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I 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 rela

• beamatronic 6y ago
  “Intelligent life” destroyed its own climate so a few could profit. “Intelligent life” won’t wear masks.
  • tlb 6y ago
    While 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Even 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.
• bserge 6y ago
  Or we just can't detect any, and neither can they. Space is incredibly vast, and interstellar travel and communication might actually be insurmountable obstacles. We're really optimistic about it, dreaming up FTL and stuff, but it may turn out to be just... impossible.
  • dcolkitt 6y ago
    You don't need FTL or anything exotic. On the scale of O(100 million) years, expansion at 0.001c is enough to colonize the galaxy. A general purpose von Neumann probe is not that far off. Self-replicating micro-machinery and reasonably intelligent robots already seem on the horizon. Unless there's truly some unforeseen roadblock, certainly within 1000 years of current growth. A 1 KG probe at 0.001c takes about 90 gigajoules of energy. On the order of what an Airbus A380 uses at cruising speed. Given lots of patience, and an only slightly higher level of current technological development, interstellar colonization does not seem like an insurmountable challenge.
    • bserge 6y ago
      Yes, I'm talking about "within a lifetime" and with feedback/observable results. As it is, that kind of colonization would mean nothing to Earthers. 10-20 generations and it will most likely be all but forgotten. Zero impact on our solar system. Might as well be a story in a videogame. Perhaps it would be worth it if we worked on extending our lifespans first.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      I hope you enjoy your 4367 year ride to Alpha centauri. How will you power the probe without fusion and why would anyone be there on earth to check the probe's reports?
• Balgair 6y ago
  Two things: 1) Our knowledge of physics is still very small. ~20% of the universe is 'dark matter'. All we really know about it is that it falls down. It outweighs the stuff you, I, and the all the stars in existence are made out of by ~4x. The other ~75% of the universe is 'dark/negative energy'. We know even less about it beside that it seems to fall ... up (?). And it's the super majority of what we know it out there. Give it another 200 years, and even this understanding is going to be embarrassingly outdated. Any other civ that is just 10k years ahead of us is going to be working in physics that we can't even imagine. 2) That leads to the larger issue: Time. The difference in our lives and the lives of the earliest humans is literally astronomical, in that we have people living up in space now. That same rate of difference separates us from any neighbors out there. Their understanding of our universe is likely to be so vast that we're essentially amoeba to them. Though intelligent life may exist out there in bushels, we're still infants in what 'intelligent' means. We may be surrounded by olde gods rendering us effectively alone all the same, and those gods themselves surrounded by yet grander deities rendering them alone as well.
  • tyfon 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm not saying we are peak intelligence, but it took us almost 4 billion years to reach the point where we even can ask the question "Are we alone?". Much of the early universe had conditions that were not as stable and favourable as the last 4 billion years. I also think distance and time is preventing us from detecting any other like us, but I'm pretty sure some exists somewhere out there. It's just that the reality of physics (even with more knowledge) prevents easy travel and contacts. Another thing is that we have barely looked at the sky. The SETI project is very underfunded and most other projects have just recently started looking for planets and signatures that can indicate life (not intelligent life). Many think we have surveyed all of space in as much detail as our current technology allowed but we are _far_ from that.
• hermitcrab 6y ago
  You may be right. But you are also extrapolating from a single data point.