4 ms·

There's good reason to believe that the Great Filter is not only behind us, it's way behind us. A Great Filter in the future would have to apply to the vast sp

There's good reason to believe that the Great Filter is not only behind us, it's way behind us. A Great Filter in the future would have to apply to the vast space of possible intelligent lifeforms. This means that no matter what the psychology of the intelligences that evolve--no matter what they value or attempt to create--they all get themselves killed somehow. Every intelligence would need its own unique story of how it died so quickly, and these are burdensome details on our theory. In contrast, the pre-biological past is simple and homogenized. Any Great Filter would be a regularity of physics and chemistry, which we know apply universally. If physics dictates that it's really hard for anything self-replicating to form (excluding trivial things like crystals and fire) then we've explained the lack of life everywhere. The theory is simpler, and Occam's razor tells us the simpler theory wins.

stavrianos 17y ago
The future answers don't need to be unique and convoluted. Offhand, there's Baxter's suggestion in "Manifold: Space" that epic-scale collapses of multi-star systems might happen more often than we think, with sterilizing effects on big chunks of space. Egan used a variation of this in "Diaspora".
- jeremyawon 17y ago
  the scenarios Baxter and Egan write about only push the Great Filter up to the moment of being able to create self-replicating probes (the most basic form of explosive colonization). i think that's actually the point after which filters have to contend with a diversity of "the psychology of the intelligences that evolve" (rather than at the emergence of biology, since biology is localized and subject to regularities in astrophysics such as supernovae). how far are we from being able to produce such probes, and could our psychology become so idiosyncratic between now and then that we wouldn't deploy them?
  - eru 17y ago
    I guess if we'd throw all our resources at it, the probes would not be far off. Hey, if we transported enough garbage up to Mars, now, some Microbes would probably survive, adapt and flourish.

stavrianos 17y ago

The future answers don't need to be unique and convoluted. Offhand, there's Baxter's suggestion in "Manifold: Space" that epic-scale collapses of multi-star systems might happen more often than we think, with sterilizing effects on big chunks of space. Egan used a variation of this in "Diaspora".

jeremyawon 17y ago
the scenarios Baxter and Egan write about only push the Great Filter up to the moment of being able to create self-replicating probes (the most basic form of explosive colonization). i think that's actually the point after which filters have to contend with a diversity of "the psychology of the intelligences that evolve" (rather than at the emergence of biology, since biology is localized and subject to regularities in astrophysics such as supernovae). how far are we from being able to produce such probes, and could our psychology become so idiosyncratic between now and then that we wouldn't deploy them?
- eru 17y ago
  I guess if we'd throw all our resources at it, the probes would not be far off. Hey, if we transported enough garbage up to Mars, now, some Microbes would probably survive, adapt and flourish.