Well, I hope that the self-importance shown in this post is not a true reflection of the community; although unfortunately I think it might well be.
One aspect of this I find anthropologically interesting is the motivations of Adams and Lahood. Spending years searching for a total stranger's dead body. Why? Why do we want to "know what happened" so badly? What is at stakes here? There is a movie like that - it's called The Vanishing. It's quite good.
What does it mean, fundamentally, when something is NOT where it is most likely to be (like Ewasko's body here, well outside of the most searched zone)? Or more generally when something - permanently - is NOT the way it is most likely to be? Does it mean our assessment of the likelyhoods was wrong?
1I doubt it's all that qualitatively different than the sorts of summits humanity has surmounted before
This seems to imply that we have surmounted the fields of physics, that all available knowledge in all subfields has been acquired whereas the most that can be claimed is that we have reduced the degree of our ignorance in some of those subfields. We have not - by any stretch of the imagination - mastered the field. Indeed, if we think we cannot push our understanding of AI, and related alignment problems, further than our current degree of understanding of physics, I think that is a strong point for the "stop everything, while we still can" case.
Oh that's an interesting way to approach things! If you were asked : a fair coin is tossed, what is the probability it will land on head - wouldn't you reply 1/2, and wouldn't you for your reply be relying on such a thing as conventional probability theory?