Technological civilizations collapse under the built up complexity after using up the planet's shallow deposits of resources but before going to space. This always happens, because the fundamental laws of psychohistory require all societies reaching a certain stage to accumulate enough regulation and other complexity that the pace of technological and scientific development grinds to a standstill.
They just burn through all the resources while not doing much. The resource repletion makes it impossible to restart, and subsequent civilizations on the planet don't amount to anything.
The only way this doesn't happen is if the planet contains a sparsely inhabited & undeveloped continent that is:
located at a distance just right that is gets settled just in time for the industrial revolution,
gets settled by the most hard-working, open minded and freedom loving segment of the population,
is large and resource-rich enough that it becomes the most powerful force in the world just in time for the information age,
successfully fights off attempts to impose socialism by the rest of the world for long enough to get to space
1,000@skibidist Do you actually think this is the case, or are you just speculating/memeposting/whatever?
@Nightsquared Only trolling with the timing of the post since many people (and ChatGPT) like to put the US or a 'Trumpian stable totalitarian state' as the Great Filter in the bad sense.
Otherwise serious and something I have thought about a lot, but this is a pretty leaky & speculative reasoning, as I think ~all writing on the subject is. At minimum, I would claim that the USA-like entity is more important and less frequent than the right-sized Moon ensuring orbital/axial stability.