Seems more like they're implying that entrepreneurs will not accept anything that isn't straight up proving a negative. Which is logically impossible. Thus whatever "this is possibly bad" scientists come up with, will end up dismissed because it's not "This is 100% certainty bad".

It's plants. They grow in the ground in front of us. We've have discovered Agriculture about 10k years ago.

And we still haven't figured out all of the details of how plans actually work.

It's humbling and amusing to think about how we're always dreaming about space, other worlds, or the unexplored deep sea trenches, but could just as well just spend more time studying the grass we're standing on.

I'd suggest that performing a precise aerobrake in reality might be slightly more difficult than in an abstracted simulation, i.e. due to the simulation always being 100% accurate, whilst any modelling of our actual atmosphere might be less precise.

It's easy to do a full aerobrake, and it's relatively easy to avoid aerobraking. But treading that fine line between might be a bit unfeasible in an unsimulated environment.

To append another perspective to this: The entirety of Earth's biosphere makes up an extremely small part of the planet. Essentially, Earth is a massive ball of near-molten rock, with a very thin crust, that is covered in a microscopic layer of water and grime. We're part of that grime.

So when a small pebble (aka a meteor) hits Earth, the planet hardly cares, it's just that the outermost layer, the grime, will be disrupted.

That's how an extinction level meteorite impact can both be so devastating to everything we know, yet also be mostly irrelevant to the planet as an astronomical object.

You're anthropomorphizing the very concept of 'a species'. There is no 'species of these wasps' entity that specifically places it's future onto any thing... it's just a load of individual wasps bumbling about doing whatever and just so happening to have genetically condensed on doing something that kind of works well enough.

If so, yes. That's a pretty big if tho. Might be why decoding whale / orca language could be the next big step in AI development: Being able to communicate with other beings that may be sapient (aka holding consciousness) as well is going to be the only way in which we might be able to truly understand what common denominators constitute consciousness... only then would we be able to replicate it artificially (unless we succeed at that by accident).

> In denying other conscious life forms their consciousness, we have also stunted our understanding of it.

Word.

It's not going to be easy to clearly define (if ever possible) what kind (or even individual!) of animal contains what level of consciousness, but the very least we can do is recognize that it's not a binary toggle, and that we're far from alone on one side. Heck, for all we know we might not even be the extreme of the scale.

I'm hoping we can figure this out, at least partially, before true sentient AI comes into play.

Ye, no, sorry to burst your bubble, but that's just 'any biological lifeform', and it does include humans.

We, like any other animals, have a lot of instincts that don't make much sense in our modern lifestyle, or can even be actively counterproductive. I.e. Arachnophobia (or most fears, really). Herd mentality can likewise cause humans to behave hilarious; There's been experiments showcasing this, such as placing some actors in an elevator, back-facing the entrance. Any other person that entered would join them in staring at the back side of the elevator, regardless of the fact that was highly impractical for using that elevator, and utterly pointless. But it's simply instinct to imitate what other humans are doing, even if the action doesn't make any rational sense (instead of, as would be proper, to question whether there is an actual reason for performing that action).

There's also a lot of less-clear examples of instinctive behaviors screwing with us: i.e. over-patternization; Our brains developed two ways to deal with situations: The first is active analysis, which is high in energy-cost, but allows us to make complex deductions. The other is passive repetition, which is extremely quick and energy-efficient, but can only do what we have already established. I.e. driving/riding to work/school on autopilot. It's a neat trick by which we can combine high intelligence with moderated energy consumption. But it also generates a problem, in that the brain will try to aggressively patternize EVERYTHING, in order to turn it into a low-level automated behavior. This means you brain will actively try to class, stereotype, simplify, automate everything it can. Which can lead to, as implied, unjustified stereotypes or in fact oversimplifying problems. This again is a cornerstone of Populism, which tries to stimulate the brain of listeners into simplifying complex societal problems into seemingly simple (but factually incorrect) answers.

So, from these examples alone: Don't, for one second, believe that we humans aren't also animals with very daft instincts. The only thing that differentiates us from most (not even all) animals, is that our consciousnesses have developed to a point where we can (not 'always will') actively recognize when an instinct is kicking in, and might be even able to actively suppress it in favor of a cognitive choice.