Now, but it's not clear at all how it will evolve in the fairly near future :-).
But I generally agree with your point on evolution: it is a random process. We tend to "personify" it ("evolution chose to make us like this"), but that's wrong: species that evolved to being less fit died, those that evolved to be more fit survived. Pure chance.
I guess my point is that there is a tendency to say "evolution chose to make this because that's the optimal solution", where actually evolution may have "missed" the optimal solution.
But evolution is not an active process (of something choosing what's optimal), but a passive process (it does change, and some of those (random) changes win).
Or am I missing something?
In general it's unsurprising that selection misses hypothetical universal optima for the same reason it's unsurprising we didn't evolve wings even though that'd be an optimal way to escape lions. Evolution moves traits around fitness landscapes heavily contrained by exaptation. But interestingly many highly conserved mechanisms, e.g. essential cell machinery or metabolic pathways shared widely across the tree of life, have been shown to be maintained at absolute energetic and informational optima.
Do you have a link for your number, would be very interested.
This is rando google search for it (so double check) but material looks correct to me:
"An average inhabitant of the Earth nowadays has at their disposal nearly 700 times more useful energy than their ancestors had at the beginning of the 19th century. Moreover, within a lifetime of people born just after the Second World War the rate had more than tripled, from about 10 to 34 GJ/capita between 1950 and 2020. Translating the last rate into more readily imaginable equivalents, it is as if an average Earthling has every year at their personal disposal about 800 kilograms (0.8 tons, or nearly six barrels) of crude oil, or about 1.5 tons of good bituminous coal. And when put in terms of physical labor, it is as if 60 adults would be working non-stop, day and night, for each average person; and for the inhabitants of affluent countries this equivalent of steadily laboring adults would be, depending on the specific country, mostly between 200 and 240."
So looks like my number was quite low.
The references to "Earthlings" makes me suspect this quote was pulled from "How the World Really Works", since it starts out with a thought exercise using an extraplanetary observer watching the progress of human civilization over millennia. If you like this kind of information, I would highly recommend Energy and Civilization, it's a fantastic and eye-opening book.
Edit: confirmed, above quote is from "How the World..".
Evolution is not smart at all. It trends toward reproductive success and that's all. At the most basic level, natural selection is an emergent phenomena of an energy-scarce environment. That is no longer the case for humans. A single human now has access to orders of magnitude more energy than any of our ancestors. It no longer matters if keeping an individual from aging requires ten times the energy input of creating and raising a child. That entire realm of biological innovation is completely invisible to traditional evolution.