4 ms·

Love the optimism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

• DennisP 7y ago
  It's entirely possible that the Great Filter is behind us. If life itself is extremely rare, then the only life that exists will necessarily have passed through it, and will look out on a near lifeless universe.
• wongarsu 7y ago
  If we assume a great filter exists and that we haven't passed it already, it follows that we should be concerned about events that could wipe out humanity (or human civilisation). Establishing at least one self-sustaining human colony outside earth, preferably followed by one outside the solar system, drastically lowers the number of possible doomsday scenarios. Everything from asteroid impacts to thermonuclear war and biological warfare to pandemics becomes much less likely to wipe us out if we live on more than one planet. The independence wars of those colonies might become brutal, but the small risk from interplanetary warfare is dwarfed by all the scenarios that are solved by inhabiting more than one planet.