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Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but the main argument for the Great Filter is that we haven't observed any extraterrestrial life. If we started observing tha
by piptastic 6y ago
Hmm, maybe I'm missing something, but the main argument for the Great Filter is that we haven't observed any extraterrestrial life. If we started observing that life, that might just mean that so far our observation technology has not been good enough previously.
- dyingkneepad 6y agoYeah, detecting life could mean many things: - The filter is ahead us - There is no filter - The filter is behind us, but ahead of the other planet - Both planets have successfully got past the filter We'll still be debating :). Then we'll go crazy trying find evidence of life in more planets.
- adventured 6y agoAn addition to there is no filter (yet): - We're one of the first nearby and we're going to help build a filter The various AI we give birth to over the next two centuries are going to dominate several galaxies. There are many filters - competing standards - throughout the universe, our galaxy doesn't yet have one. Humans will cease to exist as we think of them now, within those two centuries (and not due to climate change or any other similar event).
- catwind7 6y agothat said, the likelihood of there being _no_ filter is still lower than the others. if we detect life so near to us and _yet_ we still have yet to encounter life from another planet means there's likely still _some_ kind of filter. So I don't think the likelihood of no filter is high if we detect life
- majkinetor 6y agoRather then apocaliptyical filter, the most probable reason is that space is so wast that even if advanced life was common, chance of meeting/observing one would be next to 0. Think about our civ living on a sand grain in the desert - the chance is almost 0 to encounter another civ living on sand grain on random desert location no matter how advanced your tech is.
- catwind7 6y agoyikes - that's true, we could still move life beyond earth and still never meet another civ. I didn't realize this at first but I was conflating the two
- est31 6y agoWe can't detect life at our stage of development from afar, or from earlier stages, but things that extremely advanced civilizations build like dyson spheres can't be hidden really. The issue is that the universe is extremely old compared to how long it took for earth to develop life. It's ample time for civilizations to develop technologies extremely far more advanced than ours. So why isn't there a single civilization that's so advanced that it builds these things? So there must be some "filter" that prevents civilizations from doing that, whether they are alive or dead. Maybe they just don't want to, but then ALL of them have to not want to do it, which would be weird. If we detect life close to us, it makes it more likely that there is tons of life around the galaxy, which makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. If we detect no life close to us, it makes it more likely that the filter is past us. See this Kurzgesagt video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
- TremendousJudge 6y agoI don't like that theory, it's completely limited by our current understanding of how a "more advanced" civilization would look like. If we haven't seen signs of what we think more advanced civilizations would look like, the simplest explanation is that what we think advanced civilizations are like is wrong
- oska 6y agoI agree. Saying that a Dyson Sphere is something that an 'extremely advanced civilization would build' presumes that we can project the course of civilization. Seems presumptuous and short sighted to me.
- Gibbon1 6y agoYeah a Dyson Sphere contains the presumption that an advanced alien civilization's population would grow exponentially like earths population did in the 20th century. I don't know how you square a utterly stupid idea like exponential population growth with the word advanced in advanced civilization. Instead this sounds like blinkered mid twentieth century thinking. Or the old science fiction trope of seeing the future as like the present but more of it.
- catwind7 6y agojust learned about the "great filter", very interesting. I think it does mean that our observation tech is not good previously - it also sounds like if we did start observing life, the fact that we have yet to be visited / colonized by that life form means only re-affirms the unlikelihood of interplanetary travel.. according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter): > So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.[4]
- bickeringyokel 6y agoImagine that, knowing there's intelligent life out there, but knowing we will never meaningfully interact with them because it's impossible to travel any useful distance or communicate in any real way. Even if we could travel vast distances, It seems likely if we discover any life out there it may be long dead by the time we get there.