The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
Personally I think it’s photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.
I have no data to back that up, just a guess.
Boy, Lemmy sucks donkey dick. For every one legitimate answer there are two or three edgelord answers like “capitalism” and “the internet”.
Here’s an answer that hasn’t come up yet: cooperation among mono cellular organisms. I don’t mean the development of polyp analogues or colonies of single celled organisms; I mean getting down to mitochondria. Brace for wild oversimplification.
Before mitochondria, life had a hard time creating enough energy to do much more than barely stay alive. The current line of thinking is that one organism ate another and didn’t digest it. The two organisms worked symbiotically, one handled energy production and the other handled getting food and staying alive.
Just about every living thing utilizes mitochondria and if the current idea that mitochondria were actually symbiotic organisms is true, that means that what was likely a chance “sparing” of prey is the underpinning of all complex life.
The odds of that happening are ridiculously low. There could be simple life in tons of places even within our own star system, but if the mitochondria-like symbiotic capture never happens for those extraterrestrial organisms, then complex life is probably unlikely to develop.
Good answer. This seemed relevant enough to share, it’s certainly interesting. https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/
Maybe cooperation is hard wired just like competition. It might be less likely but hardly impossible.
I’d hardly describe it that way. It took untold trillions of predator/prey interactions over the hundreds of millions of years that single celled life existed for it to happen. That’s more or less brute forcing the problem and it took geologic timescales to happen.
If you ask me to point at a hurdle stopping civilizations from developing that looks awfully reasonable.
Ultimately we don’t know much about that era of time, but I suspect it was less like fumbling around for millions of years looking for a light switch, and more like the gradual warming of the planet with warmer and cooler seasons/years.
Iirc at least one of the other things related to development of eukaryotes was that atmospheric oxygen had to first be generated by early cyanobacteria.
So maybe that proverbial light switch was being flipped millions of times through random encounters but only became more viable after the voltage (atmospheric oxygen levels) became high enough. Maybe that’s the reason it took hundreds of millions of years, because transforming by bacteria just takes that long.
We just don’t know unfortunately. However, we DO know about species getting wiped out by asteroids or human cultures getting wiped out by disease or conflict with superior cultures. Any of these filters seems more of a hurdle to me than the development of eukaryotes.
Edgelord teenagers are a plague on lemmy
Still not as bad as reddit though
A - fucking - men
your paragraphs complaining about it are a lot more annoying than the people who might not be being totally serious on the internet for a minute.
If by “paragraphs” you mean two sentences, sure.
If you’d bothered to read past those two sentences you’d see that I was making an offhand comment before answering the question.
nah if you open up just insulting all the people around you, I don’t owe you reading the rest of your post.
Case in point for Lemmy being a shit hole.
I’m starting to wonder if its LLMs. An AGI is something we would be incredibly cautious around and is really no more likely to be psychopathic than any other living thing, the vast majority of which are not. LLMs on the other hand are pushed into every role techbros can shove them into while having less understanding of what they do than a housefly, the potential for damage is immense if someone decides to put one in charge of something important like infastructure or weaponry.
I think it would be nuclear warfare. Nuclear fission is a universal development for any advanced civilization. It would be easy to construct a nuclear bomb in an advanced civilization. Once a few rogue/pariah states start making them, everyone’s screwed.
Making nukes is easy, the only reason we don’t see more nuclear states on earth is because of the international backlash. With a couple more Iran and North Korea’s we’ll likely meet the filter ourselves.
I like the “Dark Forest” theory I learned from the Three Body Problem books. Basically it’s dumb for civilizations to make a big footprint and reveal themselves because other civilizations won’t know how powerful and dangerous you might become, and so out of precaution they might just zap you. Ironic and over dramatic, but just because that’s a possibility it might be wise to keep a low profile and not invite trouble.
The “Dark Forest” is fine for a scary sci-fi series, but it has many flaws that make it unrealistic as a real solution to the Fermi paradox.
- Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. We should have been wiped out long ago.
- The book series made up fantasy magic tech for how exactly a civilization can be destroyed by another without giving away their own location. I’ve yet to see an explanation for how that would be done in reality that doesn’t give away the attacker’s location.
- It doesn’t explain why nobody has colonized the galaxy.
I think others wouldn’t bother with us until we started demonstrating likelihood of using dangerous tech or crazy exponential expansion.
I don’t remember well, but I think civilizations stationed their defensive or offensive tech away from their own civilizations, just dispersed around.
I think its explanation for why no one or anything has colonized the galaxy though is that if anyone shows signs of becoming that strong, they get zapped. Nobody wants to see a neighbor rise up into a behemoth, you get that bold you’re a threat.
My real preferred theory of why we don’t see other civilizations though is that I think they choose more inward, VR, computer-based evolution that doesn’t result in big mega structures.
I think others wouldn’t bother with us until we started demonstrating likelihood of using dangerous tech or crazy exponential expansion.
Why do you think that, though? It doesn’t make sense, frankly - if you’re worried about competition evolving you shouldn’t wait until the last possible second to destroy it. That raises so many unnecessary risks of being slightly slow on the draw, and then it’s too late. Why not do it at the earliest convenience, when it’s super easy to do by comparison and there’s an incredibly long margin of error if you somehow miss the first couple of tries?
I don’t remember well, but I think civilizations stationed their defensive or offensive tech away from their own civilizations, just dispersed around.
I think its explanation for why no one or anything has colonized the galaxy though is that if anyone shows signs of becoming that strong, they get zapped.
But they’re already doing it, you just said they’re putting outposts out there. If they can’t do that secretly then the Dark Forest doesn’t work in the first place. Placing a secret weapon base in another solar system is no different from placing a colony there.
My real preferred theory of why we don’t see other civilizations though is that I think they choose more inward, VR, computer-based evolution that doesn’t result in big mega structures.
As with many Fermi paradox solutions this one fails on account of requiring every single civilization (and every single subset of those civilizations) to all decide to do exactly the same thing, forever, with no exceptions. In a scenario like this what happens if a single subculture of a single advanced civilization decides for whatever reason that they prefer not to do that? They would be able to spread throughout the cosmos without opposition, everyone else is locked in their little dream boxes and therefore is basically irrelevant. It only needs to happen once, and the universe has been around for a very long time.
I agree, I don’t think they’d wait until the last possible moment when the civilization becomes super powerful or builds the mega weapon. I just mention it along the range of development to highlight the why.
I think they might let weaker civilizations keep going, though, just out of hope they wouldn’t be too mean. Also, zapping other civilizations when you don’t need to exposes yourself and your own aggression.
About the shift to VR /computer substrate worlds that wouldn’t have huge footprints, I agree that not all would do that, and it only takes one to go the big building and footprint route and it’s weird we don’t see it.
My guess then would be that maybe they do build big, but they just conceal well…? You get good enough tech at some point you can choose to be hard to see.
Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. We should have been wiped out long ago.
I believe the theory is that as civilizations broadcast a signal indicating life exists strong enough such that it is picked up by other civilizations, the dark forest theory applies. Essentially we haven’t broadcasted a signal loud enough to be picked up
But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.
We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.
This is quickly becoming beyond my knowledge pool, but does this assume that all life is intrinsically linked to oxygen?
It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.
There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.
Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.
Thanks! That’s a different way of looking at the problem that I hadn’t considered.
I’ve never read the three body problem (started it but just couldn’t finish…it was very slow paced and there were moments when the Chinese…I don’t want to call it propaganda but more like promotion…took me out of it, like the supposedly international coalition of scientists where the non Chinese ones were just cardboard cutouts) but I can speak to this:
The book series made up fantasy magic tech for how exactly a civilization can be destroyed by another without giving away their own location. I’ve yet to see an explanation for how that would be done in reality that doesn’t give away the attacker’s location.
Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits. Sure, you can calculate the origin of the missile after it obliterates its target, but it’s almost impossible to form a counterattack especially if the attacker just yoinked an asteroid from a different star system than their own and strapped an engine on it. And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.
And a rock moving at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light could obliterate the Earth.
Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits.
This is a very common answer to “how”, but it comes with lots of problems in the Dark Forest context.
- If you actually calculate how much energy is required to boost a big rock up to that speed you run into lots of difficulties. It takes a lot, a heck of a lot. How does a civilization that is “hiding” accumulate that energy? How does it store it long-term?
- How is that energy actually put into the rock? This is basically a starship accelerating up to that speed and getting a starship up to that velocity is not easy even if you have the energy available. Does it have a rocket? The rocket equation for getting up to near-lightspeed requires ridiculous amounts of propellant. Is it beam-propelled? You’re not being at all stealthy that way. How much acceleration can you get out of your system? It takes a full year at one Earth gravity of acceleration to get up near lightspeed, and that’s a really high acceleration - you generally trade acceleration for efficiency so the faster you want to get up to speed the more energy you need and the noisier you’ll be.
- It actually is possible to counter an RKV. It’s much easier to hit and destroy an RKV than it is to launch it, all you need to do is get a pebble in its path. The key is detection, and the above points give some pretty good options for detecting it before and during launch. That gives you time to fire your countermeasures.
And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.
Absolutely not guaranteed to be the case. Earth’s civilization could have easily had offworld colonies by now if circumstances had been slightly different, so a Fermi paradox solution that requires reliably blowing up Earthlike civilizations before they can get offworld doesn’t work. They’re already too late.
As I said previously, Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. Why wait until something like an RKV is needed, and even that is not guaranteed? They could have destroyed life on Earth far easier, and thus far more stealthily, if they’d done it a billion years ago.
I agree, either we’ve escaped detection or the dark forest theory is wrong.
Couldn’t antimatter bursts get an object to extremely high speeds relatively cheaply?
Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.
Fair enough, guess it depends on how many resources they’re willing to sink into first strike capability. Maybe a strongly expansionist civilization would have such a more efficient use of resources it would quickly catch up to a dark forest predator trying to wipe them out. Like a swarm of piranha eating a shark.
Tbf we are noises as fuck. We’ve been sending so much out for decades.
Sure, but it’s just small game chatter. We start building a Dyson sphere powered starkiller cannon or some such nonsense we might pop up on somebody’s radar.
Military Industrial Complex: “Hold my beer”
The problem for the Fermi paradox is that there’s no reason to do stuff like that before we start colonizing other solar systems.
Also, how do you destroy a civilization that has a Dyson swarm already? That’s not exactly an easy task, and if you insist on remaining stealthy yourself it’s nigh impossible.
The galaxy is a bowl of M&Ms. One of every hundred M&Ms is poisoned and will immediately kill you. It’s only a 1% chance you’ll die. Well maybe pike 5% if you eat a handful.
Most of the civilizations might even be moral enough not to destroy us, but all it takes is one.
How do they do it, though? It’s not really a valid solution unless you can explain how it works, otherwise it’s just “maybe some magic happens that kills civilizations.”
Once a civilization has begun spreading to hundreds of other solar systems I have yet to hear of any plausible way to reliably “kill” it.
Guns? Bombs? Surely you can kill a civilization. Not sure why magic would be required.
I don’t think you’ve thought through the logistics required for the sort of war where you’d just go around and shoot everyone who lives in hundreds of solar systems. Even assuming they do nothing at all to defend themselves, how do you even find them all?
Yep exactly. Who knows how murderous other civs might be, maybe they’re nice but maybe not.
Everyone is talking about society or physiology stuff. That is just things that might get humans.
Stars going super-nova is the real great filter. Our sun is 4.6 billion years old. Life started 4 billion years ago. In 4 billion years, the sun goes supernova. We are halfway to the end of the earth.
Smaller stars last longer, but have smaller ranges that life can exist in - and planets tend to move in or out in their orbits. Bigger stars have giant habitable zones - but some large stars born when humans took their first steps are in their last decades of life. You couldn’t get from the pyramids to NASA in that time, never mind the 4 billion years it took to get to humans.
I think it’s supposed to actually less than that, the sun’s luminescence will increase over the next 1 billion years to the point that it will boil off the earth’s oceans. No life will be able to exist past that, and earth will just be a barren rock in orbit for the next 3 billion years.
Well I’m doing my part to make sure the oceans are full of Arctic ice for the great boil off
When they do boil off they need to make sure to have a hell of a lot of cocktail sauce and melted butter on hand.
While that is true I would counter point that humans have a bit of a handicap as earth got hit by a big astroid that killed just about everything on it making terran life have to start all over again but at the other hand I saw someone else on here mentioned that oil has given us a head start at space ferrang advancement and oil is made from dead life so granted I haven’t done much reacerch on how oil forms naturally but I do wonder if we would have oil if earth never got blown up but on top of all that there are theorys that mars used to have life so if astroids haven’t interfered with our solar system intelligent life may have formed faster and maybe twice also there used to be multiple species of humans in the past so maybe 4 or five times in the same solar system
That is an interesting idea that is not typically considered in the drake equation as far as I know. That could significantly reduce the chance of finding intelligent life elsewhere.
I think it is in the drake equation effectively, it factors into the length of time that the civilization might send and receive detectable signals - It doesn’t say why the Civilisation might collapse, but the planet becoming uninhabitable is surely one reason. On wikipedia for Drake Equation the Carl Sagan specification of L is in terms of the “fraction of planetary lifetime”.
I think a missing factor might be how directional transmission and receiving is, if we can’t broadcast to and listen to the whole sky equally then we might have a 1/r-cubed type issue with the chances of both listening and transmitting with enough strength/energy at the same time.
For us it’s conservatism and its synonyms.
Read like any history book.
Or just about any book, really.
I think that it’s you who should read more.
Here:
We propose that the global environmental crises of the Anthropocene are the outcome of a ratcheting process in long-term human evolution which has favoured groups of increased size and greater environmental exploitation. To explore this hypothesis, we review the changes in the human ecological niche. Evidence indicates the growth of the human niche has been facilitated by group-level cultural traits for environmental control. Following this logic, sustaining the biosphere under intense human use will probably require global cultural traits, including legal and technical systems. We investigate the conditions for the evolution of global cultural traits. We estimate that our species does not exhibit adequate population structure to evolve these traits. Our analysis suggests that characteristic patterns of human group-level cultural evolution created the Anthropocene and will work against global collective solutions to the environmental challenges it poses. We illustrate the implications of this theory with alternative evolutionary paths for humanity. We conclude that our species must alter longstanding patterns of cultural evolution to avoid environmental disaster and escalating between-group competition. We propose an applied research and policy programme with the goal of avoiding these outcomes.
Figure 2. Dimensions of environmental management create an attractor landscape for long-term human evolution. Environmental sustainability challenges (curved frontiers) require a minimum level of cooperation in a society of a certain minimum spatial size. Alternative potential paths move humanity toward different long-term evolutionary outcomes. In path B, competition between societies over common environmental resources creates cultural selection between groups for increasingly direct competition and conflict. Path A, growing cooperation between societies facilitates the emergence of global cultural traits to preserve shared environmental benefits.
A Great Filter is way, way bigger than that. Something that prevents a civilization from being able to expand into space. This includes things like “you can’t make fire on this planet and therefore are never able to learn to work metal” and “supernovas sterilize regions of space before species can leave them”.
Even the worst ecological disaster - one that kills billions - will not prevent humanity from eventually recovering, rebuilding, and expanding.
Under no circumstances (even Cold War mutually assured destruction) can human politics be a Great Filter. Thinking that it can be is small-minded and petty.
I see, so you don’t understand what’s happening on the planet.
Don’t worry, you’re not alone, you represent the majority.
There’s a lot of possibilities.
My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we’d have an explanation by now. It could be that it’s an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with “intelligent” but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don’t build civilizations or explore much.
Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.
Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don’t) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that’s invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function. So there.
conscious beings can’t be part of the wave function
That’s not how any of this works. Your brain is made out of regular matter, not special fancy matter.
I don’t know if the type of matter matters, rather I’m basing in on the idea that measurement collapses the wave function, and consciousness does measure things
Your brain isn’t what “collapses the wave function”, it’s the measuring device that you use. You can do a double slit experiment and watch it with your eyes the whole time. Light will still act as a wave until you interact with it experimentally.
You are reading too much Deepak Chopra. Your brain is just a computer made out of meat. It’s not magic.
For your final point, that’s not what that means. It’s not “observation” that collapses the wave function, at least as you’re understanding the word. It’s any interaction that requires the information to be known. That includes any particle interactions. It’s not consciousness that matters. When we “make a measurement” it’s only recording information of an interaction. It doesn’t actually matter that we record it, only that there was an interaction. There is zero metaphysical consciousness mumbo-jumbo involved.
That’s what I thought too, but according to Sabine Hossenfelder there actually is, we just choose not to speak about it. I don’t really know enough about quantum physics to make my own judgement.
That video makes no argument for consciousness being required. Also, Sabine is not a reliable source of information. She is confident and convincing, but that doesn’t make her accurate or correct.
For an example, not related to this topic: https://youtu.be/s7XAxiJGJdg?si=S0IkGdF_EV5If_wJ
Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.
Not just too spread out to make contact, too spread out to even detect each other’s presence
I don’t think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to “specialised generalists” would be a major hurdle.
Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.
Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.
I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.
Speaking of our moon, the fact that it’s roughly the same size as the sun as seen from earth and the fact that this is a complete coincidence blows my mind. Like there’s no reason for that to be the case. Total eclipses like ours (where you can see the corona) are very rare.
Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.
A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn’t just luck out with the moon’s large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.
That’s nuts. In two million years, humans will be sighing and saying wistfully “if I had a time machine, I’d want to go back to the time of the full eclipses, like 2024”
Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.
There seem to be so many coincidences that make our solar system unique that it’s really upsetting lol It’s like we are so perfect for stability because of things like Jupiter keeping the inner system “clean” of large impactors, our part of the galaxy being more “quiet” than typical as far as supernovae, stuff like that which makes it seem even less likely for life to exist anywhere else. :(
Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren’t actually that bad.
The problem is, we can’t detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won’t recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.
I think we’re the first. Or rather in the first wave of intelligent life. It could take a thousand years just for a message to reach us. On the theory that life has evolved to this point as fast as possible over the life of our Galaxy, there’s no filter. There just hasn’t been enough time for contact to occur.
Time itself is the filter. I don’t think we are the first, but I don’t think we will every find any other intelligent life. The universe is too big and our lives are far too short to make any sort of attempt to travel or communicate across those distances ourselves. I’m also not entirely confident our idea of what a society is will last in any meaningful way over the timespans required. Our longest lasting dynasties rarely make it more than a couple hundred years. Space is just too big for us to work with using our current understanding of physics.
Your answer doesn’t make sense.
“Photosynthesis” is a positive development for life. The great filter must be a negative development: it’s a filter or a barrier that keeps life from achieving long term extra terrestrial survival.
So “climate change” would be an answer. Or “fuel depletion” (to which photosynthesis may be a solution). But the filter is the mechanism by which life forms are prevented from progressing.
I was suggesting that photosynthesis is a very unlikely mutation to occur and thus its unlikeliness means most life, if it emerges, won’t progress to that stage.
The filter doesn’t have to be ahead of us, it could be some stage of development that we’ve already passed. Like photosynthesis, or the development of consciousness. If, out of all life that develops, only a tiny fraction ever develops photosynthesis, the universe would be largely devoid of any life that we can presently detect. Despite us being the lucky lifeform that did develop photosynthesis in our past.
Regardless: photosynthesis is a possible solution to avoid the filter. Not the filter itself.
You can’t filter something in
The failure to develop photosynthesis is the filter. I don’t know how you’re not getting this. No photosynthesis, no complex life, no sentience, no interstellar civilization.
You started here
Personally I think it’s photosynthesis.
Now you’re here
The failure to develop photosynthesis
I think you got it! Good job!
I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think you might be stupid.
Maybe it’s wisdom.
Every species that might have grown advanced enough, would have gotten over the point of fighting themselves. So they would be wise enough to have something like the Prime Directive in Star Trek (not interfering with less advanced species’ until they reach a certain milestone).
Capitalism I can imagine how capitalism could be inevitable. I can’t imagine enough controls on it to make it sustainable
My guess would be self-replicating biological organisms capable of significant rates of mutation.
But then my preferred solution to the paradox as a whole is basically the “nobody tries” idea.
I don’t think there’s tremendous reason to try to make ones-self detectable at long distances. It’s an expenditure of non-trivial resources for an uncertain result. Since there isn’t really any robustly sound logic for making the attempt outside of dramatized sci fi stories, I imagine a vanishingly small percentage of occurrences of intelligent life would make a serious, high-powered attempt at any point.
I don’t really subscribe to the theory, but I think the idea that alien races are all like “go to SPACE? Why the fuck would we do that?? It sucks up there!” is definitely the funniest solution to the Fermi paradox.
For a technological civilization like ours, I think it’s just that Earth/humans are weird and we’re past the main ones (like going from single-cell to multi-cellular organisms).
Having to overcome the physical obstacles on other planets rules out the type of spacefaring technological civilizations like ours. No matter how intelligent a civilization on a water world is, it’s not starting fires, much less building rockets. Just getting out of the water would be their space program. Even a totally Earth-like planet that’s a bit bigger and has an intelligent species wouldn’t be able to get to space with chemical rockets.
And also, humans are weird. It could be as basic as “we have hands for building complex tools.” We have a seemingly insatiable need to compete and explore, even beyond all logic—maybe no other intelligent species wants to strap someone to a rocket and send them to space because it sucks up there. We’re violent: without WWII and the Cold War, do we even have a space program?
So many things had to come together to create an intelligent, tool-building species with hands that lives on a planet with the right balance of land and water. As far as we know, it never even happened on Earth before and even then, we had thousands of years of civilizations before anyone was dumb enough to strap themselves to a rocket just to see what would happen.
I definitely subscribe to the “humans are insane” theory of galactic lifeforms
Exponential functions. Seriously. You meet crisis after crisis, each having a risk of ending civilization, but that risk never goes away. It keeps multiplying and multiplying, until you realize the risk curve is approaching a vertical line
Why would risk go up over time? For humanity, we’re pretty much at the point that very little could end our species now.
Well except, obviously, for humanity. That’s our greatest enemy, and it seems to be shown more frequently.
We would be hard pressed to end our own species either. Even global thermonuclear war would end civilization but not our species.
Edit: This mf just jinxed humanity
Depends on the amount of nukes.Acidifying oceans also dares a cascading effect that would wipe us out.Disease.Also, think about globale warming. The core of the sun is 27 million degrees. 130 degrees is enough to make the surface unbearable, higher than that is going to be>!!< uninhabitable.Also let’s not forget space is wild, meteors or GRBs can take us out instantlyUniverse 25 experiment. My take away from it is when society gets bored and loses goals it’s over. If the mice had some predators they probably wouldn’t have collapsed. Humans don’t have predators but have dreams that we worked toward amd stimulate us. Once we lose that it’s like what happened Walle. Stuck in a system slowly dying full of apathy.
