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I'd say "a great filter is likely in the past." There could be more than one...

worldsayshi 9y ago
> The stars just don’t foretell our doom
DiThi 9y ago
What's why it says it doesn't imply our safety. It's called _the_ great filter because affects pretty much any attempt of intelligent life, and not because it's the only one.
- reubenswartz 9y ago
  I agree with what you're saying, I've just never liked the naming convention. ;-) There are probably lots of great filters that we've passed through already, and I imagine there are lots more "in front" of us, if we are good and lucky.
  - jerf 9y ago
    The reason it is called "the" great filter is similar to the sort of thinking that this PDF is attempting to debunk. If you optimistically assumed that the early Fermi terms are likely to be high, that therefore many civilizations must have gotten at least as far as ours, but there are still no aliens in the stars, then the logical conclusion is that there must be something standing between where we are now and galactic civilization, hence, the Great Filter. If on the other hand the early terms are much lower than expected, as this PDF is discussing, then the sum total of them could be considered the "Great Filter" and we could be past it. It's fine to just lump them together from our point of view, since at the moment we don't have the data to figure out which gate is "really" the determinative one. Wandering down my own thoughts here: The Copernican Principle, or perhaps better termed in modern parlance the Copernican Heuristic, that we are nothing particularly special, has had a good run. But it is just a heuristic, and one whose adherence has arguably been driven more by a science v. religion feud than logic or data, and whose underlying logic in the past 50ish years has metastasized into "Some religious people I don't like think Man is unique, they're wrong about everything, therefore Man is not unique in any way." But lately the Copernican Heuristic has been showing a lot of strain. Our solar system may not be unique, but it is increasingly looking like it may indeed be unusual, for instance. The Rare Earth arguments have never gone away and I think a lot of the dismissal of that idea has also come from "Religious people like the idea of the Rare Earth and some of them are arguing for it, religious people are wrong about everything, therefore Earth is not rare." [1], because scientifically they look as good as anything else on the subject (namely "those arguments seem to fit our lack of data as well as anything else", which is a pretty weak endorsement). And per the PDF under discussion, a lot of the universe really starts to make more sense when you start to seriously consider the possibility that, yes, we may in fact be very unusual, if not perhaps truly unique. [1]: Those are not the only arguments here, nor are they the best; I'm just saying that it is my subjective sense that the debate over the past few decades has often been very skewed by the underlying presence of this argument, even when not necessarily spoken. It is my perception that this debate has often been had under unspoken ground rules where all the discussion must occur in such a way as to ensure that the religious people are unable to point to anything as evidence for their side. It... doesn't make for the best conditions to do science under.

> The stars just don’t foretell our doom

What's why it says it doesn't imply our safety. It's called _the_ great filter because affects pretty much any attempt of intelligent life, and not because it's the only one.

reubenswartz 9y ago
I agree with what you're saying, I've just never liked the naming convention. ;-) There are probably lots of great filters that we've passed through already, and I imagine there are lots more "in front" of us, if we are good and lucky.
- jerf 9y ago
  The reason it is called "the" great filter is similar to the sort of thinking that this PDF is attempting to debunk. If you optimistically assumed that the early Fermi terms are likely to be high, that therefore many civilizations must have gotten at least as far as ours, but there are still no aliens in the stars, then the logical conclusion is that there must be something standing between where we are now and galactic civilization, hence, the Great Filter. If on the other hand the early terms are much lower than expected, as this PDF is discussing, then the sum total of them could be considered the "Great Filter" and we could be past it. It's fine to just lump them together from our point of view, since at the moment we don't have the data to figure out which gate is "really" the determinative one. Wandering down my own thoughts here: The Copernican Principle, or perhaps better termed in modern parlance the Copernican Heuristic, that we are nothing particularly special, has had a good run. But it is just a heuristic, and one whose adherence has arguably been driven more by a science v. religion feud than logic or data, and whose underlying logic in the past 50ish years has metastasized into "Some religious people I don't like think Man is unique, they're wrong about everything, therefore Man is not unique in any way." But lately the Copernican Heuristic has been showing a lot of strain. Our solar system may not be unique, but it is increasingly looking like it may indeed be unusual, for instance. The Rare Earth arguments have never gone away and I think a lot of the dismissal of that idea has also come from "Religious people like the idea of the Rare Earth and some of them are arguing for it, religious people are wrong about everything, therefore Earth is not rare." [1], because scientifically they look as good as anything else on the subject (namely "those arguments seem to fit our lack of data as well as anything else", which is a pretty weak endorsement). And per the PDF under discussion, a lot of the universe really starts to make more sense when you start to seriously consider the possibility that, yes, we may in fact be very unusual, if not perhaps truly unique. [1]: Those are not the only arguments here, nor are they the best; I'm just saying that it is my subjective sense that the debate over the past few decades has often been very skewed by the underlying presence of this argument, even when not necessarily spoken. It is my perception that this debate has often been had under unspoken ground rules where all the discussion must occur in such a way as to ensure that the religious people are unable to point to anything as evidence for their side. It... doesn't make for the best conditions to do science under.