"According to me, there's a decent chance that we live at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated. That out of a staggering number of persons who will ever exist, we're among the first. And that out of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, ours will produce the... See more

" Describing Earth as a tiny dot in a photo from space, Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan wrote: The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena...

... But here I'm making the opposite point. It looks for all the world as though our "tiny dot" has a real shot at being the origin of a galaxy-scale civilization. "

"... we live in the most important century for humanity."

"within this century, we could develop advanced enough AI to start a productivity explosion."