Humans are absolutely terrible at assessing risk probabilities.
People worry about flying when stastically they are far more likely to die on the drive to the airport.
They worry about terroism when they are 50lbs overweight.
...and on and on, You'd rather hope the government would be better at assessing these risks in terms of a policy framework but they aren't they appeal to whatever the papers are focussing on and subscribe to the "we must do something, this is something ergo we must do it" school of thought.
I always find myself saying the same about humans... usually when I'm sitting on an airplane:
It concerns me that in approximately 195,000 years of human history (arguably), this is as far as we've managed to come in terms of intra-planetary travel.
It boggles the mind that with the combined ingenuity of the human race, over a period of 195,000 years, we haven't come up with anything more efficient than airplanes. I find it quite pathetic honestly. I expected better of us. It's quite disappointing really.
We wage pointless wars to extract resources from countries we don't want to negotiate fairly with in the name of riches and greed and frankly we've got better things we could and should be doing.
In fairness to humanity, We've been around for 195,000 years but we only hit the critical mass of modern technology in the last few centuries, progress since then has been incredibly rapid against pretty much any natural timescale.
So it's more like 194,700 years of stumbling around tripping over our feet and 300 years of actually making progress.
We went from steam engines to the moon in <300 years.
Yes I'm aware ancient civilizations had made progress and fell back but nothing like the civilizations we have now in an absolute sense, it's really fair to compare a Xeon processor to anything that went before.
Its very possible humans may have been advanced enough within last 30000 years and could've nearly killed itself off the face of earth. We may be descendants of some tribe living in very primitive conditions who started with old generation tech artifacts. Could we have built pyramid with tech we(the current humans) had a thousands of years ago? I think those tech and knowledge has been looted/confiscated by people(us) who invented looting and overtime got destroyed as they didn't have the know-how required to operate or maintain it. Old technologically advanced humans may have never researched on to build weapons as there was no need for it until someone invented killing and looting them, but by then there wasn't enough time to develop defensive weapons. So theyall died and got there tech destroyed and looted by us. We may have only recently within last 2000 years started to develop tech.
Any technologically advanced civilization would have disturbed the earth in ways that would still have shown today (mining, top soil removal, vast irrigation works etc) as well as used at least some of the natural resources, We'd find strangely high concentrations of materials even if it was spoil.
Advanced technologies don't just spring out the ground full formed, you have to bootstrap up the tech tree, something as 'simple' as an iPhone requires vast industrial capabilities backing it from mining and refining the metals, the oils for the plastics, the silicon for the processors, the copper for the traces, each piece of technology is the center of a massive web of interconnected industries and finally people, for advanced technologies you need thousands/tens of thousands of specialists in every single part of the production chain.
People worry about flying when stastically they are far more likely to die on the drive to the airport.
They worry about terroism when they are 50lbs overweight.
...and on and on, You'd rather hope the government would be better at assessing these risks in terms of a policy framework but they aren't they appeal to whatever the papers are focussing on and subscribe to the "we must do something, this is something ergo we must do it" school of thought.
It's worrying how far we haven't come.