>>10569200I can't even imagine having such an autistic mindset that one could not think critically for a second about the world around them and the information available to them.
How do new sources get produced? They aggregate information and perform necessary procedure to vet their hypothesis about said information in some process or another (whether it be in a scientific lab, a sociological/psychological study or merely a survey and interpretation of data available to them). Those studies often have bibliography for specific micro phenomena that effect their conclusions drawn about their hypothesis, but they don't have a "source" in any meaningful way for their conclusions beyond a subjective interpretation of how rigorously tested their hypothesis was. Aside from that, just having a source doesn't ensure the quality of the work. Even in very quantitative fields like computational biology and physics crap papers that are effectively worthless get published all the fucking time, and it's up to the reader to decide whether or not the information holds water in their view.
Yes of course I don't have a specific study demonstrating with 100% certainty what will happen when humanity as we know it collapses, but we have significant information about previous instances of civilizational collapse and we can still learn from them. Once human beings as a species die out, who knows what will happen, but I have a reasonable degree of certainty that evolutionary processes have not fundamentally been altered by humanity having existed. Selection via environmental pressures will still occur, which has a decent chance over a vast expanse of time of bringing about intelligence, just as it brought out us.
