Comment by fellowniusmonk

Humans make meaning, as far as we have observed we are the meaning making organ of the universe in a totally literalist physicalized sense. Stars convert mass to energy, humans convert energy to semantic meaning with high syntactic complexity, density and causal leverage.

We build the libraries, we deflect the asteroids for the foreseeable future (we really should check and see if dolphins would like thumbs.)

Flight existed before apes but - in a purely non-woo sense - a few of us gave the universe the how and why of it.

We haven't yet definitively ruled out the possibility of altering spacetime topology, or solving entropy, or plucking entities out of the light cone.

Humans tend to bring what they desire into the world. Wheat threshers, combines, tricorders, harry potter cloaks.

Listen to interviews of people who lived from the mid 1800's to the mid 1900's. They say the whole damn world changed, everything changed.

Now,

A large contingent of Humans want eternal life, want resurrection.

There is this kind of speculative naturalists pascals wager at play right now that we are losing at.

Where a certain contingent of the population simply refuses to believe that the earth could be destroyed by an asteroid, or if it was it will be part of the fulfillment of their wishes for a new heaven and earth.

But if they have the least doubt in the quite moments of the night they need to realize. That if only what we empirically observe is stable and true, then their only hope for their desires coming true might be humans making it happen. We don't know yet, we just don't know, it's early days yet, nothing or everything might be in the future.

So we really need to preserve humans so they can keep making meaning, make our existence more resilient and keep pushing the edge and expansion of knowledge.

At one point humans thought travel to the moon was impossible, some living people still do, but the very strange implications is that us and other meaning making agents might actually fill the universe with meaning, we might end up giving the universe meaning, as semantically less complex dna bootstrapped us we may bootstrap the whole universe.

I find it highly unlikely but I cannot rule it out and no one else can either. We really need to protect human and the life we can see.