Homo sapiens is about 300,000 years old, give or take 50,000. Here are the available options.
- Despite the incredibly long odds against this happy coincidence, the period of your lifespan – which will likely be around 75 years, and thus cover about .025% of the human story to date – does in fact happen to overlap with the most important era in human history, the age of kings, the great conjunction, the time of heroes. Congratulations.
- You do not, in fact, live in the most important era of human history. You have not been lucky enough to occupy some sort of liminal period for our species. But you have a consciousness system that compels you to think of yourself as uniquely special and thus begs you to believe that you live in special times. The idea that you are somehow not important, the notion that the universe had no special responsibility to produce you, is in a very deep sense unthinkable to you. Now a new technology has emerged, and those who stand to make billions off of it are telling you: you will never be lonely again; the meaning you’ve always pined for will be provided for you by superintelligent beings; you will not die, but have eternal life. Or, alternatively, you are soon to witness the end of the world, which will free you from everything you don’t like about your life and yourself. Either way – people are telling you that something very, very important is happening, and right now is important, and you live now, so you’reimportant, and you want to believe, have to believe, are desperate to believe. And so you do believe, even though it isn’t true.
So. Do absolutely everything you can to extricate yourself, momentarily, from what the maladaptive evolutionary byproduct we call consciousness is screaming in your ear, and ask yourself: which of these two stories is more likely?