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You can choose to believe that we’ll make it past that event, and even do things to help your community and neighborhood in that spirit.

• pfdietz 3y ago
  If we run into another intelligence it is strong evidence we haven't made it past the Great Filter. Sure, you can choose to believe the opposite, but that's pure wishful thinking.
  • contravariant 3y ago
    That makes no sense to me. If there wasn't a great filter we would expect to find more intelligent life, if there were we would expect a much smaller probability of intelligent life. If an event makes an observation less likely then conversely such an observation also makes that event less likely, not the other way around.
    • pfdietz 3y ago
      The thing that has to be explained was why Earth was left alone for 4.55 billion years so we could evolve. Something prevented intelligences from colonizing it and exploiting it (and everywhere else we can see in the universe, as far as we can tell). That thing is called the Great Filter. Its existence is not in question, since we evolved. If we run into ETs that means intelligence must be extremely common (and mobile, since we ran into it) so the filter has to be very VERY effective. The most benign Great Filter would be in our past, if life or intelligence is very difficult for the universe to create. If it's not in our past, it's in our future, and it's going to clobber us with almost no chance of escape (after all, if we're not special, we have no better chance than any of the potentially vast number of ET civilizations it has already hit.)
    • generalizations 3y ago
      It's not a question of if there's a great filter. It's a question of whether or not we're already past it.