Don't forget the anthropic principal: the reason we haven't yet encountered any civilization-destroying black balls is because we wouldn't be here to wonder why

Don't forget the anthropic principal: the reason we haven't yet encountered any civilization-destroying black balls is because we wouldn't be here to wonder why if we had. Similarly, there's a probabilistic argument that we actually are on the cusp of some humanity-destroying event. If human population grows exponentially until it faces a civilization-destroying crisis, then a large fraction of the people who will ever be born will be born in the last lifetime before the cataclysm, because this is the nature of exponential growth. Hence, for any given observer, chances are they see the end of civilization. (Changing population growth rates can alter this prediction somewhat: I've read that only about 10% of all humans who have ever lived are alive now, because we had several millenia of relative stagnation & steady-state population. That implies that if we don't see a cataclysm, though, there will be more stagnation ahead.) Finally, don't rule out the possibility that the definition of "consciousness" may shift. Is a bacteria self-aware? Nobody's ever really asked one. They do communicate via chemical signals, though. [1] What if in the future, humanity's role is essentially like cells in a great planetary-scale organization, and we have planets asking each other "Do we need to worry about the destruction of the galaxy?" [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16212498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16212498/