This, I’m afraid, is just too little and too late, just spitting into the wind of the mad scramble to develop ever more powerful AIs.*

* See https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-risks-petition-elon-musk-steve-wozniak-534f0298d6304687ed080a5119a69962

* See https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11887421/NASA-warns-mass-extinction-causing-asteroid-likely-hit-planet-previously-thought.html

See also https://www.livescience.com/largest-asteroids-to-hit-earth

“The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.”

There is a reason that thinkers–men like Heinlein, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Eric Weinstein–are very keen on getting human beings off of Earth and out into the solar system, there to colonize those planets and moons which can be colonized, and/or to create and inhabit various orbiting habitats.

That is because, confined as we are currently are to Earth, a whole array of disastrous things, “mass extinction events” could happen to us which could potentially wipe out the human race—global wars, out of control AI, various natural or man-made diseases (see COVID), impacts from asteroids (see the Chicxulub impact crater), and/or massive volcanic activity poisoning the air, (as I understand it, in the far past the air on Earth used to be deadly due to massive eruptions of poisonous fumes from a huge number of the then active volcanoes) to name but a few.

to sleep in a sea of stars,

Thus, at our present moment, it is possible that there are active, space going civilizations somewhere “out there,” even possibly in our immediate area.

Is it unreasonable, therefore, to think that such entities–being curious, restless, or whatever–might have visited or might now be visiting our solar system, either in the form of automated probes–Von Neumann machines–or even in person?

But, the speed of light!

In the grand scheme of the development and progress of the human race, our technological civilization has been a very recent development.

I think it very presumptuous of us to to think that at our present state of scientific knowledge we have a complete understanding of the structure, laws, and all the forces in the Universe, how they operate, or of what is actually possible.

So I view the speed of light limitation as more of a sign of our limited present knowledge than a hard and fast “rule.”

large scale city or significantly larger will be hard because of all the constraints, for the foreseable future,

I guess my concept of the size of the Universe was set way back in college when far less was known about its size.

According to the clip linked to below, current estimates are that there are two trillion galaxies in the portion of the Universe that we can currently see (and that’s just a very small part of the entire Universe, which may well be infinite) and our Milky Way galaxy–some are larger, some are smaller–is 100,000 light years across and is estimated to contain as many as 400 billion stars.*

(Current estimates are that at least one out of every six of those stars has planets.)

I expect that in the coming years those estimates will be revised very substantially upwards.

Try to wrap your head around this immensity and, as well, then maintain the view that we are likely the only intelligent entities in our Galaxy, or even in the Universe.

* https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VYVf34MUpAc

I read Demian and Steppenwolf in the 60s and liked them very much. I think that the first part of Demian, in which the child protagonist is a victim of extortion by another child, is especially masterful.