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One of Carl Sagan's ideas about why we haven't found intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is any life form that evolves intelligence will then promptly destroy themselves when they discover technology. As I've watched the world for a large number of years what I see happening is exactly that and it's not just climate change it's a lot of other things we do as well.
As far as climate change goes we are already to late, it's going to be a disaster no matter what we do. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to fix it, but realistically those who live in the future are going to have a far lower standard of living than what we currently enjoy. Life is going to start to suck pretty bad in the future and I'm lucky because I won't be around to see it.
Debra AI Prediction
Arguments
That said, technological evolution may very well wipe out all species undertaking it at some stage. A theory that I like is that every civilization creates a complicated AI before expanding beyond the home star system. That AI quickly, through the reasoning incomprehensible to limited organic beings, but very obvious to any being with enough mental capacity, decides that life is a menace, wipes out all life on the planet and consequentially self-destructs.
Intuitively though, I believe civilizations must be able to persist. The problem is, the space is very vast. According to our knowledge of physics, no matter the level of technology, interstellar travel is extremely limited by a large array of factors, including (but not limited to) the light speed constraint, the cosmic radiation, the cosmic friction, the rogue objects (such as small asteroids)... Colonization of space could be extremely cost-inefficient and just plain dangerous, causing most species to almost never venture beyond their home star system.
Imagine if the closest advanced civilization to us is, say, 10 light years away. This does not sound like much, but the amount of things that can go wrong in trying to travel that distance is enormous. It is very likely that the aliens simply never reached us. They might not even be interested in us; for one, they probably cannot even detect us from such a distance. They might have sent some explorer drones, and after they saw how undeveloped we were, they lost all interest and never bothered interacting with us, just like we don't bother interacting with a random pigeon on the street.
Even if that civilization is millions years old, it is possible that there is some natural technological limit beyond which nothing significant can be developed, and that limit very well may lay below the level required to travel between stars.
Finally, we may just be an aberration. Perhaps the emergence of life on a given planet is extremely unlucky, and there is no more than a handful of planets with life on them in our entire galactic cluster, for example. In this case, even if there are civilizations billions years old out there, and even if they have the technology required for intergalactic travel - they would simply not have had enough time to find us.
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Bottom line is: we know so little about life and about the Universe as a whole, that speculating on why we haven't met any aliens yet only makes sense in the realm of science fiction.
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If you had any intention of investing in beach front estate, you should reconsider...
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  Entity Sentiment Detection: Food sources    cost of extreme weather pattern   mass migration   rough time  
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I also agree that one of the biggest problems with the current cycle of climate change is the "gaping chasm between the actual consensus and the public perception." As soon as more people of the public (as well as those of some policymakers) begin to accept the consensus the better to be we will be able to do our best to at least not make things worse. The damage, however, is already done.
A few centuries down the line space travel could be a viable solution to try and save living species of this Earth albeit this is quite a long way down the line to speculate. But like I said, for now, we can just play our part in not making things any worse than they already are.
The unexamined thought is not worth thinking.
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Strange, a few years ago the party of "family values" seemed to care SO much about family. Now, their leaders hardly seem to care about immediate, single generation members, …. forget those with a "Grand" suffix (on EITHER side of them).
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The unexamined thought is not worth thinking.
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There are a couple key points that make this basic principle untrue. It is far more practical with such glim predictions made on climate manipulation not to just house people in storm shelters and start colonizing space. The biggest nuclear deterrent is the migration to outer space even if such projects as Star Wars are abandoned.
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