Good point, I guess it would be back to considering the permanence of The Cave allegory. I still have that gut feeling that humanity has a sort of in-built desire for freedom and self-determination which exists somewhere beyond the conceptual, something innate. Maybe its materialisation just takes a long enough timeline and that the species is offered relative stability in terms of genetics/psychological development (i.e. they don't just outright lobotomise us and turn us into Servitors, or smth...)
They'd need to come back and plant something else, because the side-effect of shortening attention spans has also increased the frequency at which we require new flavours of brainrot. I think this method of doing things is somewhat ineffectual.
Honestly, if I were to guess how someone would stunt us, is to "help" us improve our industry before we even grasp its implications. It essentially created Baron-Gods (and we sure do like triangles and shit!) while ensuring that we'll choke ourselves out.
Surely, if something/someone intentionally caused our existence, they must be pulling out clumps of hair at this point (or equivalent gestures).
Although... well, this is purely speculative and quite a bit philosophical, but I guess it all comes down to how they'd manage fear and greed. I initially wanted to say that viciousness seems to be a facile trait for sentience, but I only have us as a sample, so...
I genuinely don't even know what to think anymore. My sense of scale and value has been completely shattered by our contemporary debasement with Fascism and burning the planet and everything in between and around, not in a million years could I have believed humanity in general could be so stupid as to do the same horrid shit all over again, and especially not after our forerunners' fervency in purging the very concept of Fascism. Hell, maybe it was just Marketing...
I mean, how can anyone consider a governing system so unabashedly inimical to life as a feasible way of doing things?! I... I just don't understand it. I don't know if I'm too stupid, or too naïve, or cloistered, or whatever the fuck else, but I just cannot process the idea of anything which looks like me behaving in such a horrid manner. I can grasp that capacity for violence, because I have it, too, but to use it in such a manner? No. That's where my system hangs.
Honestly, I don't think anyone in their right mind would risk it! We're certifiably insane when in large masses, we'd ruin their civilisation if they'd get us all.
We'd deffo see Bezos/Musk/Zuck/etc. becoming the Breens of our timeline, and we already hate'em!
Edit: plus, why bother? It's enough to cause a Pandemic, we're aces at making things worse by ourselves! Planet cleans itself up, move in, adapt existing infrastructure, no risk of random nukes... sounds like a good deal to me!
I fucking hate this timeline... I always fall for ridiculous memes about Conservatives, because, like, Conservatives almost literally cannot be outdone in the sheer quality of stupidity they're putting out.
This is without a doubt something I would downright expect from Prager U, in all seriousness.
These are noteworthy and relevant breakthroughs, yes, but I don't see us doing anything dramatic with this technology in less than a decade, maybe two. And that's just for something like regrowing teeth, way longer timeline for anything fancier. We're still just basically optimising old tech right now. New battery designs incoming, solar panel tech is getting better (slowly), we are moving, yes. But it's like watching people paint the living room at this point, and I assume long-distance space travel still isn't "cheap" for them, even with their fancy manoeuvering.
If I were The Aliens, I would've stopped coming here somewhere around 2013-2014. And I don't say this with any kind of undertone, I just feel we haven't developed in significant ways over the past decade. They most certainly haven't presented any social interest, so it's a study. They'd only need vertical slices every half century to a century or so.
Yeah, I saw it once I squinted. I'm gambling a lot on low-res pattern recognition in terms of visual acuity nowadays... Whatever, antelopes are basically just bougie deer, idec...
"Bllgh! Bllgh-glllgh-glllgh, gllgh-bl-blllglllh" ("Dude! Let me in, I'm a fairy" as heard underwater)