If we attempt to divorce ourselves from our human points-of-view and look on dispassionately, it can be seen that 99%+ of existence is simply working its way towards what is called the ‘heat-death’ of existence. Which can also be expressed as the end-game of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
But there is a much, much smaller part of existence which is moving the other way. I.e. towards amassing greater complexity and concentration of energy and organization. I’m referring to life. Life can arises in goldilocks zones of excess energy through processes we don’t fully understand. But, arise it does. Life on Earth is the proof.
Indeed, I once expressed this in a cryptic bit of writing a few years ago:
“Energy evaporates down gradients and little creatures arise in the backwash.”
So, do we and the backwash arising of life have a purpose? If so, I cannot see it implied anywhere. But, in spite of that, it is a truly amazing thing that natural processes within existence should be able to create and evolve bits of itself (us) which are aware of itself.
Are we, the pinnacle creatures on this planet, likely to be the pinnacle creatures throughout existence? Given the size of existence, that seems an extremely dubious notion.
I like your idea about what a next intelligent species might be like:
“Maybe the next intelligent species won’t even care about tech. They’ll just float around, eat fish, sing songs, have sex, and raise their babies, happy to be alive on this planet.“
There’s nothing impossible about it. All it requires is the manifested intent of the new species be to live within the limits of the biosphere around it.
We humans could do that now and live on this planet for many hundreds of thousands of years more. Evolving our intelligence up and up and patiently enjoying our lives and seeing what awaits us.
But I strongly doubt we will change and follow that path. I think we are taking the current biosphere into a big reset. After that, life will slowly build again and maybe those who come after will outgrow this inherent self-destructiveness that we seem to have.