16 ms·
The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
- mellosouls 6y ago(1998)
- Ariarule 6y agoFor anyone noting the 1998 date and not already aware, Robin Hason is still writing on the topic off and on at the _Overcoming Bias_ blog, and has had a few posts on the topic just this month: "Why We Can’t See Grabby Aliens" -- more generally about life in the universe at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/why-we-cant-see-grabby-aliens.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/why-we-cant-see-grabb... and "Try-Menu-Combo Filter Steps" explicitly talking about the Great Filter idea some more at https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/try-menu-combo-filter-steps.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/try-menu-combo-filter...
- stevehawk 6y agoI love the theory of Great Filters. I'm pretty sure that #9 on the list should be "social media", though. Or in general, "self destructing human behavior."
- short_sells_poo 6y agoI have absolutely no education on the subject and have done almost zero research, but I wonder if this "Self Destructive Behavior of Humans" is merely the evolutionary local optimum of tribal behavior. Historically, it has been an advantage to have a strongly tribal drive. Cohesive groups achieved much more than individuals and yet were small enough that they could effectively self-police and agree on common goals. However, as the capabilities of each tribe increased and the world became smaller through travel (and now the internet), tribalism, us-versus-them still remain part of our basic instincts and subconscious, however it is now the source of international and high powered conflicts. 10000 years ago, our tribal programming resulted in the survival of a group of families and the development of townships and emergence of societies. If a tribe got particularly bloodthirsty, their impact was almost purely local and perhaps eventually their notoriety resulted in a decline. Now, sticks and stones have been replaced by nuclear weapons and ICBMs. A first strike capability is no longer dangerous to just one village, but entire continents. Perhaps our technological evolution has outpaced our biological and social evolution, and the behavior that was optimal even 1000 years ago is now a grave danger?
- hotstickyballs 6y agoThis makes a lot of sense. Any intelligent organism will have to overcome the biological local optima that brought it to the intelligent state before further developing as a species. We already have explored a variety options, each with their own advantages and downsides: 1. Free individuals in a distributed system in a cottage industry economy. 2. Semi-free individuals who gather in tribes formed around value-generation (i.e. corporations). 3. Centralized system with individuals who are assigned functions. Future progress will have to be technological and will change what it means to operate in the afore-mentioned scenarios 1,2,3.
- slfnflctd 6y agoThis resonates with me. I've long said that if we are to launch any kind of significant space-faring civilization, we will need to some extent to become a different species, through cybernetics & drugs or genetic engineering (probably a mix). Our current biggest challenge is to make ourselves 'smarter' (i.e. less susceptible to the biases baked into our DNA). Otherwise, it's likely only a matter of time before we cripple ourselves into an extended Dark Age or worse. Constant setbacks resulting from too many of us having ignorant, emotional reactions to incomplete stories with insufficient facts means we're all dancing on shifting sand. It's not a good foundation upon which to build a durable interstellar civilization.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoWhen I was a kid ignorant people kept their thoughts in their heads safe and tucked away or maybe told a few people near them that knew better. Now they let them out on social media where they can find other ill-informed people and reinforce one another. I don’t know a way around this filter step. Maybe it naturally will resolve. As Stewart Brand said, information wants to be free. I will be optimistic enough to believe that means correct information. The science and empathy just isn’t well distributed yet. “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.” -William Gibson
- im3w1l 6y agoReligion is on the decline.
- dane-pgp 6y agoPerhaps that explains why people are increasingly adopting dangerous secular myths, such as those about vaccines and the Deep State.
- Shaanie 6y agoSeems unlikely, if that was the case then wouldn't you expect such things to be much more common in largely secular countries than the US?
- Reedx 6y agoI think it's just changing form. Old religions being replaced by new religions. Old priests with new priests. Old gods with new gods.
- nullc 6y ago"Information wants to be free" is a physical law, not a moral rallying cry. In many cases the promiscuous nature of information works heavily against human welfare. One aspect of that is that incorrect information spreads as well -- sometimes better-- than correct information.
- 6y ago
- rriepe 6y agoOne that seems obvious to me (but others cheer for) is curing aging.
- dane-pgp 6y ago> Or in general, "self destructing human behavior." That is definitely a credible theory, and it's currently catalogued as number 2.2 on Wikipedia's list of hypothetical explanations for the Fermi Paradox, where it is given the haunting title: "It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...
- shiftingleft 6y agoThe Fermi Paradox has essentially been resolved: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 This explanation is much more plausible than a Great Filter. Here's a great comment summarizing the argument very intuitively: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562439 I also found this one very helpful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564379
- sanxiyn 6y agoEh no? The paper basically IS a great filter argument. Life is rare and we are alone. That means there is a great filter behind us.
- shiftingleft 6y agoFrom the website: "The Great Silence implies that one or more of these steps are very improbable; there is a "Great Filter"" The paper argues against this in that you don't need a few very improbable. In fact, there are many parameter choices where none of the probabilities in the Drake equation are particularly low, yet the resulting number of intelligences is still staggeringly small. tl;dr: All parameters can be a bit lower. Then you don't need any events that are extremely improbable.
- rytill 6y agoBut one of the events must be the least likely. And why would it not be significantly less likely than the next least likely event, given that they are uncorrelated?
- seppel 6y ago> However, the result is extremely different if, rather than using point estimates, we take account of our uncertainty in the parameters by treating each parameter as if it were uniformly drawn from the interval [0, 0.2]. Monte Carlo simulation shows that this actually produces an empty galaxy 21.45 % of the time. Isn't that just elaborated way of saying that some of the parameters of the Drake equation have to be much smaller than we think?
- oli5679 6y agoRecent data from New horisons mission is interesting, suggesting there are an order of magnitude fewer galaxies (hundreds of billions, rather than 2 trillion) which should be relevant update to Fermi/great filter reasoning. The probe is near Pluto, and so able to sky 10 times darker than Hubble, but isn't observing the modelled galaxies extrapolated from Hubble observations. https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-finds-fewer-galaxies-than-first-thought https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-finds-fewer-galaxies-th...
- ben_w 6y agoThe source material linked to from that article is better than the article itself: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2021/news-2021-01 https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2021/news-2021... For example, it explains why the sky would be darker from the POV of Pluto than the POV of Earth orbit (Zodiacal dust is relevant at this level). That said, I’m still surprised that the estimate was ever as high as 2 trillion; I thought the estimate had been the lower 100 billion value for most of my life.
- hermitcrab 6y agoFox News has science articles? That is more surprising to me than the science reported.
- throw0101a 6y agoKurzgesagt has a ten minute video on the subject: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
- gizmodo59 6y agoWhen you realize that even if by some miracle we find a way to travel at really fast speeds we will never explore 99.99999% of the universe is mind boggling. This video by Kurzgesagt explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs
- TheMechanist 6y agoIt's low orbit pollution with high speed space junk by any technological civilization,resulting in an inevitable self-interdiction of space flight: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2000/03/23/a-handful-of-dust https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2000/03/23/...
- ericbarrett 6y agoI find this improbable. Kessler syndrome could well make it impossible to keep a satellite in orbit at certain altitudes. However it is unlikely to create a “shell” that prevents space flight entirely. Kessler in LEO would be cleared fairly quickly (a generation or less) and at higher orbits the debris would be less dense due to the volume of orbital space it covered, which expands at the square of altitude. If we were really determined to get off the planet, I don’t think it would stop us.
- andi999 6y agoI find the space colonization (outside own solar system) a bit too optimistic, while it is 'only' a technical problem, it still might be an impossible problem.
- qayxc 6y agoHm. I tend to think that it's not impossible, but simply very impractical. Outside of the very nearest neighbouring systems, any interstellar colony would instantly become an isolated new civilisation. There's simply no plausible way for interstellar trade or even just meaningful communication. All a colony at say, 82 Eridani - a sun-like star about 20 ly from Earth, would have a two-way communication time of 40 years. Even digital "goods" aren't worth exchanging if it takes 20 years to send them and another 20 years to receive any kind of payment. At a very optimistic 30% lightspeed, ships would take 67 years to get there. This means no one can make the journey within a single human lifetime, unless the lifespan is dramatically increased or some form of hibernation technology is used. In any case, colonists would be completely removed from Earth and all that effort pretty much requires a suitable target planet to be present. Without radical genetic changes, humans wouldn't be able to thrive and survive on a Super Earth or in poisonous atmospheres. So another factor would be spending tens of thousands of years and unfathomable amounts of energy terraforming planets or changing the human genome beyond recognition. The same issues would apply to extra-terrestrial intelligences as well, which is why I don't think interstellar colonisation would even be all that desirable in the first place. First you have to find a suitable host star. Next you need to find a matching planet. Then you need to scout potential candidates (likely using automated probes), which would take about a century even for just the nearest stars... While all this is certainly doable, it's really not all that attractive given that you instantly "lose" the colony anyway simply due to the distances involved.
- hermitcrab 6y agoI agree there isn't much benefit to a civilization of creating a colony too far away to be able to effectively communicate with (apart from the philosophical benefits of 'not putting all your eggs in one basket'). The isolation might be very attractive to some colonists though. Just as the pilgrim fathers sailed to america to escape religious persecution and start a new society. Whether a group smaller than a state or civilization would have enough resources to do this is another matter.
- gmuslera 6y agoReaching a conclusion with so many unknowns (specially unknown unknowns) is risky. That life must evolve in enough number of planets doesn't mean that the next one is close. And that interplanetary travel is practical doesn't mean that interstellar or intergalactic travel must be. And considering the speed of our current technological development, vs the time needed to get to the next stage in colonization, something big may emerge in the middle. Or something different and unexpected. In some way, we are like churches deciding what and how a god may think. We are not at the right stage to judge based on our lack of knowledge or perspective. It may not be just one road forward, and going galactic may be the wrong one. I prefer to take one step at a time, and solve our current roadblocks, if we can. Maybe we have the great filter in front of us in plain view and we can't recognize it.
- beamatronic 6y agoI agree and I’ve come to the conclusion that the highest moral purpose any intelligent beings can aspire to is to broadcast the information “You Are Not Alone!” by any means available.
- pixl97 6y agoUnless of course Dark Forest theory is correct.
- shrimp_emoji 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLC1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLC1 "DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS MESSAGE!" xD
- ethbr0 6y agoThe noun you're looking for is "hypothesis," and that's if we're being charitable.
- gmuslera 6y agoAt our current stage and philosophy, it may seem that way. That is the point. It may not be valid for most or all of civilizations (if they could be called that way) that are far from us in those and more points. The same goes for some assumptions behind the great filter concept, like exponential growth and biological needs. Maybe the ideal goal is just a silent self-suficient culture in an small outpost far away from any galaxy.
- Giorgi 6y agoI think it's much simpler than that: if there is intelligent life, it is at the same level of development that we are.
- meowster 6y agoI believe that's unlikely given that the universe is billions of years old, and many galaxies are older than ours.
- f6v 6y agoThe time between the emergence of procaryotes and the eukaryotes is estimated to be about 1 billion years. Last time I checked the Universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years. That’s just one order of magnitude between these two numbers. I don’t think it’s inconceivable that we’re the first intelligent life form. The life itself might be an extremely rare event. Multicellular life might be where the first great filter is.
- Izkata 6y agoAlso how long dinosaurs were around before the world reset and how quickly human civilization developed relative to that.
- patentatt 6y agoPeople always say that if life is possible, then there must be a bunch of aliens out in the universe. It may be unlikely, but one has to be first, maybe it’s us? It’s a somewhat comforting thought, I like it.
- hermitcrab 6y ago“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” - Arthur C. Clarke
- pretendscholar 6y agoLife in other galaxies is unlikely to physically leave its own galaxy just given the vast distances involved. Life in our own galaxy takes a number of inputs that take billions of years to produce.
- yboris 6y agoDissolving the Fermi Paradox by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, Toby Ord > "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe" https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
- antonvs 6y agoThanks a lot for that. It seems like an intuitive result to me, but it's great to have a more rigorous analysis, since people so love to trot out the Fermi Paradox and Great Filter as though they're unquestionable facts.
- perl4ever 6y agoAnother way one can look at it, I think, is that if there is about one civilization per galaxy, then there are billions or trillions of civilizations, but practically speaking we might as well be alone.
- antonvs 6y agoRight. But there could easily be hundreds or thousands of technological civilizations in the Milky Way, which has a diameter of over 100,000 light years. We wouldn't necessarily have spotted any of them yet, depending on how far away they are, when they exist(ed), what their tech level and orientation is, what's important to them, etc. The other argument people tend to pile on to try to claim that we should have seen something is the idea of expansion via colonization, or civilizations using enormous resources to broadcast messages, but all of these have there own huge set of problems. People try very hard to fill gaps in their knowledge even when it's not really possible to do so.
- perl4ever 6y agoBased on observation, I would guess: - Alien megastructures visible at long distances are plausibly not a thing, due to material limitations or something. - But, even very slow expansion into space should have covered the galaxy long ago, so the aliens should be here or in the archaeological record. A possible explanation for the latter is, what if the aliens are everywhere but they don't go near stars? Once you have a kind of generation ship that can function essentially forever in interstellar space, why would you risk going near a star or whatnot? That would also be consistent with the "dark forest" viewpoint.
- blamestross 6y agoLife is a search algorithm for energy utilization. Arguably the only evolutionary benefit of intelligence is the ability to bridge troughs between local optima farther than genetics alone can. It has limits as much as genetics does. We like to think of intelligence as some boundless forever bootstrapping superpower but all growth curves end up being sigmoid. The hard question is are we close to topping out or are we just waiting on the next punctuation in the equilibrium. I think future punctuations will be found in "what comes after intelligence" in the search for increasingly efficient energy utilization?
- carapace 6y agoEvery time this sort of thing comes up (the Fermi Paradox, the Great Silence) I like to point out that it says more about the person than the real world. To wit: there is no time or culture in the history of the world where humans have not been in contact with some kind of "otherworldly" intelligence. Personally, (not that anyone asked) I think we're in quarantine. I think that most intelligent species rapidly reach a peaceful "win-win" equilibrium, that we humans are rare or even unique in our violence, that this is because of some specific but forgotten event (maybe the Younger Dryas, I don't know) that traumatized us and triggered the development of agriculture and cities, that those are degenerate forms of civilization that perpetrate the trauma that leads to our current malfunctions, and that we are essentially in a hospice-type situation vis-à-vis the little green men. So, um, there? Have a nice day y'all.
- Izkata 6y ago> I think that most intelligent species rapidly reach a peaceful "win-win" equilibrium, that we humans are rare or even unique in our violence This reminds me of a short story where Earth exists in a Bermuda Triangle-like sector of space, known as the Veil of Madness, that all other civilizations avoid: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind
- oli5679 6y agoI was more open-minded to this type of argument a few decades ago. The quality of our sensors - both smartphones held by everyone, and telescopes, satellites and radar by governments has improved exponentially, without a corresponding increase in detection, so I think it's reasonably likely we are not currently in contact with otherworldly intelligence. Once I made this argument to a friend, and they sent me this xkcd comic. https://xkcd.com/1235/ https://xkcd.com/1235/
- shrimp_emoji 6y agoUnless the aliens stopped showing up because we've developed smartphones, and they were showing up so often in the 1900s because they knew it was their last shot of dorking around with plausible deniability before camera and telecomm tech became mainstream! The tin foil always finds a way.
- h4kor 6y agoClimate Change will be the great filter for humanity.
- cgrealy 6y agoCivilisation? Possibly. Humanity? Unlikely. Even in the absolute worst case scenarios, climate change doesn’t wipe out humanity. Life would be very different (and would frankly suck), but some humans would still survive. The question is how long it takes to get back to our current level (hopefully with lessons learned!)
- h4kor 6y agoYes we are probably not wiped out, but the current trajectory will bring us to a hot earth scenario. This will limited humanity (and most current life) to the pole regions or fully controlled closed environments as everything to close to the equator will be too hot for life. Under these circumstances we will be unable to become as space faring species. The worst part is that the hot earth is a stable system and returning to the our current state will take millennia.
- m0llusk 6y agoGeoffrey West's work on the laws of life and metabolism might provide some insight. He shows that adaptations tend toward crashes so that survival requires constant ongoing adaptation to avoid self disruption. This means it is highly likely that advanced civilizations will tend to crash whether it is from their own consumption of resources or catastrophic changes that go beyond capacity for adaptation.
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324566 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597461
- Animats 6y ago"Life Will Colonize" "So far, life on earth seems to have adapted its technology to fill every ecological niche it could." Not any more. As technology has advanced, and agriculture has become less labor intensive, there's been a sizable cutback in populated area in the US and Japan, at least. Farms in less productive areas are not competitive and those areas are emptying out.[1] Towns which serviced the farms are dying off with them.[2] [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-population-change-by-county-2010-2018/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-population-change-by-co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...
- edgyquant 6y agoNot to mention Antarctica is a whole continent that people do not live on
- aptwebapps 6y agoMaybe by the time a civilization achieves the tech needed to really expand, they no longer want to.
- tlholaday 6y ago> Maybe by the time a civilization achieves the tech needed to really expand, they no longer want to. Is that your candidate for the Great Filter?
- edgyquant 6y agoThat’s definitely what I believe
- aptwebapps 6y agoThat was what I meant, yes.
- thow-01187 6y agoColonizing and terraforming every single rock in the solar system increases the available land only by a factor of three: https://xkcd.com/1389/ https://xkcd.com/1389/ There's just no way every commoner gets their own Caribbean cabin. Unless we find some unlikely physics hack in the last few vestiges of scientific unknowns, any interstellar travel seems impossibly difficult. An alternative future: we live forever as brains in the vats, plugged into infinite virtual worlds devoid of scarcity, life-threatening danger or physical constraints. Most of the human activity takes place there, with occasional interactions between the virtual and the real. No new physics required, just a series of incremental improvements in biology and computing.
- PeterisP 6y agoIf we're being cynical, it's trivial to ensure that every commoner gets their own Carribean cabin - just reduce the number of commoners by a few orders of magnitude. After all, with some technological advancements, you would not need huge numbers of commoners just for their labor. A stable future can plausibly take many forms, not all of them are nice.
- jl2718 6y agoThe thing I keep seeing people miss is the narrow slice of time that we have existed in a technological state to be broadcasting and/or looking. Assuming exponential distribution, this is most likely to only last further as long as it has already. And with us as the only example, it would most likely be the same for others. So 50 years out of 5 billion on the planet and 3 billion since life began. Are there 100M stars within radio range? Do we even have time to point antennas at each one long enough to get a signal? That’s about 15 seconds each. How many bands do we need to scan in that time? Any hope of contact or expansion requires an extremely long period of sustainable existence in a state of constant technological development. Most of modern humanism is antithetical to this. The entire world today seems focused on expanding consumption. This is especially true of both colonialism and immigration. Economist today judge an economy by its internal consumption rather than older notions like export productivity. Seems like we’re going to have to reconsider policies and priorities if we want to make it out of here.
- api 6y agoI don’t think there is a singular great filter. Instead I suspect there is a relatively constant probability of a black swan event across the entire existence of a biosphere. It took over four billion years to get from simple replicators to what exists here now. It is quite possible that most biospheres simply don’t make it that long without such an event. We don’t know the probabilities, but over billions of years the continuous probability of biosphere extinction need not be very high to filter out almost all biospheres before they develop something capable of interstellar signaling or flight. Keep in mind that another prior we don’t know is the probability of a diverse biosphere developing this type of intelligence. We have no idea if that is likely or not even given sufficient time and energy inputs. Intergalactic flight is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar flight, which in turn is many orders of magnitude harder than interplanetary flight. If the probability limits such intelligences to no more than an average of 1-2 per galaxy then there is your answer. We would be extremely unlikely to see intelligent aliens any time soon, even if we do find a lot of microbes. Given where Earth is now I would be surprised if it does not hatch an interstellar scale intelligence at some point in the remainder of its habitable life. Will that be us? Hopefully so. Given that we are already almost there (on evolutionary time scales) it is reasonably likely it will be us or an AI we create.
- tyfon 6y agoI think the "great filter" is evolution itself. Life formed almost immediately that the conditions allowed for it. But it took over three billion years of relative stable conditions for it go go past the stage of single celled organisms and even the cell itself took a long time to form. Higher forms of life are only 500 million years old and the human line only started taking shape the last few million years. Personally I think the universe is teaming with life but intelligent/sentient life is exceedingly rare.
- beamatronic 6y ago“Intelligent life” destroyed its own climate so a few could profit. “Intelligent life” won’t wear masks.
- tlb 6y agoWhile those things are indeed dumb, all forms of human stupidity including wars have killed at most a few percent of any generation. At the Great Filter scale, those aren't a significant evolutionary pressure.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jug 6y agoI sometimes think of how Earth is so OLD. It’s a third of the age of the Universe. That is just mind boggling. While I have trouble mentally grasping ages on the magnitude “billions”, I do know what a third is. It’s a very sizable chunk. And for this very old thing with life as you say very early — it’s crazy how we’re here only now. The sample size is small though. I have no idea if quirks on the path took evolution unusually long or if we’re early, or what. Still, yes, this is something to consider.
- tyfon 6y agoEven more mind boggling, in Canada you can find bedrock that is 4.28 billion years old and have survived bombardments, erosion and plate tectonics. I'd like to have one of those rocks one day :) In my country (Norway) the oldest rock is "only" 3 billion years old, life was well underway at that time.
- orbgirlgi98 6y agoHumans are doomed to die at the Heat Death of the universe. Science tells us our universe had a definite beginning, the Big Bang, and that this event will not repeat: there will be no Big Crunch, no reboot. SciFi authors prefer to ignore science so they can imagine immortal humans who survive the cycle of infinitely rebooting universes. If we colonize the stars and galaxies we can postpone our death a few trillion trillion years, but eventually the last star will snuff out, the last black hole will evaporate, and there will be no energy left to power the phenomena of intelligence and consciousness, and life shall be no more. The last humans will have to bravely face certain and inevitable death just as our prehistoric ancestors did, and just as you and I must.
- deanCommie 6y agoThat's choosing an arbitrary finite point on an infinite spectrum. What is beyond the universe? What is beyond time? What IS the universe? We simply do not know the answers to these questions. Hell, we barely understand what consciousness and sentience is. Maybe by the time we make it to the heat death of the universe, we will have answered these questions, and can reverse entropy. Maybe not. But the quest to get these answers and to overcome our elements is what gives us purpose. Everything we do in our mortal lives stuck on the rock of our birth, is in one way or another, in the quest to achieve that. Some people find that too overwhelming, and choose either religion or nihilism. I think there is a middle ground.
- orbgirlgi98 6y agoYou don't need to fully understand something to know that it will die. I don't need to know what the billions of transistors in a MacBook CPU do in order to understand that the CPU will cease to compute if placed in an incinerator and burned to gas and ash. I don't need to understand how the human brain works in order to understand that it will no longer work when our star balloons to a red giant and incinerates the brain to gas and ash. You don't need to understand things in order to understand that they will end when physically destroyed. Everything in our universe will be physically destroyed at the Heat Death. Time, Space, Matter, and Energy will all end. There is no "middle ground". It will all end. If there is an eternal God who exists outside the universe and who will sustain the immortality of souls, as Plato thought 2400 years ago and all noteable Judeo-Christian philosophers have held, then something of humans will exist after the Heat Death. Otherwise, we know it will all die, and we don't need to know how it works to know that it will die.
- lumost 6y agoWhile it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity extinguishes itself, it's easy to imagine scenarios which make civilized society difficult, and could preclude future advanced civilizations from ever emerging on Earth, these may constitute a variety of "hidden filters" which make exiting ones own solar system or mustering the energy to make oneself known impractical. The article makes reference to a million year time horizon, however even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon. As we're all acutely aware, the great biochemical battery of fossil fuels is already operating on diminished capacity. Planet's such as mars lack the hydro-cycle to drive renewables, the organic legacy to support fossil fuels, and potentially the tectonics to enable surface extraction of nuclear fuels. While a theoretical expansion outside of the confines of earths gravity to acquire resources from asteroids, or produce high concentrations of solar energy is currently achievable on a 20-100 year time horizon, supporting the energy demands of the aerospace supply chain or considering regular space launches may be difficult in 2 centuries. On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive when considering the concentrated energy demands of blast furnaces or industrial mining. Similar collapse events have occurred historically due in part to the exhaustion of limited resources such as forests have occurred in the past in both Europe and polynesia. If a similar event occurred in the future it's entirely plausible that a future civilization would be unable to muster the resources to ever "unlock" the next set of energy production capabilities.
- UweSchmidt 6y agoScenarios where humanity extinguishes itself are easy to come by: We are still living under the threat of accidental or intentional launch of a great number of nuclear weapons. The remaining civilizations might be unable to survive or thrive with what's left. On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-tech.
- Retric 6y ago
- imhoguy 6y agoWhat if there is unlimited number of The Great Filters. What if we are already Nth contingency plan seeded on Earth by N-1th parent life form(s) woring about the same problem - to survive, replicate further onto closest places as N+1 backup.
- einpoklum 6y ago> among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. May soon reach? I doubt it. I'd say there's a significant filter between our technology level and large-scale inter-solar-system colonization. It's not at all clear that there is a strong motivation for that - except for a continuous-growth economy, which is kind of unsustainable anyway. Once the population stabilizes and human civilization is basically energy-neutral (i.e. not taking more than the sun provides), where's the great need to colonize someplace else (as opposed to communicating)? And if we don't stabilize - civilization will burn itself out soon enough, colonization or no. > Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter No it doesn't. It's extremely unlikely that one planet with life will travel to a different galaxy. Even with intelligent life it's extremely unlikely. Only if instantaneous travel were possible would this be likely.
- taylorius 6y agoI think technology acts as an amplifier to our impulses, both good and bad. The more technology, the more sensitive the balancing act, to stop civilisation going off the rails. We are not sufficiently balanced. The sort of tech required to conquer the stars, in human hands would probably lead us to wipe ourselves out within an hour of getting hold of it.
- dvh 6y agoCarbon is great filter
- SkyMarshal 6y agoI don't think we're far enough along in tinkering with subatomic physics or gravity to know whether we've passed the great filter or not. Hell, we haven't even managed to guarantee human rights to every person on the planet yet. We've got a ways to go.
- knome 6y agoI've wondered if the first of the great filters isn't simply water. Assuming something like octopuses evolved into a relatively long lived tool-using species with complex communication, they would be infinitely hampered by their environment. Even if they were lucky, as we were, and their planet had available great reserves of fossil fuels, they could not burn them. They cannot invent fire. Without fire, they have no way to invent metallurgy. Or glassworks. Or plastics. What are the odds of having enough water for life to spark without having so much of it that it blankets the surface? Anything evolving on worlds with little land seem unlikely to ever escape their world. Life could be commonplace, but if most worlds it evolves on are 99% water, we would never see it or hear it. The universe would be silent. It may be our luck in simply being terrestrial rather than aquatic that separates us from our apparently absent galactic cohabitants. Being in a position to be capable of taking advantage of burnable trees, and later coals and oils may be beyond rare in the universe.
- lisper 6y agoYou don't need land to have fire. It's enough to have photosynthesis producing free oxygen. That produces an energy store at the water-air interface. That would lead to life forms evolving to take advantage of the benefit of living at that boundary and that would eventually lead to the formation of biological rather than geological land masses. Hm, sounds like a good premise for a SciFi novel. :-)
- isaacgreyed 6y agoI may be misunderstanding the free oxygen part, but if that's the case why doesn't that happen in our ocean?
- lisper 6y agoBecause it's easier to harvest free oxygen on land. So since we have land, free-oxygen harvesters live there. Then they turn around and eat anything close to the surface that could evolve into a land-equivalent. But on an all-water planet, the putative bio-land makers would not have to compete with actual land-dwelling creatures because there wouldn't be any. [UPDATE] Just to be clear: there's obviously no way to know whether this would happen. I'm only arguing that it could happen, and so lack of land is not necessarily a show-stopper for industrial civilization to emerge.
- gumby 6y agoI don't see much of a future for sending people off earth. It's very complex and expensive to drag a bubble of earth along. We should just send robots and move all the messy stuff off the planet so we can try to restore the planet to being a human-oriented paradise.