@mahgister Well articulated, and I share your pessimism... also, like you, optimistic in the long run, should we survive the short-term consequences of our actions.
Read up on the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter... this could be one of the deciding/defining moments for us as a species...
Fermi Paradox and his solution with the idea of a drastic filtering of survival by a fitness survival testing . modulo an evolution which in most case drive most primitive civilizations to destruction then making them unable to exist and manifest out of the scale of their own planet is logical and probably right to a great extent...but it is not a complete solutuion and explanation. Why ?
Because there exist from a long time ago civilizations that had passed this test many billions years ago, and their spiritual status make them more Gods than mortals...
These masters or advanced beings or angels, names do not matter here , supervised and control the evolution in the cosmos coordinated by a conscious link with the Source. Nothing is only randomness anymore at this scale...Randomness is constrainted...Randomness is very hard to define in maths, it does not exist as an absolute single concept...
My intuition about this is born 50 years ago in my quest to understand the core and meaning of maths.
my basic intuition was founded in an understanding of the impossibility for any conscious primate or any other evolutive species to design or invent the prime numbers distribution geometry...
A long study of Cantor and set theory convinced me and a reading of Grothendieck books...As an aside i discovered that Set Theory intuition were grounded in the works of Dionysos the Areopagite and Nicolas of Cues by Cantor heavy study of them. Cantor taught theology and would had never defied orthodox mathematician about the infinite without an insight in mystic experience that assured him he was not a fool facing Kronecker and Russell and half of mathematicians in the world wanting to put him in an asylum for mental delirium .. This is forgotten today but was very real debates.... Hilbert cut the knot saying : "nobody will throw off from Cantor paradise".... Few people only know that the concept of limitation of size inspiring set theoretical methods before axiomatization come from mystical Duionysus methods ( the hierarchical principles first and then cataphatic and apophatic methods and non discursive intuition) See Michael Hallett book about Cantor principle limitation of size meaning .
My basic intuition about primes meanings was also confirmed to me 12 years ago by the book of Shai Haran : the real prime... A masterpiece about the importance of the non archimedean reals world over the archimedean reals ... Read his articles online... Buy his book ...
Then this was confirmed by the controversial inter-universal geometry of Shinichi Mochizuki...
In all these two works the search circle around the prime geometrical meaning...
But in 2020 i was astounded to stumble on the Book of Anirban "Nanobrain" which use the prime numbers matrixes to design brain as well as the cosmos...
To say it in a word i had no doubt at all after studying these three geniuses that no one invented the primes, they are discovered...Alain Connes the founder of non commutative geometry is sure of this fact...
The primes as the circle geometry are transcendant infinite objects we observe and which precede and survive any cosmos... They are the code of the brain as well as the cosmos...Their rooting together in a musical way...
Sorry but call him Brahman or Allah or God the father or the Goddess or the Source will not change mathematics... A universal field of creative memory is the core of mathematics and cannot be understood in any others ways...
We live in love source expressing itself as absolute knowledge from which we are a rooted extension ...
Maths demonstrate it in an evident way...
It is the reason why almost ALL true great geniuses in maths were mystics in orthodox ways as Pascal Cantor, Euler and many others in an unorthodox ways as Godel, Grothedieck or Ramanujan ...The list is too long...
Materialism is already dead but alas! was replaced by a very negative false religion : techno-cultism and idolization of our own machines... Destruction of our own soul or roots for an alleged constructed "immortality" by fear of what does not exist anyway : death ...