this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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Imagine humanity in 1000 years. We would be among the stars.
Now imagine humanity in 10000 years, 100000 years or even 1000000 years.
A million years is still a fraction in the cosmic timescale.
It would be nearly impossible to have other civilizations be on exactly the same technological level as us. They would indeed be either much less advanced, or much more advanced.
With all the crazy ass things that can kill us off, I don't think we're alone in the universe, but we may very well be alone in time.
The Fermi Paradox might just the the likelyhood to get wiped out from motions to everything and we're too far away to get contact in this gnat's ass of a conscious timeline we're in.
This is mostly uneducated postulation, but I think as we become more technologically advanced, technological advancements (and the knowledge of mechanics necessary to allow for them) become fewer and more far between as advancements occur.
I feel like the industrial revolution was a perfect storm of many advancements all happening in the same blip, and it allowed us to go from Wright to the moon in one lifespan, but 100 years later, we're still not far from that point, technologically.
I mean, look at radiological half life - that's the point at which there's a 50% chance that any one atom will decay, but when that atom decays seems to be mere chance more than anything. It's perplexing and maddening. But the more we stare at that, the more sure we are in the belief that the void, nothingness, is actually rife with energy just flitting in and out of perceivable existence, affecting observable particles, but we just can't see this vacuum energy. Almost like quantum mechanics is used as a workaround to try to make sense of those unseen forces (and when we can observe them, it'd likely be able to be described in a more classical sense).
Maybe the industrial revolution gave us some hopium lol, but we've been butting our heads into a wall for a century pining for a magical microscope. Maybe in 500 years it'll all look mostly the same, who knows
The last 75 years of nothing is because of Neoliberalism. It is not conventially profitable to spend government funds on scientific exploration. Government funds are used to counter tax breaks to the wealthy and corporations. Along with just stealing the money through various means.
I agree with you for the most part. We've seen companies with dominance just sit on innovation and basically slow play it when competition keeps up, or go straight to lawfare or popularity contests (Intel cough cough). Kinda sucks we place more importance on the resources used to arrive at innovation than the practicality of those innovations. But where we're at now, it's like peeling an onion and what everyone wants to find is 3 layers down, so it's not like we can build more LHCs to smash particles, because the things we need to find are a couple skips past that point. We eventually find it, what next?