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Nick Bostrom says it's one of the worst discoveries we could make. Especially if the life is complex like animal life. That would greatly increase the probabili

Nick Bostrom says it's one of the worst discoveries we could make. Especially if the life is complex like animal life. That would greatly increase the probability that the great filter is ahead of us instead of behind us.

aalleavitch 9y ago
Unless we find out that for some reason all life develops at more or less the same rate from the beginning of the universe. In which case our future could be very crowded. That, or the window of technological development that we can detect and are capable of recognizing as intelligent is very small. It's possible that superintelligence is all over the place, but we're unable to perceive or comprehend it, in the same way that a nematode is completely oblivious to human society. Once a society creates superintelligence, they might even "clean up" after themselves, so that traces of previous stages of their civilization aren't available for us to observe.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  So a cycle every 50,000 years or so?
  - m3kw9 9y ago
    Yeah like in Mass effect
- Houshalter 9y ago
  >all life develops at more or less the same rate I don't think that's likely. Earth is billions of years old but we have just been around for a few thousand. If we an alien world had evolved just a few thousand years earlier, it could have colonized the galaxy by now. We can't possibly be synced that perfectly. All sorts of random events, like asteroid collisions, had a huge impact on the timing of our evolution. >we're unable to perceive or comprehend it That doesn't seem likely either. An advanced civilization could easily build many kinds of megastructures that would be detectable to us, like dyson spheres. I also think it's very unlikely they wouldn't interact with us. Either to help us if they were moral, or to exterminate us if they were not.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Life and human intelligence hasn't only been around for a few thousand though... it's been a few billion for all life and 40-50k yrs for modern humans. The fact the circumstances for intelligent beings took so long may have been random circumstance. There's no guarantee it would take that long on other planets to go from general life -> intelligent beings. The environments could easily be more welcoming to it, they may have had fewer extinction events restarting growth, etc, etc.
  - aalleavitch 9y ago
    Do you often care about what an innocuous population of nematodes are up to in the soil of your backyard? I think given the sheer differing scales of life it's more likely that superintelligence just really wouldn't care about any particular population of significantly less developed life for anything other than research purposes.
yakz 9y ago
While it's less interesting immediately, it's probably better for us in the long term if we're first.
m3kw9 9y ago
I really think the great filter is us destroying ourselves from by inventing something that goes out of control or just by war itself.
- rictic 9y ago
  The great filter can't just be something that wipes out most civilizations, it has to be something that wipes out essentially every civilization, and in such a way that doesn't propagate. I don't think war is enough by itself. Maybe war with the weapons of tomorrow. If it's as easy to make a nuclear-class weapon as it is to make a microwave, for example. That would probably be the end of us.
  - Houshalter 9y ago
    A sufficiently large scale nuclear war could easily set humanity back to preindustrial levels of development. And it's not certain to me that we would ever get back to where we were. The first industrial revolution was bootstrapped by easy to get to minerals and fossil fuels. Many of those have been used up.
    - nohat 9y ago
      The speed of bootstrapping would be greatly increased by the knowledge we have. Even a very serious nuclear war would leave significant caches of scientific and technological knowledge. Galactic timescales are so large that we could easily afford to spend thousands of years rebooting, even do so many times. Of course if there's some technology that is even more damaging (and easier to make) than nuclear weapons, we might have a good great filter candidate.
  - hliyan 9y ago
    I personally believe the Great Filter will be psychological. Our will to achieve things and propagate is in our brains. Future generations are likely to ask "Why do we have to move around a lot of matter and energy to achieve very minuscule electrical changes in a bunch of neurons, when we can short circuit the whole process and do those changes directly?" We're already kind of doing this with drugs and digital simulations...

aalleavitch 9y ago

Unless we find out that for some reason all life develops at more or less the same rate from the beginning of the universe. In which case our future could be very crowded. That, or the window of technological development that we can detect and are capable of recognizing as intelligent is very small. It's possible that superintelligence is all over the place, but we're unable to perceive or comprehend it, in the same way that a nematode is completely oblivious to human society. Once a society creates superintelligence, they might even "clean up" after themselves, so that traces of previous stages of their civilization aren't available for us to observe.

Baeocystin 9y ago
So a cycle every 50,000 years or so?
- m3kw9 9y ago
  Yeah like in Mass effect
Houshalter 9y ago
>all life develops at more or less the same rate I don't think that's likely. Earth is billions of years old but we have just been around for a few thousand. If we an alien world had evolved just a few thousand years earlier, it could have colonized the galaxy by now. We can't possibly be synced that perfectly. All sorts of random events, like asteroid collisions, had a huge impact on the timing of our evolution. >we're unable to perceive or comprehend it That doesn't seem likely either. An advanced civilization could easily build many kinds of megastructures that would be detectable to us, like dyson spheres. I also think it's very unlikely they wouldn't interact with us. Either to help us if they were moral, or to exterminate us if they were not.
- dmix 9y ago
  Life and human intelligence hasn't only been around for a few thousand though... it's been a few billion for all life and 40-50k yrs for modern humans. The fact the circumstances for intelligent beings took so long may have been random circumstance. There's no guarantee it would take that long on other planets to go from general life -> intelligent beings. The environments could easily be more welcoming to it, they may have had fewer extinction events restarting growth, etc, etc.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  Do you often care about what an innocuous population of nematodes are up to in the soil of your backyard? I think given the sheer differing scales of life it's more likely that superintelligence just really wouldn't care about any particular population of significantly less developed life for anything other than research purposes.

yakz 9y ago

While it's less interesting immediately, it's probably better for us in the long term if we're first.

m3kw9 9y ago

I really think the great filter is us destroying ourselves from by inventing something that goes out of control or just by war itself.

rictic 9y ago
The great filter can't just be something that wipes out most civilizations, it has to be something that wipes out essentially every civilization, and in such a way that doesn't propagate. I don't think war is enough by itself. Maybe war with the weapons of tomorrow. If it's as easy to make a nuclear-class weapon as it is to make a microwave, for example. That would probably be the end of us.
- Houshalter 9y ago
  A sufficiently large scale nuclear war could easily set humanity back to preindustrial levels of development. And it's not certain to me that we would ever get back to where we were. The first industrial revolution was bootstrapped by easy to get to minerals and fossil fuels. Many of those have been used up.
  - nohat 9y ago
    The speed of bootstrapping would be greatly increased by the knowledge we have. Even a very serious nuclear war would leave significant caches of scientific and technological knowledge. Galactic timescales are so large that we could easily afford to spend thousands of years rebooting, even do so many times. Of course if there's some technology that is even more damaging (and easier to make) than nuclear weapons, we might have a good great filter candidate.
- hliyan 9y ago
  I personally believe the Great Filter will be psychological. Our will to achieve things and propagate is in our brains. Future generations are likely to ask "Why do we have to move around a lot of matter and energy to achieve very minuscule electrical changes in a bunch of neurons, when we can short circuit the whole process and do those changes directly?" We're already kind of doing this with drugs and digital simulations...