All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

We seem to be among the earliest living beings in the galaxy.

Audio also available by searching Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio" Summary: In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more. This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, th

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• Blake Elias
• Ratan Kaliani
• Amy Li
• Lydia Nottingham

related reading

• The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com
• The "most important century" blog post seriescold-takes.com
• My techno-optimismvitalik.eth.limo
• The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altmanblog.samaltman.com
• The Coming Technological Singularityedoras.sdsu.edu
• Fermi paradox - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Developmentnickbostrom.com
• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com
• Preparing for the Intelligence Explosionforethought.org
• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2 - Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com
• The Most Important Century (in a nutshell)cold-takes.com
• Sentient Developments: Nick Bostrom: "Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing."sentientdevelopments.com