California Takes Drastic Step Towards Reducing Emissions

That all assumes that next large asteroid strike doesn’t happen during the impending neo-neolithic.

I’ve always wondered about Enrico Fermi’s comment that if there were space aliens, they’d have been here by now.

I’ve now figured it out. No matter what planet, any sentient species will have arisen by evolutionary process. They will be cultural obligates. In an environment of predators and con-specific competitors, their survival will have required tribalism.

Tribalism, as a survival trait, and genetics co-evolved to produce species that has an innately collectivist psyche (most human cultures still exhibit that trait). But any genetically determined psychology has its 3-sigma wings. In this case, ideological tyrants on one wing, and free-thinkers on the other.

When the culture reaches some state of material advancement, the free-thinkers emerge as the first true scholars, scientists, and engineers. Their culture necessarily splits away from the collectivist base.

This is a cultural speciation event. People with individualistic psyches emerge and form a new society of negotiated ethics (i.e., free-thinking) rather than one of collective morality (i.e., ideological).

And there we have it. All our material progress has come from individualistic culture. One that allows the independent thinking abhorred by collectivists.

The battle is between two cultural species occupying one landscape: one collectivist and one individualist. The latter tolerates the former, but the former cannot permit the latter. Where individuals thrive, collectivism fails.

I suspect the collectivist-individualist conflict occurs wherever a sentient species arises and develops as culturally obligate. If collectivists win out, the physical species goes culturally moribund (collectivist bliss), the bolide finally arrives, and they go extinct.

So far, as no space aliens have appeared, any such scenario has played out as a collectivist win.

Here on Earth, individualist culture first appeared as an obvious historical phenomenon during the Greek Enlightenment. Call it our cultural speciation event. Individual thinkers abounded. But they were eventually obliterated in the collectivist counter-attack which operated within the ideological and collectivist construct of Christianity.

In our time, individualist culture arose again during the 16th and 17th centuries, producing the Enlightenment in the 18th. Our second observable cultural speciation event.

The Romantic reaction is the collectivist counter-attack. Every ideology serves as its vehicle. Communism is the obvious example. Modern progressives have allied themselves with every single socialist mass-murderer. Whatever the delusional excuse, the result is invariably the obliteration of free-thinking.

One can only see the destruction of free-thought as the intended outcome, even if the intent is a visceral drive rather than conscious.

So, the on-going culture war is the answer to the space alien mystery. The same battle between cultural species is inevitable. If the collectivists win, human culture goes moribund, and the inevitable bolide will finish the job.

It doesn’t matter if human civilization arises again. The identical conflict will emerge.

So the culture war is an existential battle. If the next big bolide arrives with an extinction event, then the collectivists will have won (again). Humans will be just one more space alien species to have not made the free-thinking grade.

If the bolide is a happy catch of raw materials, then individualists will have won, humans have an optimistic future, and ad astra will be their outlook.