>>33923996I'm the anon who started the conversation and I don't want to bring it up again but a few things.
1. You overestimate the time we have left with our sun:
https://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a10474.html2. You overestimate the actual capability for exponential growth. Exponential growth is treated almost like a principle that defines it's own limits and people throw it at a problem as if it's a solution without factoring in the limitations of the growth process (e.g. how many times can a two step adaptation occur in a 5 million year period), or the actual factor that creates exponential growth (a quadratic curve is higher than a linear curve but it doesn't come from nothing as if it shoe strings itself into existence.)
In the case of technology you're correct, the gap in our development is almost the amount of time it took for humanity to genetically modify their food into something like a crop so that small settlements could be supported by farming, but there is no mechanism that natural selection has that can accelerate the process in the same way beyond eugenics, selective breeding, or outright gene editing.
3. LUCA, the earliest microbe on earth probably came to be around 4.5 billion years ago shortly after the oceans formed, I know this is an estimate on the longer side but I've actually never heard someone who doesnt go as high as 3.5 billion for the age of life.
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-timescale-evolution-life-earth.htmlI feel much better now, started reading through Helmut Thielicke and his book on nihilism. Pulled the edge off. 