I threw this post against the submitted story, but this looks like a good anchor to bring it over here, slightly abridged...
Form follows function. The form of the Enterprise, if it were to follow any sort of function at all, would have been dictated by warp physics, not gravitywheels and ion engines. You could force-fit a nuclear-reactor powered ion-engine propelled spaceship into a shape like the Enterprise, I suppose. But I'm sure there would be other, much more logical shapes.
Like f'rinstance the Discovery from 2001, or the starship from Avatar.
A "one in a million" story makes it the general model for success for anyone, right?
How many immigrants are stuck in bottom-end jobs? How do the percentages compare with home-grown?
They say "twice as likely to launch a high-tech startup", but that's also against the statistic I've heard that most business startups fail within 5 years. Maybe they really are successful at these startups, buy maybe their success rate is only half or less of home-grown. Maybe they did the launch because they didn't know the ropes well enough to see the failure looming. Sometimes it works to see the failure and word around/over, sometimes it doesn't.
So THAT's where I went wrong, back on Step 2. Darn, and I thought getting married was such a good idea at the time. My wife is going to be upset, after breaking this news to her after over 30 years - and we thought we were happy, too. Darn!
Strikes me like the situation I saw when I moved to Vermont.
There was one group of people trying to plan sensibly for growth. There was another group of people who wanted NO growth, and fully engaged themselves stopping the first group. While those two groups were busy duking it out, the third group simply wanted to make money through development and didn't care about the consequences.
As a result, we were pretty much guaranteed ONLY chaotic growth.
I heard an interview with a guy doing calorie restriction, in interest of an extended life. Maybe he was overdoing it, maybe he was doing what was truly necessary to double his lifespan.
But as a result of his calorie restriction regimen, he didn't have the energy for many activities most consider normal, let alone more strenuous things many do for fun. Half a life, lived twice as long.
It's not just *mostly* unattainable, it's unwise to even try, much less to achieve.
Minor pet peeve of mine... Between anorectic fashion models and overweight "accept me as I am" reactions to the fashion models, the "sensible middle" has been lost.
Robert A Heinlen - "The Door Into Summer", the character was a grad student of the scientist who invented the time travel machine, named Leonard Vincent. Don't remember the scientist's name, don't remember the protagonist's name, just remember that the protagonist invented CAD - called it "Drafting Dan."
Actually it is, to at least some extent. Go back a few years, when Intel was making misstep after misstep, and AMD was coming on gangbusters with K8. At that point, Intel had missed the market so badly that had they been AMD they would have gone under. They weren't AMD, they were Chipzilla. AMD enjoyed a good product cycle with K8, until Intel managed to come back. But they didn't enjoy the great product cycle they should have. Their great product cycle was turned into a merely good product cycle because Chipzilla twisted a few arms and kept K8 out of key opportunities.
The other piece of reality is that Intel combines first-rate process technology with first-rate design capability. (I say "capability" because more than once they've shown themselves to be very capable of letting their eye off the ball, design-wise.)
AMDs biggest problems have always been financing and less-than-best process technology. Bulldozer is a misstep, agreed. But it's not a misstep of the degree of Netburst or IA64. Had K8 gotten the success it deserved, AMD would have been better able to properly fund their design shop. That wouldn't have helped their process problems, however.
The simple fact is that the way things are today, Intel can afford to screw up badly, and can recover. None of their competitors can.
I can't mod this up, but I can at least reply to it.
The other thing that really strikes me about the failing mortgages is that they seemed almost designed to fail, from what I heard about them on the news.
IMHO the real problem is that the people writing mortgages were given strong incentives to write mortgages, but it doesn't appear that they were given strong disincentives in the event that those mortgages failed.
Or as R.A.H once said, any system where responsibility and authority go hand in hand will work. It may not work well, be most democratic, or anything else, but it will work. When authority and responsibility are decoupled, in the long run it just won't work.
I actually think we pretty much agree, except at that third paragraph.
First and most emphatically, I don't think rape cases are a "straw man". To make such a call is to blame women for men who can't control their urges, and perhaps in the same breath absolving those men for their lack of self-control and lack of respect for women. It really bothers me that in the recent political debate over these issues, The Pill received quite a bit of blame for our sexually-charged society, but not a word was said about Viagra.
Second, I don't confer any special rights on an unimplanted fertilized egg. It certainly represents potential, but it's just too early. You seem to equate every act of sex with a woman deciding to accept pregnancy, and I would strongly dispute that. In fact, I would say that much in the world happens without any decisions at all. In raising my own kids, I've told them that there are three kinds of decisions, good decisions, bad decisions, and failure to make a decision, and that in most cases even the path taken through a bad decision is better than the path taken through failing to decide.
Personally, I feel that every child deserves to be welcomed into the world, cared for, nurtured, etc. Just because I may be pro-choice does not mean that I'm pro-abortion. I think that abortion is a bad thing, it's just that I think that there are worse things - one of them being, "having a child is punishment for in appropriate sexual activity." Another is a child being raised by a resenting parent.
Again, I don't like abortion, and don't feel that it's an acceptable form of birth control. I also don't consider preventing implantation to be abortion, and I suspect that's a key difference. Once implanted, I'm uncomfortable with any intervention, and the longer you wait, the worse it is - a darkening shade of grey.
Everything up to and including iron can come from normal fusion. To get past iron you need something more. I don't know if there are processes shy of a supernova to do that, but certainly a supernova does, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are other processes as well, though maybe more limited.
Yesterday on Vermont Public Radio, Vermont Edition spoke with an author about the rise in "dark fiction" for youth. There were many good points brought up, but it got me thinking off in another direction...
As someone else here has mentioned, it isn't so much that there's dark fiction, there's always been dark fiction. I see a bigger problem in that the Utopian fiction (like Star Trek) has diminished. The overall tide has gotten significantly darker.
I remember as a kid my first real book was "20,000 Leagues Under the See", which while it had dark elements, was really typical turn-of-the-century Utopian science fiction. Shortly after that, the WW-III nuclear apocolypse stuff typical of the time started moving into the mix. But even as that and environmental disaster sci-fi mixed in, the Utopian stuff was still present.
To me the real tipping point seems to be as the "corporate dystopia" of which William Gibson and Cyberpunk was part. Around that time, the Utopian sci-fi started dropping off. In more recent years, I've started seeing more "end times" sci-fi, too. (Think "Terminal World", "Feersum Endjin", "The City at the End of Time", "Spin", to name a few.) Peter F. Hamilton and Iain Banks are still pretty optimistic, though with the latter, in "State of the Art" he made it pretty clear that Earth is not part of "The Culture."
No, Stephenson isn't to blame, but he's participated in the problem, and hasn't been part of the solution.
Personally, I think if the swinging pendulum, hope we're pretty much at the limit of the swing, and hope the whole system hasn't gone nonlinear or fallen off its bearings.
You miss my point. We currently have neither freedom nor efficiency. Plus freedom had different meanings for different people.
My point was simply this: If we're not going to turn away emergency care - if we're going to make some level of our medical system universally accessable, the we really ought to be doing it in the most cost-efficient way that is reasonably possible. Personally I believe in availability of "universal preventive care" as the best route to that end.
If we're not going to manage health care efficiently, then perhaps we need to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror, realize what we're really saying, and do the practical alternative - "go away and die" and prepare to handle the consequences.
Since you bring up the phrase "ONLY liberals" I'll say that it's generally liberals who want to extend the health care system, to improve the net worth you speak of. Last I saw it was conservatives screeching out against any sort of socialized health care, you know, the "everyone will be treated. None are turned away" kind. In fact my "Go away and die" suggested "medical plan" was a liberal's paraphrasing of a conservative's plan. I just stated it up-front, for the provocation.
You also completely missed my point, and perhaps thought I was in favor of the "Modest Proposal." I'm not, and I only bring it up as a strawman, in order to see who salutes.
Personally, I'm in favor of universal preventive care, and that especially includes prenatal care and well-baby checks. No questions, just do it. I also have a very strong suspician the cost for this woudn't be bad - emergency neonatal care is very expensive, and proper preventive care is the best way avoid it.
By this line of reasoning, we need 2 more bills before Congress:
1 - Doctors and hospitals are absolved of blame in refusing to tread non-paying patients, and are permitted to eject them.
2 - We need a public health organization to collect and cremate uncollected bodies found on public property, or upon request uncollected bodies found on private property. This is of course subject to finding that the death was natural and not the result of foul play. This is necessary to safeguard the water supply, and because trained personnel are required to safely handle such bodies.
EITHER !!!
You are going to be compassionate about medical care, in which case you'd better be as efficient about it as possible. In which case paying for birth control is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying for emergency childbirth care.
OR !!!
You have to adopt the, "Go away and die," model. There is very little in-between. Health care as practiced in the US today is one of the lease efficient ways to run it. There is effectively universal emergency care, but no universal preventive care. That pretty much guarantees that some portion of the population will require expensive medical care.
How do you buy a much higher quality toaster? On occasion I have tried to buy higher quality appliances. Price is no indicator. Brand is only a weak indicator. Reviews are only a weak indicator, because product lines are constantly being churned, even if the name has remained the same.
I'm thinking more about the balance of rights between a fertilized egg and the mother, because in the hard-line debate, that may not have been the mother's choice.
I'm not mocking the idea of protecting a fetus. I'm mocking the idea of selling "personhood" as a simple way of banning abortion and most contraception, without simply being a ban on abortion and contraception.
In the history of the US Constitution we've had exactly 1 Amendment overturned, and that was prohibition. The Constitution and its Amendments have all been about rights and processes, not about specific acts - except for Prohibition.
Knowing that an Amendment prohibiting a small range of specific acts probably wouldn't fly in the long run, the desired goal was re-phrased in the semantic of something that does pass Constitutional muster - fetal rights. That's really what Personhood is all about, conferring full human rights at the moment of conception rather than the moment of birth.
From a Constitutional point of view, I agree that it passes muster much better. But at least as far as it has been discussed in the popular press, it sounds horribly simplistic. In basic, this: You never simply grant rights, you balance rights. Rights granted to the Federal government are removed from the States and the People. Rights granted to the People are removed from the States and the Feds. Rights granted to the fetus are removed, primarily from the Mother, but to some extent from everyone the Mother passes near. From what I've heard, the Personhood proposals simply grant rights to the fetus without any sense of balance regarding whom they have taken rights away from.
Then perhaps we should prosecute those/any mothers who can't carry every conception to full term - for murder.
This is really one of the things that gets me about "personhood" legislation. I'm sure that what they want to do is stop abortion and contraception, but I'm equally sure that they haven't thought it through thoroughly.
Smoking near a pregnant woman? I'm sure there's a lawyer somewhere who would be happy to prosecute and/or sue you for endangering the foetus. The list of potential slights or potential injuries that could potentially be detrimental to a foetus could grow incredibly large in our litiginous society. Then think of employing a pregnant woman in that environment - but to do anything else would be discrimination - subject to lawsuit. The safest and cheapest course might be a 9 month paid leave of absence. Think of the possibilities!
It's all supposition and guessing, and I'll freely admit that. Until now, discounting tin-foil hat conspiracies, we've had only one data point, and that's us. So far there has been no other life, either less or more advanced than us. We can also separate the evolution of intelligent life into four problem sets - or "tests" : 1 - From a bare planet to something recognizable as life 2 - From #1 to us 3 - From us to something not-us that we can detect (think SETI) 4 - From #3 to a physical visit
I'm not saying anything about the various unknowns, and obviously there are many. I'm just dividing the into regimes. We have passed through #1 and #2, perhaps #3, but definitely not #4.
Until now, to the best of our knowledge, the rest of the universe is at #0 - haven't made it past any of these hurdles.
This changes the game, because Mars may have passed #1, and we haven't even made a real evaluation of Europa or Titan yet, but there are some odds that either or both of those will pass #1 also. Moving from life on only 1 place in a solar system to 2 or 3 or 4 says something powerful about lessening its rarity. We start moving away from the "rare Earth hypothesis".
The further we move from the "rare Earth hypothesis" the more we have to start wondering about other places making it past hurdles #2, #3, and #4. Again, we can't currently detect #2 at interstellar distances(yet), and to the best of our knowledge nobody has passed #3 or #4.
You have certainly outlined a good set of reasons why not - I can quibble details, but not the general conclusion.
But your very conclusion reinforces my title, "Bad News", because I would consider either population collapse or ant community to be that kind of bad news. I fear it's equally obvious that we're not far from the brink, and we may live to see it. Interesting Times, and all that.
OTOH, the annoying thing is that we're really on the brink of getting past the problems you mention. Brute force is the obvious way to do many things, but we've been learning how to do things in much more subtle and much more efficient ways. If we could only get a sustained and real footing in space and beyond Earth orbit, we'd be on our way to solving the problems. We're right at the edge.
By the way, as for energy, you're also right. The "easy big energy" is all gone. Any sort of "technology interruption" and oil, nuclear, and coal are kaput. We'd be back to charcoal and whatever sorts of methane reactors we could devise. Question is if we could arrest our fall to that, or if we'd have to fight our way back up there from sticks and stones.
It would be much more rosy if there were already representatives of other civilizations out in the asteroid belt, observing us and respecting the "Prime Directive." It would be better to think that budding civilizations commonly pull themselves back from the brink that we're at, and make the grade to interstellar travel.
Slashdot Mirror
I threw this post against the submitted story, but this looks like a good anchor to bring it over here, slightly abridged...
Form follows function. The form of the Enterprise, if it were to follow any sort of function at all, would have been dictated by warp physics, not gravitywheels and ion engines. You could force-fit a nuclear-reactor powered ion-engine propelled spaceship into a shape like the Enterprise, I suppose. But I'm sure there would be other, much more logical shapes.
Like f'rinstance the Discovery from 2001, or the starship from Avatar.
A "one in a million" story makes it the general model for success for anyone, right?
How many immigrants are stuck in bottom-end jobs?
How do the percentages compare with home-grown?
They say "twice as likely to launch a high-tech startup", but that's also against the statistic I've heard that most business startups fail within 5 years. Maybe they really are successful at these startups, buy maybe their success rate is only half or less of home-grown. Maybe they did the launch because they didn't know the ropes well enough to see the failure looming. Sometimes it works to see the failure and word around/over, sometimes it doesn't.
So THAT's where I went wrong, back on Step 2. Darn, and I thought getting married was such a good idea at the time. My wife is going to be upset, after breaking this news to her after over 30 years - and we thought we were happy, too. Darn!
Strikes me like the situation I saw when I moved to Vermont.
There was one group of people trying to plan sensibly for growth. There was another group of people who wanted NO growth, and fully engaged themselves stopping the first group. While those two groups were busy duking it out, the third group simply wanted to make money through development and didn't care about the consequences.
As a result, we were pretty much guaranteed ONLY chaotic growth.
I heard an interview with a guy doing calorie restriction, in interest of an extended life. Maybe he was overdoing it, maybe he was doing what was truly necessary to double his lifespan.
But as a result of his calorie restriction regimen, he didn't have the energy for many activities most consider normal, let alone more strenuous things many do for fun. Half a life, lived twice as long.
It's not just *mostly* unattainable, it's unwise to even try, much less to achieve.
Minor pet peeve of mine... Between anorectic fashion models and overweight "accept me as I am" reactions to the fashion models, the "sensible middle" has been lost.
Robert A Heinlen - "The Door Into Summer", the character was a grad student of the scientist who invented the time travel machine, named Leonard Vincent. Don't remember the scientist's name, don't remember the protagonist's name, just remember that the protagonist invented CAD - called it "Drafting Dan."
I'm suggesting that the original sans-L2-cache Celeron, the entire NetBurst architecture, and IA64 were all pretty bad missteps.
Chipzilla twisted a lot of arms to hinder and delay K8 adoption in the marketplace. It should have done better.
> but that isn't Intel's fault.
Actually it is, to at least some extent. Go back a few years, when Intel was making misstep after misstep, and AMD was coming on gangbusters with K8. At that point, Intel had missed the market so badly that had they been AMD they would have gone under. They weren't AMD, they were Chipzilla. AMD enjoyed a good product cycle with K8, until Intel managed to come back. But they didn't enjoy the great product cycle they should have. Their great product cycle was turned into a merely good product cycle because Chipzilla twisted a few arms and kept K8 out of key opportunities.
The other piece of reality is that Intel combines first-rate process technology with first-rate design capability. (I say "capability" because more than once they've shown themselves to be very capable of letting their eye off the ball, design-wise.)
AMDs biggest problems have always been financing and less-than-best process technology. Bulldozer is a misstep, agreed. But it's not a misstep of the degree of Netburst or IA64. Had K8 gotten the success it deserved, AMD would have been better able to properly fund their design shop. That wouldn't have helped their process problems, however.
The simple fact is that the way things are today, Intel can afford to screw up badly, and can recover. None of their competitors can.
I can't mod this up, but I can at least reply to it.
The other thing that really strikes me about the failing mortgages is that they seemed almost designed to fail, from what I heard about them on the news.
IMHO the real problem is that the people writing mortgages were given strong incentives to write mortgages, but it doesn't appear that they were given strong disincentives in the event that those mortgages failed.
Or as R.A.H once said, any system where responsibility and authority go hand in hand will work. It may not work well, be most democratic, or anything else, but it will work. When authority and responsibility are decoupled, in the long run it just won't work.
A sadist's Utopia is Dystopia for anything other than a masochist.
There are simply degrees and forms of both sadism and masochism.
I actually think we pretty much agree, except at that third paragraph.
First and most emphatically, I don't think rape cases are a "straw man". To make such a call is to blame women for men who can't control their urges, and perhaps in the same breath absolving those men for their lack of self-control and lack of respect for women. It really bothers me that in the recent political debate over these issues, The Pill received quite a bit of blame for our sexually-charged society, but not a word was said about Viagra.
Second, I don't confer any special rights on an unimplanted fertilized egg. It certainly represents potential, but it's just too early. You seem to equate every act of sex with a woman deciding to accept pregnancy, and I would strongly dispute that. In fact, I would say that much in the world happens without any decisions at all. In raising my own kids, I've told them that there are three kinds of decisions, good decisions, bad decisions, and failure to make a decision, and that in most cases even the path taken through a bad decision is better than the path taken through failing to decide.
Personally, I feel that every child deserves to be welcomed into the world, cared for, nurtured, etc. Just because I may be pro-choice does not mean that I'm pro-abortion. I think that abortion is a bad thing, it's just that I think that there are worse things - one of them being, "having a child is punishment for in appropriate sexual activity." Another is a child being raised by a resenting parent.
Again, I don't like abortion, and don't feel that it's an acceptable form of birth control. I also don't consider preventing implantation to be abortion, and I suspect that's a key difference. Once implanted, I'm uncomfortable with any intervention, and the longer you wait, the worse it is - a darkening shade of grey.
Everything up to and including iron can come from normal fusion. To get past iron you need something more. I don't know if there are processes shy of a supernova to do that, but certainly a supernova does, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are other processes as well, though maybe more limited.
Don't argue, but I see the role of Utopian fiction as injecting some hope.
Yesterday on Vermont Public Radio, Vermont Edition spoke with an author about the rise in "dark fiction" for youth. There were many good points brought up, but it got me thinking off in another direction...
As someone else here has mentioned, it isn't so much that there's dark fiction, there's always been dark fiction. I see a bigger problem in that the Utopian fiction (like Star Trek) has diminished. The overall tide has gotten significantly darker.
I remember as a kid my first real book was "20,000 Leagues Under the See", which while it had dark elements, was really typical turn-of-the-century Utopian science fiction. Shortly after that, the WW-III nuclear apocolypse stuff typical of the time started moving into the mix. But even as that and environmental disaster sci-fi mixed in, the Utopian stuff was still present.
To me the real tipping point seems to be as the "corporate dystopia" of which William Gibson and Cyberpunk was part. Around that time, the Utopian sci-fi started dropping off. In more recent years, I've started seeing more "end times" sci-fi, too. (Think "Terminal World", "Feersum Endjin", "The City at the End of Time", "Spin", to name a few.) Peter F. Hamilton and Iain Banks are still pretty optimistic, though with the latter, in "State of the Art" he made it pretty clear that Earth is not part of "The Culture."
No, Stephenson isn't to blame, but he's participated in the problem, and hasn't been part of the solution.
Personally, I think if the swinging pendulum, hope we're pretty much at the limit of the swing, and hope the whole system hasn't gone nonlinear or fallen off its bearings.
You miss my point. We currently have neither freedom nor efficiency. Plus freedom had different meanings for different people.
My point was simply this: If we're not going to turn away emergency care - if we're going to make some level of our medical system universally accessable, the we really ought to be doing it in the most cost-efficient way that is reasonably possible. Personally I believe in availability of "universal preventive care" as the best route to that end.
If we're not going to manage health care efficiently, then perhaps we need to take a hard look at ourselves in the mirror, realize what we're really saying, and do the practical alternative - "go away and die" and prepare to handle the consequences.
Since you bring up the phrase "ONLY liberals" I'll say that it's generally liberals who want to extend the health care system, to improve the net worth you speak of. Last I saw it was conservatives screeching out against any sort of socialized health care, you know, the "everyone will be treated. None are turned away" kind. In fact my "Go away and die" suggested "medical plan" was a liberal's paraphrasing of a conservative's plan. I just stated it up-front, for the provocation.
You also completely missed my point, and perhaps thought I was in favor of the "Modest Proposal." I'm not, and I only bring it up as a strawman, in order to see who salutes.
Personally, I'm in favor of universal preventive care, and that especially includes prenatal care and well-baby checks. No questions, just do it. I also have a very strong suspician the cost for this woudn't be bad - emergency neonatal care is very expensive, and proper preventive care is the best way avoid it.
By this line of reasoning, we need 2 more bills before Congress:
1 - Doctors and hospitals are absolved of blame in refusing to tread non-paying patients, and are permitted to eject them.
2 - We need a public health organization to collect and cremate uncollected bodies found on public property, or upon request uncollected bodies found on private property. This is of course subject to finding that the death was natural and not the result of foul play. This is necessary to safeguard the water supply, and because trained personnel are required to safely handle such bodies.
EITHER !!!
You are going to be compassionate about medical care, in which case you'd better be as efficient about it as possible. In which case paying for birth control is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying for emergency childbirth care.
OR !!!
You have to adopt the, "Go away and die," model. There is very little in-between. Health care as practiced in the US today is one of the lease efficient ways to run it. There is effectively universal emergency care, but no universal preventive care. That pretty much guarantees that some portion of the population will require expensive medical care.
How do you buy a much higher quality toaster? On occasion I have tried to buy higher quality appliances. Price is no indicator. Brand is only a weak indicator. Reviews are only a weak indicator, because product lines are constantly being churned, even if the name has remained the same.
I'm thinking more about the balance of rights between a fertilized egg and the mother, because in the hard-line debate, that may not have been the mother's choice.
I'm not mocking the idea of protecting a fetus. I'm mocking the idea of selling "personhood" as a simple way of banning abortion and most contraception, without simply being a ban on abortion and contraception.
In the history of the US Constitution we've had exactly 1 Amendment overturned, and that was prohibition. The Constitution and its Amendments have all been about rights and processes, not about specific acts - except for Prohibition.
Knowing that an Amendment prohibiting a small range of specific acts probably wouldn't fly in the long run, the desired goal was re-phrased in the semantic of something that does pass Constitutional muster - fetal rights. That's really what Personhood is all about, conferring full human rights at the moment of conception rather than the moment of birth.
From a Constitutional point of view, I agree that it passes muster much better. But at least as far as it has been discussed in the popular press, it sounds horribly simplistic. In basic, this: You never simply grant rights, you balance rights. Rights granted to the Federal government are removed from the States and the People. Rights granted to the People are removed from the States and the Feds. Rights granted to the fetus are removed, primarily from the Mother, but to some extent from everyone the Mother passes near. From what I've heard, the Personhood proposals simply grant rights to the fetus without any sense of balance regarding whom they have taken rights away from.
It's a goldmine for frivolous litigation.
That's what I'm mocking.
There's also negligence, which has been shown to have ample fruit for legislation.
You know, you're right. Absolutely.
Religion kills people, and will likely kill a lot more.
Global warming kills people, and will likely kill a lot more.
Then perhaps we should prosecute those/any mothers who can't carry every conception to full term - for murder.
This is really one of the things that gets me about "personhood" legislation. I'm sure that what they want to do is stop abortion and contraception, but I'm equally sure that they haven't thought it through thoroughly.
Smoking near a pregnant woman? I'm sure there's a lawyer somewhere who would be happy to prosecute and/or sue you for endangering the foetus. The list of potential slights or potential injuries that could potentially be detrimental to a foetus could grow incredibly large in our litiginous society. Then think of employing a pregnant woman in that environment - but to do anything else would be discrimination - subject to lawsuit. The safest and cheapest course might be a 9 month paid leave of absence. Think of the possibilities!
It's all supposition and guessing, and I'll freely admit that. Until now, discounting tin-foil hat conspiracies, we've had only one data point, and that's us. So far there has been no other life, either less or more advanced than us. We can also separate the evolution of intelligent life into four problem sets - or "tests" :
1 - From a bare planet to something recognizable as life
2 - From #1 to us
3 - From us to something not-us that we can detect (think SETI)
4 - From #3 to a physical visit
I'm not saying anything about the various unknowns, and obviously there are many. I'm just dividing the into regimes. We have passed through #1 and #2, perhaps #3, but definitely not #4.
Until now, to the best of our knowledge, the rest of the universe is at #0 - haven't made it past any of these hurdles.
This changes the game, because Mars may have passed #1, and we haven't even made a real evaluation of Europa or Titan yet, but there are some odds that either or both of those will pass #1 also. Moving from life on only 1 place in a solar system to 2 or 3 or 4 says something powerful about lessening its rarity. We start moving away from the "rare Earth hypothesis".
The further we move from the "rare Earth hypothesis" the more we have to start wondering about other places making it past hurdles #2, #3, and #4. Again, we can't currently detect #2 at interstellar distances(yet), and to the best of our knowledge nobody has passed #3 or #4.
You have certainly outlined a good set of reasons why not - I can quibble details, but not the general conclusion.
But your very conclusion reinforces my title, "Bad News", because I would consider either population collapse or ant community to be that kind of bad news. I fear it's equally obvious that we're not far from the brink, and we may live to see it. Interesting Times, and all that.
OTOH, the annoying thing is that we're really on the brink of getting past the problems you mention. Brute force is the obvious way to do many things, but we've been learning how to do things in much more subtle and much more efficient ways. If we could only get a sustained and real footing in space and beyond Earth orbit, we'd be on our way to solving the problems. We're right at the edge.
By the way, as for energy, you're also right. The "easy big energy" is all gone. Any sort of "technology interruption" and oil, nuclear, and coal are kaput. We'd be back to charcoal and whatever sorts of methane reactors we could devise. Question is if we could arrest our fall to that, or if we'd have to fight our way back up there from sticks and stones.
It would be much more rosy if there were already representatives of other civilizations out in the asteroid belt, observing us and respecting the "Prime Directive." It would be better to think that budding civilizations commonly pull themselves back from the brink that we're at, and make the grade to interstellar travel.