale of at least thousands of years. The odds of us not either populating the galaxy or utterly owning ourselves are vanishingly small. What is the middle ground that you think is likely, and what things have to happen for that to be true? Why is it more likely than one of the extremes?

It's so interesting that our intuitions are vastly different on this. You and I both just can't believe that our default case isn't obvious.

I personally think "recency bias" is to blame for the "we'll muddle through" case. Life is great and the weather is fine, and there are no asteroids or globally impacting volcanoes, and we haven't had a civilisational collapse in a good while, and nukes didn't kill us, so the current state is pretty locked in indefinitely, despite massive technological change that we have zero chance of predicting the outcomes of.

That's an unstable equilibrium at best. We take over the galaxy or die trying.

[palata]

Well we are pretty capable of predicting, right now, that our civilization is very likely to collapse in the next few decades because we can't seem to address the climate/biodiversity problems (which are consequences of the abundance of fossil fuels that will end soon).

> We take over the galaxy or die trying.

Let's first survive on Earth, shall we?

[pfdietz]

How does loss of biodiversity cause civilization to collapse in the next few decades?

[MrJohz]

The Kurzgesagt videos on these sorts of topics are interesting and entertaining, but they're often very speculative — they can rely heavily on unique but unproven theories, unprovable philosophical questions, or even just interesting sci-fi premises.

They're definitely informative and interesting within a given scope of discussion — it's good to ask interesting questions and explore what different answers might look like, because it helps us to push the boundaries of our mental models of the universe. But some of the videos — particularly the ones on Boltzmann brains or solutions to the Fermi paradox — are a lot closer to "here's an interesting thought experiment" than "here's something that's likely to be the case in our universe".

(Although they're usually very explicit when they do dive into this sort of speculative territory, and they also do a lot of videos which aren't in this vein at all — this is no slight on Kurzgesagt and the people who enjoy watching them!)

[cyberlurker]

We’re essentially talking about the Fermi paradox. I think speculation is expected and the channel is upfront about their cited research.

Your comment could apply to any one commenting on these topics and so I am confused.

[MrJohz]

Yeah, I didn't want my comment to be a criticism of Kuzgesagt - like you say, they're usually very upfront when they do their more speculative videos. But I think sometimes people see the Kuzgesagt name and are like "oh, that's the informative science videos, this must be true", whereas a lot of the Fermi paradox stuff is closer to speculative fiction in nature than some of their other videos.

[gcanyon]

Here's the Kurzgesagt video on moving the solar system through the galaxy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y8AIEX_dU

I've seen at least one "physicist reacts" video to this that tl;dw's to: "seems reasonable, would obviously require a lot of technological advancement and work"

[AtlasBarfed]

Nah, we'll be fine, the 10% increase in brightness can be easily countered with space (or orbital) shields/solar power stations.

If we don't have a very active interplanetary society in 100 million years we're almost certainly extinct.