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That's a pretty shallow view of the Great Filter. Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, f
by bpodgursky 5y ago
That's a pretty shallow view of the Great Filter.
Your implicit assumption is that not a single other intelligent species decided to harness the universe by, for example, consuming stars for their raw matter, or building Dyson spheres to black out entire sections of the sky.
It is imo on you to explain why there's a hard cap on the exponential growth of intelligent life that prevents it from EVER reorganizing the universe in its own image. Not 99% of the time — that's not enough for these purposes.
- Ekaros 5y agoThe truth might be than physics are harsh mistress and there is no way to cheat. Thus actually working extra system space colonization is just not something that we or anyone else can do. Maybe even technology to do stellar engineering is out of reach.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoSpace colonization is best done by robotic ships. These could very well be plying the galaxy and just staying away from primitive life.
- jhgb 5y agoYou should still be able to see them, even from distance, if they have any reasonable power output. Stealth doesn't really work in space.
- cpuguy83 5y agoHaven't we lost satellites that are just orbiting our own planet?
- jhgb 5y agoMaybe we have, but those don't emit terawatts of power while trying to propel themselves in interstellar space.
- giantrobot 5y agoYou can only get so much power before something vaporizes. Some sort of ship emitting enough power to be detected at a non-trivial distance from Earth (see inverse square law) would vaporize itself. Just because stealth in space doesn't work doesn't automatically mean you can see everything in space at all times. We need to build giant telescopes to see stars thanks to the inverse square law. The bigger our telescopes with better light collection the narrower their field of view. An antimatter spaceship could fly past Pluto tomorrow and we could easily miss it since we can't monitor all 4πr^2 of the sky at once with powerful telescopes.
- jhgb 5y ago> Some sort of ship emitting enough power to be detected at a non-trivial distance from Earth (see inverse square law) would vaporize itself. Then you can say goodbye to those robotic spaceships. Note that I'm not claiming that they're possible -- I'm just saying that if they do exist, they're very detectable. > An antimatter spaceship could fly past Pluto tomorrow and we could easily miss it We can detect Voyager from way past Pluto, even though it emits only several dozen watts. I'm not sure how you'd miss an antimatter-powered spaceship at a comparable distance.
- zabzonk 5y ago> Space colonization is best done by robotic ships. But why do it? If you send a robot to (say) Alpha Centauri what have you actually acheived, at probably enormous cost?
- coenhyde 5y agoTo establish supply lines. If Alpha Centauri has something of value you could send out a self replicating robotic AI entity. It establishes its footing then start sending deliveries to Earth. If each one way trip takes 50 years, after say 120 years you could have a steady supply of resources.
- crygin 5y agoWe have no evidence that we will ever be able to build sufficiently adaptable systems to engage with unfamiliar environments without constant direct human intervention, which is not possible at light-year (or even light-second) ranges.
- goatlover 5y agoWould Alpha Centauri have resources we lack in our solar system? Mars, Venus, The asteroid belt, various moons and gas giants should be ample for anything we need.
- asdff 5y agoIt's also a hedge against issues with our sun.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoThis has always seemed like a hopeless star-eyed and wildly impractical idea. So your robot ship turns up and what happens then? If it's going to self-replicate it needs to recreate most of the features of an entire industrial civilisation. In our terms that would be metal refinement, chip manufacture, chemical life support and more - all done by bug-free software running on hardware which is perfectly error-free and reliable and lasts indefinitely. If it's going to seed biological (or equivalent) colonists it needs to be clever enough to find candidate planets with an ideal biosphere and no biological threats. Then it needs to teach the colonists how to survive and colonise. A lot of SETI and colonisation seems to be based a naive idea that all you have to do is get from A to B and you've solved your expansion problem. In reality propulsion is just the loading screen. Winning the game is a much harder challenge. So many things that can break, fail, be destroyed by chance, or go wrong because of design flaws that it's an insanely difficult problem without very much more advanced tech.
- bpodgursky 5y agoOk, but to be clear, this is an argument that there IS a "Great Filter". It's just a Great Filter that is in front of us rather than behind us.
- SemanticStrengh 5y agono this is a filter to technological progress/expansion, not a filter to life appearance and sustainability in the universe..
- Jach 5y agoIt seems some people in this thread need a reminder of what the Great Filter is: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html
- koheripbal 5y agoThe concept of the Great Filter is a shallow view on evolution. Humans are likely at the end of our biological evolution. The next steps of human artificial evolution will accelerate which means extra terrestrial intelligence is unrecognizable to us currently. We look for modern human-like civilizations, and those obviously won't exist much.
- asdff 5y agoHumans are not at the end of our biological evolution. Who produces offspring is still a matter of fitness.