10 ms·

I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing (2008) [pdf]

47 points by jules-jules 6y ago

voodoomagicman 6y ago
This is newly interesting in light of the recent pentagon UFO revelations (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-...). While these have low credibility, and even if true are likely not extraterrestrial, finding life on mars would change this calculation.
- acqq 6y ago
  > these have low credibility Lower then low, to the point that whenever somebody mentions them, I believe there was just a "wish to be true" and then stop. When checked, it was just a "rerelase" of the old already published material (one can also think about to whose benefit that distraction was) which was already carefully debunked by Mick West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus Mick West's full playlist with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCVnqTx_c0P3O2t https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCV... An article mentioning Mick West: https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-an-optical-explanation/ https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-a... Also, one day after NYT published their article "No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public" they published a correction too: "Correction: July 24, 2020 An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades. An earlier version also misstated the frequency with which the director of national intelligence is supposed to report on unidentified aerial phenomena. It is 180 days after enactment of the intelligence authorization act, not every six months." Emphasis mine, now imagine how many articles in how many media were written before the above correction, and it will explain what most of the consumers got as the message (namely, the first, utterly fake version with fake "crashes").
dougmwne 6y ago
Does anyone have a detailed analysis of why we believe we have the technology to detect distant alien civilizations? Given interstellar distances, travel between stars seems unlikely without some new science we don't know yet. Also, do we know we would be able to detect our own radio transmissions with our own telescopes from lighyears away? I think the great filter hypothesis always relied on the assumption that intelligent life would eventually develop Star Trek level technology and be extremely detectable, but what if we're near the end of what's physically possible with respect to energy production, speed, radio astronomy, and communications? What if the aliens are out there, but statistically so far away that we will never detect each other?
- eindiran 6y ago
  In the case you are talking about, the Great Filter is that technology advancing to Star Trek levels that allow colonizing star systems is unlikely or impossible (ie step 9 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter).
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  One issue with the way Bostrom and others frame the Fermi paradox is that they assume the teleological end of any intelligent civilization will be the maximisation of its exploitation of natural resources through the creation of self-replicating probes that will slowly populate the universe. That's why they think the Fermi paradox is a paradox - if there is life, it should be everywhere. That may well be a reflection of ourselves, however, rather than a universal motivation of intelligent life.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    I think the Fermi paradox simply underestimates the enormous difficulty and expense of traveling between solar systems.
    - 3pt14159 6y ago
      It won't be difficult once it has been figured out once. It won't be expensive once we've truly started to unleash energy from matter. On a geological timespan, the milky way is very explorable. I think the most likely reason there isn't any observable alien life is that we're being intentionally undisturbed. Or at least, seemingly undisturbed.
dhosek 6y ago
I'm afraid we're looking at a great filter event very soon. We're doing nothing about global warming, we've demonstrated that the United States has a significant fraction of its population which values short-term pleasure over the most basic work to prevent the spread of a pandemic (and we're likely to see these sorts of things happen more, not less frequently as we continue to encroach on wildlife habitat). I'm increasingly skeptical of the ability for civilization to make it into the 21st century.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  I really doubt global warming will lead to human extinction. Life might get harder in lots of ways, but it seems extremely unlikely to be an existential problem.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    Existential problem by itself? No. Existential threat multiplier? Probably yes.
    - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
      I don't see any clear way in which it is an existential threat multiplier.
  - Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    Sure, but there's a small chance that it will bring about the end of modern civilization. In that sense it will be civilization-ending. An interesting question is whether humans would be able to rebuild civilization after events like this. I think the main extinction risk is the secular trend for technology to become both more destructive and more decentralised. If that continues, it might only be a matter of time before independent actors will be able to extinguish the human race. And given the distribution of human motivations, if individuals can do it, someone will sooner or later.
    - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
jonshariat 6y ago
I always thought the notion of the "von Neumann probe" was odd. What is the motivation for a civilization to do this? It would be highly destructive, extremely destructive, and impossible to reverse. No one would set this in motion, right?
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Who wouldn't want to live forever?
- tomrod 6y ago
  It good be accidental or natural, not driven by sapience. Bad code that evolves, or an AI, or similar. Even memetic viruses. Give Existence by David Brin a read some time.
- gamegoblin 6y ago
  Consider that, to a very alien intelligence, humanity could look a lot like von Neumann probes. If we stay on our current technological trajectory without destroying ourselves, we will spread out into the galaxy, consuming more and more resources in order to produce more copies of ourselves. From a totally alien point of view, we might be as intelligent, conscious, or sapient to them as trees are to us. That is, we might as well be bio-robots. Von Neumann probes.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  As one sci-fi author pointed out, it only takes 1 highly xenophobic species to mess up a galaxy once you have von Neumann capabilities. And that’s an optimistic view compared to Dark Forest thinking.
ohazi 6y ago
God I can't stand Nick Bostrom. I think the great filter is definitely ahead of us, but I'm not so terrified by the implications of this (or so interested in being a pompous contrarian) that I'm moved to bury my head in the sand and publicly hope for stupid things. I hope we find current or ancient life on Mars, Europa, etc. because that would be interesting and exciting. It would bring no more additional existential dread than looking outside at your fellow idiot humans. Life is hard, and we're probably all going to die. Get over it. We can still hope to find interesting things while we're around to enjoy them.
- codezero 6y ago
  I'm not even sure who Nick Bostrom is, but thanks for your comment, it stands on its own :)
  - jules-jules 6y ago
    In case you were serious, Nick Bostrom is a philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director.
    - codezero 6y ago
      Yep I was, and thanks for doing emotional labor for me, I probably wouldn’t have bothered googling him :)
- camelNotation 6y ago
  "probably" No, you ARE going to die.
- xral 6y ago
  To be honest, actively hoping for evidence of our extinction is much more contrarian than this piece.
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I've always found these Fermi paradox arguments silly. Just by posing the problem in this way you are making lots of implicit assumptions which you pretend aren't there by dressing up the rest of your argument in faux rigor.
- jules-jules 6y ago
  What are some of the implicit assumptions in your view?
PlotCitizen 6y ago
This article reads alarmingly similar to the Kurzgesagt video about the great filter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM). Of course, the Great Filter isn't a new concept, but provided that this is an argument made by somebody other than the person who coined the term (that was Robin Hanson I believe), combined with the fact that I read almost the entire article before then going on to find the video, I find the two too similar to write it off to simple chance. There have been criticisms of Kurzgesagt in the past, one I can recall being the following, in video form (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dAGU-VJcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dAGU-VJcE). I've now found out that the original video was retracted and the creator issued a public apology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgHGslVdrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgHGslVdrg), in addition to Kurzgesagt committing to performing more scrutiny over their videos and citing their sources wherever possible. I do applaud this last step on their part, and I understand that you have to admit that the Great Filter video was published back in 2018 before this commitment was made, but something about the lack of attribution throughout the video doesn't sit right with me, still.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  FWIW, Great Filter is a really simple idea, and it's very well known in certain circles (e.g. LessWrong community, to formation of which Robin Hanson contributed). I personally had no idea Robin coined it, or that Bostrom wrote about it, despite reading some text of both - and yet I could still give the same explanation way before Kurzgesagt's video aired. Which is to say, I didn't find the lack of attribution worrisome in this video, because the idea is pretty much "public domain" in the circles interested about the future. It was (as you note) before the time when Kurzgesagt decided to get super-thorough about citing their sources, and I charitably assume that the authors of the video were just aware of the concept of the Great Filter, and not necessarily where they learned about it from. It's a simple idea, easy to explain, and easy to make inferences from - so it may not have occurred to them it's worth tracking down who originally coined the term.
piptastic 6y ago
Not sure I buy this argument... here are some random thoughts on why: 1) Someone has to be first. Let's say that there is no filter, and every species that doesn't destroy itself or get destroyed will eventually become technologically advanced to travel around meaningfully in space. There is a certain amount of time it will take for this to happen. Supposedly the universe is ~14B years old, and Earth is ~5B years old. It takes a certain amount of time for abiogenesis, a certain amount of time for life to evolve, and a species to emerge "victorious" long enough to start conquering the universe before the next extinction event. So we could be the "first", or the top 20% anyway, and it'll still take us a while for those top 20% to get anywhere where they can start detecting/traveling anywhere. 2) What is the maximum distance any extraterrestrial life could observe our technology/planet currently? Space is huge, like uncomprehendingly huge... even if we could go anywhere ourselves right now, would we go visit every single planet everywhere without a reason to? And how long would that take? Maybe there hasn't been enough time for a civilization to a) detect us from 100s of light years away and b) travel to us. Maybe detection of life from far away is impossible past a certain point, but traveling there isn't (since it just takes time). So I guess my thought is, yeah, we might not find life in our solar system, but we might. But even if we do, I don't necessarily think we'll get filtered out either.
- gaukes 6y ago
  I'm not so confident we're in the top 20%. Our galaxy is middle-aged. Our star is only 4.6 billion years old in a galaxy that is 13.51 billion years. There were several stars that blew up before we got the sun which means several systems and planets right in our neighborhood and that's just 1 star in the entire milky way. Even at 1% the speed of light, it would take 2 million years to travel across the milky way which, relative to the age of the galaxy, is nothing.
  - piptastic 6y ago
    Sure, but let's say you're on the other side of the milky way. You can travel at 1% the speed of light. Why would you come to Earth or anywhere near it? It takes 2 million years to get here, so unless you know something is there, that would be an insane trip to make.
ravitation 6y ago
Honestly, I find the argument that some specifically destructive event (or even a collection of events) would be pervasive enough among all intelligent species to serve as a "Great Filter" to be completely absurd. The chances that any of the examples he listed actually resulting in full extinction (or even an endless spacefaring handicap) are only moderate at best, not assured, even if they did occur. In fact, I think it's quite reasonable to expect that a species, having undergone such a destructive event and been left not extinct, would actually be pushed into space far more efficiently. With that in mind, it's certainly completely absurd to actively hope that monumental (possibly species altering) discoveries are not made.
motohagiography 6y ago
What do we typically believe now that we would no longer believe if there were an advanced species benevolently not hunting us for sport? I am trying to sort out what are the moral and ethical implications of humans not being the most intelligent or advanced species it is aware of.
valgor 6y ago
The thought that if the Great Filter is behind us and we kill ourselves is more depressing than the Great Filter is ahead of us and we kill ourselves. I'm not very concerned with which type of intelligent life expanses into the universe so long as at least one type does it successfully. Being human, AGI, or alien does not matter. So finding ETs or creating super power AGI would be a win in my book because it increases the changes that someone will make it.
jackfoxy 6y ago
I don't agree with the assumption of a single great filter. Why not many sufficient enough filters. Maybe one occurrence of any is sufficient to locally halt forever evolution to space-faring civilization, or successive occurrence of arbitrary filters at arbitrary intervals suffices.
- dyro 6y ago
  The author states the great filter could be composed of multiple filters towards the end of the paper. > Nothing in the above reasoning precludes the Great Filter from being located both behind us and ahead of us. It might both be extremely improbable that intelligent life should arise on any given planet, and very improbable that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space.
  - jackfoxy 6y ago
    Thanks, got bored and stopped reading before I got to that.
methodin 6y ago
If it was discovered that the laws of nature prevent a species from expanding into the universe through whatever mechanisms plausible, what would that do the idea of free will? Does free will require unbounded possibilities or would an upper bound rethink our idea of the universe?
- russholmes 6y ago
  There is no such thing as free will, is there? Decisions are a consequence of physical brain state.
pmdulaney 6y ago
The finding of extraterrestrial life wouldn't destroy my Christian worldview, but it would make things much less tidy. In his Mere Christianity, as I recall, C. S. Lewis opined that there probably was other intelligent life in the universe (i.e., other than God and the angels) and it left a bad taste in my mouth.
reeealloc 6y ago
The big assumption here that really bothers me is that any civilization that developed the technology to expand into the galaxy would've found us by now. That's so bogus. We can probably expand to Mars, but we're still bound by the speed of light.

47 points by jules-jules 6y ago

This is newly interesting in light of the recent pentagon UFO revelations (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-harry-reid-navy.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/us/politics/pentagon-ufo-...). While these have low credibility, and even if true are likely not extraterrestrial, finding life on mars would change this calculation.

acqq 6y ago
> these have low credibility Lower then low, to the point that whenever somebody mentions them, I believe there was just a "wish to be true" and then stop. When checked, it was just a "rerelase" of the old already published material (one can also think about to whose benefit that distraction was) which was already carefully debunked by Mick West: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7jcBGLIpus Mick West's full playlist with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCVnqTx_c0P3O2t https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-4ZqTjKmhn5Qr0tCHkCV... An article mentioning Mick West: https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-an-optical-explanation/ https://petapixel.com/2020/04/28/that-navy-ufo-footage-has-a... Also, one day after NYT published their article "No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon’s U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public" they published a correction too: "Correction: July 24, 2020 An earlier version of this article inaccurately rendered remarks attributed to Harry Reid, the retired Senate majority leader from Nevada. Mr. Reid said he believed that crashes of objects of unknown origin may have occurred and that retrieved materials should be studied; he did not say that crashes had occurred and that retrieved materials had been studied secretly for decades. An earlier version also misstated the frequency with which the director of national intelligence is supposed to report on unidentified aerial phenomena. It is 180 days after enactment of the intelligence authorization act, not every six months." Emphasis mine, now imagine how many articles in how many media were written before the above correction, and it will explain what most of the consumers got as the message (namely, the first, utterly fake version with fake "crashes").

dougmwne 6y ago

Does anyone have a detailed analysis of why we believe we have the technology to detect distant alien civilizations? Given interstellar distances, travel between stars seems unlikely without some new science we don't know yet. Also, do we know we would be able to detect our own radio transmissions with our own telescopes from lighyears away? I think the great filter hypothesis always relied on the assumption that intelligent life would eventually develop Star Trek level technology and be extremely detectable, but what if we're near the end of what's physically possible with respect to energy production, speed, radio astronomy, and communications? What if the aliens are out there, but statistically so far away that we will never detect each other?

eindiran 6y ago
In the case you are talking about, the Great Filter is that technology advancing to Star Trek levels that allow colonizing star systems is unlikely or impossible (ie step 9 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter).
Emma_Goldman 6y ago
One issue with the way Bostrom and others frame the Fermi paradox is that they assume the teleological end of any intelligent civilization will be the maximisation of its exploitation of natural resources through the creation of self-replicating probes that will slowly populate the universe. That's why they think the Fermi paradox is a paradox - if there is life, it should be everywhere. That may well be a reflection of ourselves, however, rather than a universal motivation of intelligent life.
- jandrese 6y ago
  I think the Fermi paradox simply underestimates the enormous difficulty and expense of traveling between solar systems.
  - 3pt14159 6y ago
    It won't be difficult once it has been figured out once. It won't be expensive once we've truly started to unleash energy from matter. On a geological timespan, the milky way is very explorable. I think the most likely reason there isn't any observable alien life is that we're being intentionally undisturbed. Or at least, seemingly undisturbed.

dhosek 6y ago

I'm afraid we're looking at a great filter event very soon. We're doing nothing about global warming, we've demonstrated that the United States has a significant fraction of its population which values short-term pleasure over the most basic work to prevent the spread of a pandemic (and we're likely to see these sorts of things happen more, not less frequently as we continue to encroach on wildlife habitat). I'm increasingly skeptical of the ability for civilization to make it into the 21st century.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago
I really doubt global warming will lead to human extinction. Life might get harder in lots of ways, but it seems extremely unlikely to be an existential problem.
- trenchgun 6y ago
  Existential problem by itself? No. Existential threat multiplier? Probably yes.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    I don't see any clear way in which it is an existential threat multiplier.
- Emma_Goldman 6y ago
  Sure, but there's a small chance that it will bring about the end of modern civilization. In that sense it will be civilization-ending. An interesting question is whether humans would be able to rebuild civilization after events like this. I think the main extinction risk is the secular trend for technology to become both more destructive and more decentralised. If that continues, it might only be a matter of time before independent actors will be able to extinguish the human race. And given the distribution of human motivations, if individuals can do it, someone will sooner or later.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago

jonshariat 6y ago

I always thought the notion of the "von Neumann probe" was odd. What is the motivation for a civilization to do this? It would be highly destructive, extremely destructive, and impossible to reverse. No one would set this in motion, right?

trenchgun 6y ago
Who wouldn't want to live forever?
tomrod 6y ago
It good be accidental or natural, not driven by sapience. Bad code that evolves, or an AI, or similar. Even memetic viruses. Give Existence by David Brin a read some time.
gamegoblin 6y ago
Consider that, to a very alien intelligence, humanity could look a lot like von Neumann probes. If we stay on our current technological trajectory without destroying ourselves, we will spread out into the galaxy, consuming more and more resources in order to produce more copies of ourselves. From a totally alien point of view, we might be as intelligent, conscious, or sapient to them as trees are to us. That is, we might as well be bio-robots. Von Neumann probes.
hindsightbias 6y ago
As one sci-fi author pointed out, it only takes 1 highly xenophobic species to mess up a galaxy once you have von Neumann capabilities. And that’s an optimistic view compared to Dark Forest thinking.

ohazi 6y ago

God I can't stand Nick Bostrom. I think the great filter is definitely ahead of us, but I'm not so terrified by the implications of this (or so interested in being a pompous contrarian) that I'm moved to bury my head in the sand and publicly hope for stupid things. I hope we find current or ancient life on Mars, Europa, etc. because that would be interesting and exciting. It would bring no more additional existential dread than looking outside at your fellow idiot humans. Life is hard, and we're probably all going to die. Get over it. We can still hope to find interesting things while we're around to enjoy them.

codezero 6y ago
I'm not even sure who Nick Bostrom is, but thanks for your comment, it stands on its own :)
- jules-jules 6y ago
  In case you were serious, Nick Bostrom is a philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director.
  - codezero 6y ago
    Yep I was, and thanks for doing emotional labor for me, I probably wouldn’t have bothered googling him :)
camelNotation 6y ago
"probably" No, you ARE going to die.
xral 6y ago
To be honest, actively hoping for evidence of our extinction is much more contrarian than this piece.

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

I've always found these Fermi paradox arguments silly. Just by posing the problem in this way you are making lots of implicit assumptions which you pretend aren't there by dressing up the rest of your argument in faux rigor.

jules-jules 6y ago
What are some of the implicit assumptions in your view?

PlotCitizen 6y ago

This article reads alarmingly similar to the Kurzgesagt video about the great filter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM). Of course, the Great Filter isn't a new concept, but provided that this is an argument made by somebody other than the person who coined the term (that was Robin Hanson I believe), combined with the fact that I read almost the entire article before then going on to find the video, I find the two too similar to write it off to simple chance. There have been criticisms of Kurzgesagt in the past, one I can recall being the following, in video form (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dAGU-VJcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2dAGU-VJcE). I've now found out that the original video was retracted and the creator issued a public apology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgHGslVdrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcgHGslVdrg), in addition to Kurzgesagt committing to performing more scrutiny over their videos and citing their sources wherever possible. I do applaud this last step on their part, and I understand that you have to admit that the Great Filter video was published back in 2018 before this commitment was made, but something about the lack of attribution throughout the video doesn't sit right with me, still.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
FWIW, Great Filter is a really simple idea, and it's very well known in certain circles (e.g. LessWrong community, to formation of which Robin Hanson contributed). I personally had no idea Robin coined it, or that Bostrom wrote about it, despite reading some text of both - and yet I could still give the same explanation way before Kurzgesagt's video aired. Which is to say, I didn't find the lack of attribution worrisome in this video, because the idea is pretty much "public domain" in the circles interested about the future. It was (as you note) before the time when Kurzgesagt decided to get super-thorough about citing their sources, and I charitably assume that the authors of the video were just aware of the concept of the Great Filter, and not necessarily where they learned about it from. It's a simple idea, easy to explain, and easy to make inferences from - so it may not have occurred to them it's worth tracking down who originally coined the term.

piptastic 6y ago

Not sure I buy this argument... here are some random thoughts on why: 1) Someone has to be first. Let's say that there is no filter, and every species that doesn't destroy itself or get destroyed will eventually become technologically advanced to travel around meaningfully in space. There is a certain amount of time it will take for this to happen. Supposedly the universe is ~14B years old, and Earth is ~5B years old. It takes a certain amount of time for abiogenesis, a certain amount of time for life to evolve, and a species to emerge "victorious" long enough to start conquering the universe before the next extinction event. So we could be the "first", or the top 20% anyway, and it'll still take us a while for those top 20% to get anywhere where they can start detecting/traveling anywhere. 2) What is the maximum distance any extraterrestrial life could observe our technology/planet currently? Space is huge, like uncomprehendingly huge... even if we could go anywhere ourselves right now, would we go visit every single planet everywhere without a reason to? And how long would that take? Maybe there hasn't been enough time for a civilization to a) detect us from 100s of light years away and b) travel to us. Maybe detection of life from far away is impossible past a certain point, but traveling there isn't (since it just takes time). So I guess my thought is, yeah, we might not find life in our solar system, but we might. But even if we do, I don't necessarily think we'll get filtered out either.

gaukes 6y ago
I'm not so confident we're in the top 20%. Our galaxy is middle-aged. Our star is only 4.6 billion years old in a galaxy that is 13.51 billion years. There were several stars that blew up before we got the sun which means several systems and planets right in our neighborhood and that's just 1 star in the entire milky way. Even at 1% the speed of light, it would take 2 million years to travel across the milky way which, relative to the age of the galaxy, is nothing.
- piptastic 6y ago
  Sure, but let's say you're on the other side of the milky way. You can travel at 1% the speed of light. Why would you come to Earth or anywhere near it? It takes 2 million years to get here, so unless you know something is there, that would be an insane trip to make.

ravitation 6y ago

Honestly, I find the argument that some specifically destructive event (or even a collection of events) would be pervasive enough among all intelligent species to serve as a "Great Filter" to be completely absurd. The chances that any of the examples he listed actually resulting in full extinction (or even an endless spacefaring handicap) are only moderate at best, not assured, even if they did occur. In fact, I think it's quite reasonable to expect that a species, having undergone such a destructive event and been left not extinct, would actually be pushed into space far more efficiently. With that in mind, it's certainly completely absurd to actively hope that monumental (possibly species altering) discoveries are not made.

motohagiography 6y ago

What do we typically believe now that we would no longer believe if there were an advanced species benevolently not hunting us for sport? I am trying to sort out what are the moral and ethical implications of humans not being the most intelligent or advanced species it is aware of.

valgor 6y ago

The thought that if the Great Filter is behind us and we kill ourselves is more depressing than the Great Filter is ahead of us and we kill ourselves. I'm not very concerned with which type of intelligent life expanses into the universe so long as at least one type does it successfully. Being human, AGI, or alien does not matter. So finding ETs or creating super power AGI would be a win in my book because it increases the changes that someone will make it.

jackfoxy 6y ago

I don't agree with the assumption of a single great filter. Why not many sufficient enough filters. Maybe one occurrence of any is sufficient to locally halt forever evolution to space-faring civilization, or successive occurrence of arbitrary filters at arbitrary intervals suffices.

dyro 6y ago
The author states the great filter could be composed of multiple filters towards the end of the paper. > Nothing in the above reasoning precludes the Great Filter from being located both behind us and ahead of us. It might both be extremely improbable that intelligent life should arise on any given planet, and very improbable that intelligent life, once evolved, should succeed in becoming advanced enough to colonize space.
- jackfoxy 6y ago
  Thanks, got bored and stopped reading before I got to that.

methodin 6y ago

If it was discovered that the laws of nature prevent a species from expanding into the universe through whatever mechanisms plausible, what would that do the idea of free will? Does free will require unbounded possibilities or would an upper bound rethink our idea of the universe?

russholmes 6y ago
There is no such thing as free will, is there? Decisions are a consequence of physical brain state.

pmdulaney 6y ago

The finding of extraterrestrial life wouldn't destroy my Christian worldview, but it would make things much less tidy. In his Mere Christianity, as I recall, C. S. Lewis opined that there probably was other intelligent life in the universe (i.e., other than God and the angels) and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

reeealloc 6y ago

The big assumption here that really bothers me is that any civilization that developed the technology to expand into the galaxy would've found us by now. That's so bogus. We can probably expand to Mars, but we're still bound by the speed of light.