I think I know why MAD was smart, and ASI is terrifying. We're not really programmed to continue our own genes. Clearly there are too many situations where a human will sacrifice themself for another. A parent sacrificing themself for their child is common in fiction. We like that kind of sacrifice. But then a child sacrificing themself for a parent is absurd. We accept the deaths of the old more readily than the deaths of the young. We're programmed to continue our species, by any means necessary. We are programmed to accept colossal numbers of casualties, so long as our species survives. In the Cold War, the Tsar Bomba was the largest nuke ever built, because there was starting to be a very real worry that they'd eventually build nukes so large they killed all life on Earth. MAD was acceptable, because as you'll recall from the existence of fallout shelters, there would be survivors. They would live a miserable, pitiful existence, but they would survive and go on to continue the species. People accept billions of casualties without blinking an eye. The destruction of our civilization does not faze them. But the end of our species is unthinkable. We, as a species, are capable of anything, no matter how atrocious, no matter how awful, no matter the suffering, so long as the species survives.
And that is Humanity's blessing, survival. Majority of species if they were in the extremist of places on Earth with die, Humanity conquers it and calls it his.
Alright, not quite. We just have the highest capacity for adaptation. We don't, for example, find humans living in volcanoes, however we do find some microbials living in volcanoes. In such an instance we have an extreme place that harbors a species that is not a human. HOWEVER we cannot find a single jungle frog living in the Saharra (fucked up the name, but whatever) because they'd shrivel up and die. But we do find humans surviving there.
