[ExI] When the Universe Seeds Life but Civilizations Stay Silent

[Ben Zaiboc]

Even so, I feel that, just as with Pascal's wager and the Simulation Argument, it just makes sense that we assume there are no gods, we are not in a simulation and we are the only intelligent and self-aware life in the entire universe. Anything else is making a hugely risky gamble. I don't think that's a gamble I want to make, do you?

I do appreciate that for some people, this seems a very bleak outlook, but in my opinion at least, we need to start taking responsibility for ourselves instead of handing it off to some imagined deity/hyper-real sysadmin/galactic civilisation. Maybe such things do exist, but how likely is that?

How many of us really believe that we are all we have? That we have to take responsibility for ourselves?

If we can't do this, perhaps we deserve to fail.

If our collective will is all that lies between the kind of future we all (presumably) hope for, and a totally lifeless and dumb cosmos, what are you doing to do? What can we do?

Answers on a postcard, please.

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Ben