merchant class seizes power and starts a Wario Land timer on life as they exponentially delete the biosphere. you have half a millennia to install a DOTP before your planet is razed. the most dice roll bottleneck fathomable. if there are dead aliens and they developed like us we gotta one-up them quick gamers
also solves the fermi paradox. everyone that might contact us knows better than to let capitalists have faster-than-light travel.
It must be worse on some planets than others, too. Imagine if we reached this stage of development, but had twice as much fossil fuels that were easily available to us on the surface. Or our oceans were half as massive, and so could only absorb half as much excess heat. Or we were already slightly closer to the Sun and didn’t even have ice caps.
This might actually be the best of all possible worlds and we’re fucking it up lol
Yeah that’s more or less been my theory for around a decade lol.
