And a quote: *”A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Shakespeare Quote from an awe dropping editorial from the “Free Inquiry” magazine “Is Intelligence Toxic.” (it can be). Some takeaways from the dismal article: If All Species Go Extinct, Can We Be Any Different?

"Earth’s 10–14 million species (86 percent of them undescribed) are estimated to constitute less than 0.3 percent of the billions that ever existed. Sanity check: Life dates back 3.5 billion years, but multi-celled life evolved much more recently, about 600 million years ago. If each multi-celled species were to split into two at the (conservative) rate of once every 10 million years with no extinctions, then earth would now be home to over 10 to the 18th power, species—a hundred billion times more than the estimate. Clearly, extinction has been a very grim reaper. If environmental changes afflict species faster than they can adapt, they vanish. But hey, we have unparalleled adaptability! We can live in any environment, even the vacuum of space. With our secret sauce we’ll surely beat the odds, right?"

”Of course, people offer innumerable optimistic explanations of SETI’s dead silence. Occam’s Razor tells me that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence—we are alone in the cosmos, despite many technological civilizations having emerged over the vastness of deep time. Why? I contend that high-tech civilizations flash in and out of existence in the proverbial blink of an eye. A thousand years is a very long time to live with an exponentially growing list of existential threats such as I have been at pains to describe. But a thousand years is only a millionth of a billion years. Thus, the chance of two high-tech civilizations existing within hailing distance at the same time is tiny. Shakespeare was prescient: “A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The bottom line was that intelligent beings only last a few thousand years and any that have existed have long since gone extinct.
[secularhumanism.org]