Attention-span × Humanity's Ambition

O'Neill's *High Frontier* argues that humanity's proudest eras — Greek city-states, the Renaissance — were times of diversity, confusion, and competing small-scale experiments, not monolithic focus. Stross's *Accelerando* takes this to its endpoint: a solar system of eleven billion future-shocked primates surrounded by exocortices, where capitalism and communism are both obsolete and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling. Between these two visions sits Brin's *Existence*, which names the actual mechanism: overspecialization and "Continuously Divided Attention" as twin failure modes, where the same tools that let us "flit like gods" across all knowledge also breed anchorless skittering and susceptibility to viral simplisms. The hidden connection is this — humanity's ambition doesn't require sustained collective attention; it requires *periodic coherence*, the way a laser works. Sagan in *Pale Blue Dot* nearly says it outright: we pulled inward after Apollo not from failure of ambition but from failure to re-cohere after the Cold War's focusing lens was removed. The real threat isn't that we can't pay attention. It's that we've lost the shared crises dramatic enough to synchronize our flickering focus into a beam that can reach Mars.