[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?

[Qem]

Loss of keystone species[1]. Say, if bees went extinct, our agriculture would come crashing. We still rely on other organisms for a lot of important, sometimes poorly understood until too late[2] functions that sustain our civilization.

[1]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species [2]. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/BFI_WP_2...

[pfdietz]

If bees went extinct, it would affect none of the essential crops we grow. Grains are wind pollinated, not insect pollinated.

More generally, I'm sure extinctions would wreak havoc on wild ecosystems. But we grow food by explicitly destroying wild ecosystems, replacing them with monocultures. Crops seem to grow just fine anyway.

[CatWChainsaw]

I think it's a bit telling/alarming that you seem to be "okay" with monocultures and mass extinctions because we don't seem to be affected (at the moment).

[pfdietz]

This discussion is about the claim it causes civilization to collapse, not whether I'm okay with it. But hey, thanks for steering this in an ad hominem direction.

[bamboozled]

Let's try not to find out?

[palata]

Don't worry, the energy and climate problems can each independently cause civilization to collapse in the next few decades ;-).

But if you don't understand how we need biodiversity to survive, I guess try to eat ChatGPT or Starship.

[pfdietz]

Ah, I didn't think you had a justification for the claim. Empty hot air.