Dang. I bet that author is a fun dinner date!

I've always felt that our modern society is extremely vulnerable, extremely fragile. Look at what this virus, which really is just a bad cold that, yes, kills a small percentage of people it infects, but it's only slightly more deadly than the seasonal flu, which also kills many people.

Look at what it's done, and I would argue that we haven't even begun to see the damage it's done, which will be mostly economic, because that's being held back with money printing which can't go on much longer.

Imagine what a major meteor strike would do, let alone a major solar storm.

This article prompted me to reconsider my presumption of the inevitability of a vast number of intelligent life in our proximity of, what, a few hundred light years. Nature continually builds and destroys, everything. We will likely go extinct as a result of natural forces, and I would argue that global warming is a natural force even if we have precipitated it. We're a force of nature, after all.

So for a species that would need to exist for however many hundreds of thousands or millions of years it would take for that species to master inter-stellar travel, they would need to first figure out how to avoid being wiped out by natural forces. So perhaps intelligent life is far less common than I have presumed.

On the other hand, if one assumes that infinity is the nature of the universe, and I think it is, and I'm talking about the the mega super duper really big universe, not just the big bang shit we can observe, if infinity exists, then there exists an infinite number of intelligent species.