This. I've been searching for a way to articulate this idea for quite some time, and this is the best way I've seen it stated.

Thank you. It's still a bit indistinct to me as yet -- I haven't seen many other people talking about it in these terms, except Karl Schroeder (who explores it a bit in his science fiction writing), but I knew something seemed a little funny when the Rare Earth Hypothesis and its pop-sci cousins started growing in popularity among the transhumanist set. It seems like an awful lot of the background ideas about the Fermi Paradox and its implications for anthropics in the core cluster that LW shares go back to an intellectual movement that came to prominence at a time before we'd discovered more than a tiny handful of exoplanets. Now we know there's at least one Earth-sized world around Alpha bloody Centauri and even Tau Ceti of all stars is being proposed as rich in worlds; at this rate I personally expect to learn about the probable existence of another biosphere around a star within 100 ly, within my natural lifetime (though, for the reasons expressed in my comment, I'm doubtful we'd be able to reliably notice another civilization unless they signalled semi-deliberately or we got staggeringly lucky and they have a recognizably-similar fossil fuel "spike" within a similar window, meaning we can catch the light of cities on the night side assuming Sufficiently Powerful Telescopes).

I have long suspected that reversion towards (through perhaps not all the way to) the mean is far more likely in our future.

nod I suspect the future probably looks rather weird to LWian eyes, in this regard -- neither a reversion to the 10th or 17th century for the rest of human existence, nor much like the most common conceptions of it here (namely: UFAI-driven apocalypse vs FAI-driven technorapture). It's hard to tease out the threads that seem most relevant to my budding picture of things, but they look something like: increasing efficiency where it's possible, a gradual net reduction in the stuff economists have been watching grow for the last few generations, some decidedly weirdtopian adaptations in lifestyle that I can only guess at... we've learned so much about automation, efficiency, logistics and soforth and it seems like there's plenty of time to learn a great deal more, such that my brain tries to conjure up visions of a low-energy but surprisingly smart future infrastructure where the world is big again.