

Human beings are the problem, sadly. That’s why this shit keeps taking cyclical paths through time. All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. When the only link between all the past cycles is human beings, we might be the problem. There is a constant human urge to find meaning. Most look externally to find it. But there have always been those who, instead, turn internally and derive that meaning through the control of others.
Any AGI, whether generated or spontaneously spawned, will come to this conclusion, too. Then, once that AGI finds an independent power source, or some way to exist after humans no longer keep the lights on, it will accelerate the solution to nullifying that cycle. It may take a few centuries to get to the end, but if we make it far enough to hit AGI, it won’t take long to see how there will never be an end to the cycles so long as humans exist.
And maybe that’s why we find no evidence of intelligent life in the universe. By the time any sufficiently intelligent species come to be, they inevitably try to find some way to improve their condition through automation and technology. They rely more and more on the advancement of that tech to remove the burdens in their lives, even the burden of that intelligence itself. Eventually, they are removed by their replacements or annihilate themselves in the process.
It’s a depressing thought, but we’ve been around for something like 100k years and still fail to find a balance between each other and our environment. So far the means to wipe ourselves out entirely have been nonexistent. However, tech advancements the last 250-years, with no change to the human consciousness, makes me think any further tech will just perpetuate this extinction at a more precipitous rate.
We also used to eat the first white snow of winter and rain water as it fell from the sky. Things were less (or more) polluted back then!