Question I’ve wondered about off and on.
First of all, that old chestnut, the sins of the fathers. Or to bring it up to date more, do the children of monsters bear any responsibility for the actions of their parents? Or the grandchildren?
My opinion is no.
Second of all, the Fermi paradox. If life in the universe is inevitable, given the odds, where is it all? One of the solutions, little USA officially declared green men notwithstanding, is that we, humanity, are all alone in the big empty universe, the only beacon of sentience in the void.
Our road from replicator molecule floating in the soup, to the tik tok contributing conscious entities that we are is a very very low probability one, and the odds only get worse the more you research our evolutionary path.
The “alone” hypothesis is very reasonable.
Right now the earth’s population is probably more divided economically that it has been at any point in history. And while capitalism continues, and democracy continues to fall prey to finance, it will only become more so.
Throw in AI drone swarm armies up for sale to the highest bidders, finite resources and energy and cutting to the chase, and things don’t look all that great if you’re not firmly in the 1% club. Or maybe even the 0.01% club to be honest.
There’s 8 billion of us, so 0.01% is still 80 million people. Compare that with the roughly 200 million around 2000 years ago. A viable baseline to rebuild a species.
One of the few things I believe in is the importance of intelligent life in the universe, without something to notice existence, does anything exist? I don’t mind even if the source of that intelligence is human, or artificial. Just so long as something is intelligent, aware, curious.
To whit, if the worst comes to the worst in the next century, and there is a massive die off of humanity, and only the children of the very worst of us, the greediest, the most callous, survive to inherit what’s left… Or if only silicon or quantum chips are left to wonder about the stars…
Does it matter?