SwingingTheLamp ,

Honesty, I don't think that there is a Great Filter. The Fermi Paradox strikes me as not very well-reasoned. A whole hell of a lot of things would have to go exactly right for civilizations to make contact, rather than it being the default assumption. There are lots of filters, not just one Great one.

But the closest to a Great Filter is that space is really, really. stupendously big. The chances of even detecting each other across such distances is vanishingly small, much less traversing them. Add in the difficulty of jumping the metabolic energy gap to become complex life, and that could reduce the density of civilizations down to a level that they're just not close enough to each other in spacetime to admit even the possibility of contact. And we're hanging our hat on some highly-speculative concepts like alien mega-structures harnessing whole solar systems to allow detection.

I think a lot of persnickety, smaller filters combine to make interstellar contact between civilizations against long odds. Perhaps the best we'll get is spectral signatures from distant planets that are almost-conclusive proof of some sort of life.

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