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It means: between that extreme and say a middling collapse scenario, a range covering ~50% of outcomes, though the living Earth doesn’t end, the “world” as a shared human sense of place does. This would be a psyche trauma we may have in our future. One you could call soul-death.
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Humans are the only species that seems to operate by an incoherent but poetic sense of inclusive fitness that includes all life. Call it the Gaia instinct. It is a weird instinct that makes us identify with all life, and extend our identity onto it via anthropomorphic projection.
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When we look up at the stars a key thing we see reflected back is our sense of being part of the only known example of “life”. This is why we obsess over aliens and the Fermi paradox. Even false alarms of bacteria-level life get us excited. Oumuamua got us properly worked up.
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That’s the Gaia instinct. The capacity to feel lonely when looking up at the stars. It’s a fairly new feeling. It requires a mix of: big telescopes, globalization, discovery of DNA as shared, non-divine basis for life, and a pale-blue-dot/one-earth outside-in view of ourselves.
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I bet if we could know for certain there was no life out there, and no hope of interstellar travel, we’d lose 90% of our interest in space/astronomy. I’d still be personally interested, because I like stars, black holes and the idea of empty planets. But most would stop caring.
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The cosmos is something like a figurative mirror in a cosmic mirror test. You pass the regular mirror test if you can recognize yourself in a mirror (as other apes, and even crows do). You pass the cosmic mirror test if you feel lonely/yearning when you look up at the sky.
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Not all humans pass the cosmic mirror test or possess the Gaia instinct. Hardcore libertarians certainly don’t. Many traditionally religious types don’t. I suspect many “rationalists” who fetishize “optimization” don’t. That’s okay. You’re all just a bit less evolved than me 😇
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