Apparently Earth has about 500 million years until photosynthesis begins to decline, which gives us such a large and beautiful potential future if we achieve a communist society. Also 90% of all the stars that will ever be born has been already. Idk maybe we are amongst the first intelligent civilizations to exist but maybe intelligent life terraforms themselves into extinction if they don’t overcome this filter.
I think it’s important to put things into perspective here. I’d argue that it’s highly unlikely we’d observe a civilization at a comparable level of development. Life on Earth appears around 4.5 billion years ago. Humans start evolving around 2.8 million years ago. Use of language appears around 100,000 years ago. Writing is invented around 5500 years ago.
Inventions of language and writing are the big milestone in this story. Before language was invented the only way information could be passed down from ancestors to offspring was via mutations in our DNA. If an individual learned some new idea it would be lost with them when they died. Language allowed humans to communicate ideas to future generations and start accumulating knowledge beyond what a single individual could hold in their head. Writing made this process even more efficient.
So, for millions of years of life on Earth no technological development happened. Then when language was invented humans started creating technology, and in what is a blink of an eye on cosmological scale, we went from living in caves to visiting space in our rocket ships. It’s worth taking a moment to really appreciate just how fast our technology evolved once we were able to start accumulating knowledge by using language and persisting information through writing.
Now let’s take a look at how technology itself has been evolving. Once we discovered radio communication we went through a noisy period where we were leaking a lot of our broadcasts into space, and within a span of a 100 years we started using more efficient communication, and encryption. If somebody intercepted our broadcasts today they would look like noise because they’re designed to look like noise. Our society today is utterly and completely unrecognizable to somebody from even a 100 years ago. If we don’t go extinct, I imagine that in another thousand years future humans will be completely alien to us as well.
So the period during which intelligent life would be recognizable to us during its course of evolution is infinitesimally small. The time between creating language and becoming an advanced technological society is measured in thousands of years, while evolution of life is measured in millions of years. Thus, the chance of two different intelligences finding each other at exact same stage of development where they might be able to communicate is incredibly unlikely.
I would also imagine that the biological phase for intelligent life is rather short. We’re likely to develop AIs with human style intelligence within a century, and they will be the ones to go out and explore the universe. Meat did not evolve to live in space, we’re adapted to gravity wells. An artificial life form could be engineered to thrive in space without ever needing to visit planets. This is the kind of life that’s most likely to be prolific in the universe. Furthermore, post biological intelligences would likely be running at much faster speeds than our mental processes operate on. What we consider real-time would be might we consider to be geological scales. Such beings might consider what we view as real time akin to the way we look at continental drift. We’re aware that it’s happening, but it’s of little interest to use on day to day basis. It’s quite possible that advanced civilizations become solipsistic and care little for the outside universe. And as corollary to that, they’re likely to focus on miniaturization rather than building thing bigger. To get faster processing speeds, you need to continue minituarizing things. Perhaps advanced civilizations are able to figure out how to harness energy from quantum fluctuations in the substrate of spacetime itself.
For all we know the Universe may be teeming with intelligent life and we just don’t recognize it as such. We might be like an ant hill next to a highway looking to see if there are other ant hills around. Or perhaps it’s operating on the opposite end of the scale equally invisible to us.
I mean youre assuming too many variables like they would be an agrarian society, they aren’t nomadic, their relations of production are less efficient than capitalism, they have desires, they do not have shared consciousness, their survival is dependent, etc.
Ooh, I’ve been curious on what the Marxist analysis of the Fermi Paradox is!
The great filter is that both the Earth and the solar system are a rare configuration. Also, it hasn’t been long enough since our Milky Way became habitable - it also has a Goldilocks zone, mind you.
Nothing personal, but isn’t this basically capitalist realism projected onto the entire universe? Capitalist realism being a term coined for where people feel so trapped in capitalism that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Like what reason is there to think other life in the universe would even go through the same phases of production. They’d have different geography, different access to natural resources and possibly types of them we’ve never seen, different biology, and different cultural development resulting from all of this.
I think, broadly, a less cynical reading is this; a universal constant might be that individuals within a collective will always tug and pull between distributive and accumulative resource management. Other species might experience an echo of our struggle filtered through their own conditions.
For as radically different as aliens could be I feel there’s an equal possibility that they could be mundanely similar in certain ways. It’s hard to imagine (based on our understanding of the universe) life evolving without natural selection giving way to evolution through competition and then pushing cognitive capacity by socialization etc. And if that path is typically followed I could easily see resource management being a broad filter for developing societies, wherein a struggle must be always be resolved where the collective is given priority. If not, the species is unable to reach a certain level of shared intellectual development for higher technologies/forms of society.
There would be exceptions to this of course, like the universe is infinite so there’s going to be wildly different conditions giving way to unimaginably different societies - but I can see where OP is coming from and am kinda inclined to agree it might be a trend out there.
I think your view is valid, but I also think it’s very “current lens in history” centric. The current conditions lend themselves toward people dooming about the future of humanity. Whether it’s fears of nuclear war or it’s crossing irreversible climate change feedback loops. These fears are real and valid, but are only a small blip in the overall history of humanity. Maybe this really is the end for most people or maybe it will one day be a footnote that was worked through and it may be seen in retrospect as something that obviously could be overcome.
Survival of life, of a species, is never guaranteed. From that standpoint, any number of things could result in the death of a civilization or even a species. But in the case of the human species, it has also gone on for a very long time and could yet go on for a very long time still.
I guess what I’m trying to get at is, the argument is not without any basis, but it also assumes a lot about similarity of systems and risks dipping into mechanical materialism with a sort of inevitability-based argument about the nature of development. We don’t yet even know if other life has ever existed in a similar way to humans, or does exist now. Personally, I’m not convinced that the basis of the Fermi Paradox is even meaningful to begin with, but maybe I’m underestimating the scientific knowledge that goes into it.
Yeah I think I agree with a lot of this too. Talking aliens in general is just a fun thought exercise and I trend towards a more boring ‘based on the available data’ read. It also makes me hopeful to think the solidarity I feel with mankind could extend even further.
My read on the Fermi paradox is also similarly noncommittal. I think it adds some texture to discussing the unknown but I agree there’s nothing actually tangible there.
The real “great filter” is the speed of light. Nothing is stopping other civilizations from reaching space. There might be thousands, millions, trillions of other spacefaring species out there. But they’re really far away and we will never meet because it is impossible to move fast enough to get anywhere in the grand scheme of things.
But they’re really far away and we will never meet because it is impossible to move fast enough
True, but one response to this is that if we balance that with cosmic timescales, then the “distance / speed” point becoes moot. Interstellar travel might be slow, but a probe sent out millions of years ago would’ve likely reached somewhere.
Well yeah it’d reach somewhere. Like inside a black hole, or inside a star, or inside a gas giant, or on a random planet, or on a random moon.
If some alien probe sent out millions of years ago crashed into Jupiter or one of its moons, we would never know.
Except that it is statistically extremely close to a zero percent chance that Voyager 1 will ever reach another planet through the entire future history of the universe. Space is big.
Space is big, time is long. We don’t have definite numbers on the scale of either, enough to say whether we’re playing in a small playground or a big one.
Unless they just stay home or all of the ones near us appeared in the last few thousand years, we would likely be able to see them, as taking all the energy of a star, or a few, are things that we can detect nearby to some extent.
And if at least some of them aren’t trying to take/handle their stars, the question becomes, “why wouldn’t they?”
I can’t for the life of me find the paper on it but I can summarize it, and if I do find it I will link it here. It has been theorized that the traits it took for humans to thrive in their preagricultural environment are the same ones that prevent us from making meaningful permanent societal change.
Greed is a moralization of resource hoarding, for example, and it would’ve been important for peoples’ survival at times. That trait would have never been able to take the shape as it has in modern industrial society in a more natural environment. Greed, nepotism, corruption, addictive tendencies, IDK like so many ‘negative’ qualities are actually useful survival tools even if they hurt people and you and I think of them as bad. They are bad, we’re right, but you can’t sperate us from them. They’re not even ‘human’ as they are shared by many animals too.
If we could’ve ended war and all come together peacefully we would have by now, we don’t have what it takes. Look the shortsighted way we handle climate change, look at what we prioritize over that. I wonder what a species that was capable of shedding natural important survival traits in favor of collective good would even look like. Not like the intelligent animals on this planet.
With all due respect, counterpoint:
Purest liberalism! There is no such thing as ‘human nature’, greed and corruption are features of life only in a particular form of political economy existing only at a particular time in history. Everything wrong with society and the planet at this time is the fault of capitalism, the precarious existence of which is maintained only by the constant vigil and deployment of violence by the capitalists and their lackeys.
It is not a human’s consciousness that determines their being, it is, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. People living in new social conditions would develop a new consciousness, and those new conditions can be brought about consciously by the united working class of the world.
A filter for us maybe, but it’s a shot in the dark if it’s happened to other intelligent life.
I definitely think that there are lots and lots of “great filters”, but that would just make them filters. So to say it correctly, Fermi was being unnecessarily grandiose about filters.
Capitalism might very well be a filter that ends our species. This is not to say that it is the only thing responsible for our demise. One might argue that something simpler, like agriculture, is a technological singularity which was required for and perhaps led to Capitalism. Is agricultural production something that filters out interstellar space-faring species?
But perhaps something as esoteric as the development of analytical reductionism can ultimately do a species in.
To elaborate on this: the Great Fiflter is not a “theory” in scientific terms, it is a hypothesis.
The Fermi paradox is not a question: where are all the aliens?
The Great Filter is just a hypothetical answer.
It could be Capitalism, but it could be something else. Class analysis works for us humans but maybe there exists some sort of life that jumps over the necessity of classes.
Like, maybe there exists some fungi-like hive mind species which cannot develop commodity fetishism or abstract labor. Everything would be concrete planned labor. Maybe its Great Filter is developing anything at all, since it’s also not a given that it would develop division of labor.
It took us thousands of years to develop division of labor after the development of agriculture. Maybe it didn’t need to happen.
idk, class-based society has existed for such a short while compared to human history that I don’t think it’s gonna matter much in the long run.
I’ve definitely given this a passing thought or two in the past. Perhaps the only species that survive the Great Filter are those who are able to move into a mode of production where there is no exploitation. I suppose that would hinge on alien society having a similar or even analagous economic development to humanity, though.
I’ve read a comment on a Subnautica video before that suggested that maybe fire is the Great Filter.
A civilization born underwater would never produce fire for example. There is also no guarantee that a flammable material like wood needs to exist.
We can only speculate, but it would be funny as hell if we have blazed through a lot of filters that look trivial to us but are absolutely rare in the Universe despite being essential for the development of productive forces.
That is, if the ocean planet has a chemical composition similar to ours.
