That you know of -- it's possible he was secretly married, and his secret wife was sleeping with the likely first winner of a Nobel prize in mathematics.
Unlikely, yes, but the tale is not certainly apocryphal ;)
This is not higher-order thinking (insofar as such exists). The search tree is first-order -- in a sufficiently complex game that the search tree cannot be fully examined, the heuristics necessary to perform at a high level without the need to explore the search tree are the second order. The third order is left as an exercise to the reader.
> I hear this from time to time but it doesn’t pass the sniff test. If we assume the vehicles are points...
Ah yes, the "sniff test", in which things which are untrue are assumed, which make the interlocutor sufficiently confident to pontificate. "Sniff test", as a concept, doesn't pass itself, rhetorically (-- or maybe it's a "code smell").
We have no evidence that we will ever be able to build sufficiently adaptable systems to engage with unfamiliar environments without constant direct human intervention, which is not possible at light-year (or even light-second) ranges.
And yet, the chestnut is one of the very few commonly eaten botanical nuts (along with the hazelnut and some acorns) -- nearly all other culinary nuts are otherwise (drupes, seeds, legumes, etc).
As the post you're responding to notes, Cecilia is the patron saint of musicians -- the song is about the fleeting nature of inspiration, not a literal description of a interpersonal relationship.
I doubt that's possible at this point, honestly -- this is our great filter. We had a chance, in the 70s and 80s (when the risk was frankly already fairly well-understood), but perhaps being the evolutionary top dog / intelligence comes with a greedy optimizer that prevents long-term societal thinking.
It's a shame you're getting downvoted, because you're probably not wrong. Even if the increase in extreme weather events/drought/heat waves is less impactful on non-tropical regions, we're still going to be dealing with a multi-billion-person climate refugee crisis in the next few decades.
I think we only have to look at society's response to the pandemic, a worldwide crisis with immediate (rather than delayed) effects directly on individuals with honestly simple, straightfoward solutions (mask up, pay people to stay home and industries to maintain capacity, vaccinate everyone), to realize that humanity is not going to be able to tackle climate change as an existential issue. We just slide into an endless resource war while a few billionaires who could have meaningfully changed the course of human history hide out in New Zealand, or try to leave the planet and die.