[But]

Hmm, I'm all like, this kind of angle is interesting and everything, but I don't perceive in my refactoring singular way anything more than the usual superficial twaddle by people who like to hear themselves think. Yeah, smoke a doobie and think some deep thoughts geniuses (this is not directed at you ES).

The problem is they are all extrapolating wildly (what else can you do?) and I would bet that they end up completely missing the point again, as you would expect. It's like the question, why haven't any aliens visited us yet? Hmm, maybe there comes a point where civilizations destroy themselves because the gap between how easy it is to build stuff and destroy stuff inevitably gets bigger and bigger. Or maybe there comes a different point where every sufficiently advanced civilization realizes that (for some reason unknown to us now, extra dimensions? multiverse?) traveling to other planets is the stupidest, most pointless thing you could imagine, like banging your head against the wall to see the stars.

Or what is most likely, you don't know what's going to happen because you don't know what's going to make the stuff that's going to happen happen, but it's probably all going to get even more more, like faster and bigger and more extreme. Or maybe not.

It's like when in the past they imagined the future to be full of airplanes, but they would all be biplanes. And they missed the most important things.