Curiosity

Some things I think about.

Seems like there is no breaking the cycle of a rapid rise of a new empire and then an inevitable downfall, whether it is the Roman empire, or the American hegemony, or the Maurya empire. Is there something that can be fundamentally done to arrest this seemingly inescapable demise of prosperous ’empires’. I use empires here in a loose sense, not in their traditional sense of an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarch, an oligarchy, or a sovereign state.

Utterly fascinated with the Fermi paradox. Why can we see absolutely no evidence of any alien intelligent life while intuitively we should be seeing at least a few, given the age of the universe and the speed with which someone could have built large megastructures or sent exploratory spacecraft (umuamua anyone?)? Is life unique on earth? Is humanity the only cradle of consciousness? Or is the universe just so big and young still that our “intuition” that we should be seeing some proof is fundamentally flawed?