Of course we can use some of that logic to say what is the likelihood that we just happen to be around to experience the exact point in which our planet's progress arc hits its apex, never to reach it again?

What I pictured when I read this: The planet's entire sentient population over time as one giant planetary eye; it opens very slowly - there's a flicker of understanding - and then it closes again.

I agree with you, though - maybe it blinks once or twice.

Edit: Hey, I just looked up the original article that a-b linked, and that was Bostrum, too.

On the cancer thing - which I'm preoccupied with since finishing that excellent book - if mutation is life, then cancer is life in a mega-mutation death spiral.

To your earlier points - I don't see how fluctuations in the present education/earning arc would naturally lead to a Great Filter, but perhaps your argument is too subtle for me (wouldn't be the first time). The Europe-never-discovers-America Great Filter would be made irrelevant by the fact that there were fishing boats drifting over from Asia all the time. I think of the Max Weber theory of the Industrial Revolution emerging from Puritan towns - driven by the doctrine that affluence is evidence of God's grace working in one's life, and an indication that you might be going to heaven instead of hell (which started out as the great unknowable eventuality). The nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic fostered by that superstition has caught on all over the world. I guess I'm making the social contagion argument that change emerges from rapidly mutating social groups (back to the cancer thing again), and doesn't rely on social homogeneity, which seems to be where we're heading with the equalization thing.