My mental model is that people look at a small amount of data we have about advanced civilizations (ours), fit lines to those few, noisy, highly clustered point

My mental model is that people look at a small amount of data we have about advanced civilizations (ours), fit lines to those few, noisy, highly clustered points, or worse, assume exponential when it's really logistic / S curve. Then you can predict any old doom you want. The future is lots of things, but stable or predictable it ain't.