humanity wasn’t learning about it, they were creating it as an entity with their exhaustive research and memory enhancing drugs. It’s the old “Don’t think about the pink elephant” trick gone rouge because the habitual abuse of these memory enhancing drugs will create a concept so detailed that it takes on a life independent of your own, and in this case their imaginary worst case ‘what if’ is literally an idea that sprang to life and ate them like a manifest collective anxiety attack with real force behind it. Hitting it with a human memory glue bomb effectively crystalized it into being an entity in the past rather than an entity still moving through our present.