I feel the briefness of history is inseparable from its speed of change. Once the agricultural revolution got started, technology kept progressing and we got where we are today quite quickly—and that’s despite several continental-scale collapses of civilization. So It’s not very surprising that we are now contemplating various X-risks: to an external observer, humanity is a very brief phenomenon going back, and so it’s likely to be brief going forward as well. Understanding this on an intuitive level helps when thinking about the Fermi paradox or the Doomsday Argument.
I feel the briefness of history is inseparable from its speed of change. Once the agricultural revolution got started, technology kept progressing and we got where we are today quite quickly—and that’s despite several continental-scale collapses of civilization. So It’s not very surprising that we are now contemplating various X-risks: to an external observer, humanity is a very brief phenomenon going back, and so it’s likely to be brief going forward as well. Understanding this on an intuitive level helps when thinking about the Fermi paradox or the Doomsday Argument.