This stood out to me:
The poll comes also as Republicans hold a slight partisan edge over Democrats, which shows that 45% of Americans are Republican or lean-Republican, while 42% are Democrat or lean-Democratic, per Gallup.
That’s a change from previous years, including in 2022, when an equal number of Americans said they consider themself a Republican or a Democrat.
Democrats held a partisan edge over Republicans in 2020, 2018 and 2016, per the average of Gallup party affiliation polls from those years.
Seems like the Information Age is Fermi’s Great Filter. Goodbye cruel world.
What a crazy irony. Here we were thinking we had to survive the nuclear age and get to the point where we were all connected and well-informed. But it turns out the nukes led to an unprecedented period of peace and global information access and communication may destroy us all.
that seems rather unlikely, even if it should prove something humans are fatally unsuited to (which Im not really convinced of yet, because a lot of the problems of the information age are not really new, there is plenty of precedent for leaders that make foolish decisions to nevertheless inspire large followings and use that to break political norms in the system they exist in for example, or for harmful rumors and movements to spread false medical advice or hate towards particular groups of people, before the information age). In order for something to be the great filter, it implies that that thing has to be the death of (or at least permanently halt the advancement of) close to every species that reaches it. In other words, it isnt enough for humans to struggle with it, it has to be something for which a species evolving that can survive it is essentially inconceivable. Given how different the psychology among even different animals on earth can appear to be, and that the problems caused by the information age will be greatly impacted by the psychological quirks of the civilization experiencing it, that strikes me as unlikely. It also has to actually drive the species that reaches it to extinction, or at least completely stop their advancement. Given that new technology continues to be developed, some of it surprisingly quickly and a lot of it helped by the fruits of the information age, the latter seems unlikely, so for it to be the great filter, it would need to actually cause extinction basically 100% of the time, and even for humans, Im not sure how it would do that (while enabling things like climate change denial and anti-vaccine movements to spread causes us problems, that probably isnt enough per se, even a disaster that made three quarters of the planet literally deadly to exist in and a plague that wiped out half the population would be insufficient to make something a great filter, for example, if that species survives in what marginally livable area remains to rebuild their numbers and continue to advance their civilization. It has to kill everyone with no chance for any group to find any means to survive it)
Yeah, sorry, I tend to have a habit of putting lots of text behind parenthesis, and using run on sentences. I’m not terribly great at writing and when I try to condense things down I always feel like the results make less sense to me or are missing small bits of what I meant to say.
