What do you think the Great Filter is?

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.

theneverfox ,
@theneverfox@pawb.social avatar

I don't think life is rare, nor photosynthesis, but complex life might be. A planet needs to be really thriving with life for it to be worth it to go down the path to something like animals

But I think the bigger filter is much stranger.

Humans are a hive-like species. We're not just social - we're insanely interdependent, we don't function on our own and yet we've ended up in this place where we (often) try to individually succeed, even at the cost to our community

We're greedy enough to want the stars, yet interdependent enough we could only swarm over them in endless numbers

There's many problems with the fermi "paradox", but personally I think one of the largest is assuming all species would spread like a cancer blotting out the stars

A more individualistic and long lived species might instead be careful explorers, taking what they need and leaving little sign of their passage. A more communal species might be careful and control themselves to not destroy pointlessly. They might also feel no desire to contact other species

We're just the right mix to want everything a star could give, and to want to find others at great energy cost

Cryophilia OP ,

God help the universe if we ever discover FTL travel and escape the prison of lightspeed.

MintyFresh ,

I have a new religion!

Prometheus didn't gift us fire and cognition. Lies. We are Prometheus's curse on the universe. Nothing more than a plague on the gods creation, concocted for some slight we can never understand. The sum of us, brought into being, then tossed into the void and forgotten. To spread like an oil stain across creation.

Cryophilia OP ,

"And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die." - Genesis 6:7

"If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." - Genghis Khan

Allero ,

I don't think there is a single universal Great filter, and living and then potentially sentient beings with various traits will face various obstacles.

First, life needs suitable materials for polymers and a lot of energy. Most places don't have both.

Next, basic blocks of life that would be self-replicating and adaptive should be randomly generated, which is extremely unlikely and literally took over a billion years on Earth, a planet with generally great conditions for such process.

Then, those blocks should be able to get together to form complex structures - ideally, many separate ones, so that one event wouldn't destroy the entire effort. Earth had it easy, with billions of super simple life forms.

Next, assuming life survived up to this point in a potentially unfriendly and ever-changing environment, bombarded by UV light and exposed to myriad of sources of damage, it should not destroy itself or environment too badly to never recover. Earth had periods when life generated too much carbon dioxide or too much oxygen (yes, that too was a thing), and those were critical points at which our story could very much end.

Then, life has to evolutionize and get into complex forms, either by forming multicellular organisms or by making a cell a powerhouse of everything.

Then, life has to get sentient, and some kind of response system should be available and get highly complex.

Then, most of the sentient creatures just won't be tribal, and civilization requires society and a common effort.

Then, many more won't be expansionist, and will die out in some small region.

Many also won't be competitive, which would slow down evolution.

For those species who are competitive, they shouldn't destroy each other while they're at it, and this is currently one of the risks of our own.

And after all that, they should develop space travel and either get as developed and decisive and resource-rich as to send a generational ship to some random planet named Earth populated by genocidal monkeys, or to somehow hyperdrive here. They can very much decide it's not worth it, and they may be so far away we couldn't see signs of their civilization.

LordGimp ,

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite scifi books and it deals with this question in an interesting way. It proposes that Time is the great filter. Life exists in this galaxy, but intelligent life is so fleeting when considering galactic distances that the probability of one sentient lifeform finding another during their "peaks" is vanishingly small. Extinction, societal collapse, evolution to a higher form, whatever you want to imagine, it all gets in the way of the fantasy of meeting a thinking being from another planet.

Maggoty ,

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.

LordGimp ,

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.

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

seriously though, I think life on other planets probably just usually evolves underground, so even if they develop some sort of intelligence they're not looking up at the sky so they have no motivation to explore beyond their atmosphere no matter how advanced they get.

there was a planet in The hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe that had thick cloud cover so that people never even conceived of an existence beyond their planet. when a spaceship crashed there, it never even occurred to them that it might have come from the sky

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

evidence of human existence has only gotten what, 150 lightyears out into space?

Cryophilia OP ,

Eh. The amount of oxygen in out atmosphere is pretty much impossible by non-living processes alone iirc. Anyone who can do astro-spectroscopy can probably tell there's life here, from thousands of light years away.

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

and if life is as abundant as we think, how are they going to tell the difference between intelligent and non-intelligent life

Cryophilia OP ,

Life is so rare, finding ANY life is worth investigation

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

that has nothing to do with why I asked that question lol. if you have to investigate every single one that shows signs of life, that would mean investigating a lot of worlds before you find any with intelligence.

HurlingDurling ,
@HurlingDurling@lemmy.world avatar

By the color of their hats /jk

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

sentience. I think it usually immediately leads to suicide

HANN ,

Even if you had a super intelligent species that can make Dyson spheres and travel at the speed of light the observable universe is beyond vast. I don't know much about cosmology or our ability to detect light but given humans have only been looking into the sky for a couple centuries, not being able to see a thimble in the ocean seems like a non issue. I think if you scale the observable universe down to the size of earth the speed of light becomes 0.05 mph.

oo1 ,

I think most lifeforms will have more pressing matters than wasting large amounts of time an energy blasting signals in to space for no reason, or listening to the sky.

Maybe those civilizations that waste more energy chasing aliens die off sooner due to wasting resources on sci-fi bullshit and ignoring their real problems at home.

Cryophilia OP ,

I disagree. I think there is no more important thing we have ever done or will ever do as a civilization, than try to make contact with alien life.

vxx ,

If there really is a cosmic web and information flows through it, the other solar system will know that we're coming to destroy another world, but it will have developed defensive techniques against a known disease, humans. The same our immune systems does to known viruses.

I went a bit creative with this one.

CheeseNoodle ,

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.

Foni ,
@Foni@lemm.ee avatar

Energy needed to leave your planetary system vs energy available on your planet of origin.

We have not yet overcome it and I am not sure that we will achieve it.

Cryophilia OP ,

Well, we've already sent a couple of probes out of the solar system, but they're not really going fast enough to have any meaningful interstellar impact.

Foni ,
@Foni@lemm.ee avatar

Yes, but I mean leaving the planetary system not only with isolated elements, but with parts of our civilization.

Anyolduser , (edited )

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.

Cryophilia OP ,

Edgelord teenagers are a plague on lemmy

Anyolduser ,

A - fucking - men

scottywh ,

Still not as bad as reddit though

Gregonar ,

Maybe cooperation is hard wired just like competition. It might be less likely but hardly impossible.

Anyolduser ,

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.

Gregonar ,

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.

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

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.

Anyolduser ,

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.

pelletbucket ,
@pelletbucket@lemm.ee avatar

nah if you open up just insulting all the people around you, I don't owe you reading the rest of your post.

Anyolduser ,

Case in point for Lemmy being a shit hole.

ChewTiger ,

Good answer.
This seemed relevant enough to share, it's certainly interesting.
https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/

veganpizza69 ,
@veganpizza69@lemmy.world avatar

For us it's conservatism and its synonyms.

Anyolduser ,

Read like any history book.

Or just about any book, really.

veganpizza69 ,
@veganpizza69@lemmy.world avatar

I think that it's you who should read more.

Here:

Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

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.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4c98d163-d037-41e0-9092-479db76236df.jpeg

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.

Anyolduser ,

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.

veganpizza69 ,
@veganpizza69@lemmy.world avatar

I see, so you don't understand what's happening on the planet.

Don't worry, you're not alone, you represent the majority.

nondescripthandle ,

I'm sure simply continuing to live will show me more about possible great filters than most teachers could unfortunately.

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