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.

Melvin_Ferd , (edited )

Resources often get squandered on trivial vanity and novelty products instead of being channeled into advancing science and medicine. Imagine if we had a cosmic ledger tracking every resource used to develop simple items, like a pencil. It would show countless fires burned and animals consumed just to fuel the human ingenuity required for lumber, materials, and mining. Now, think about how many more resources are required for rockets, heat shields, and life support systems. Extend that to space stations, energy capture, and escaping Earth’s gravity.The resources on a planet are abundant, and nothing is ever truly destroyed. However, we’ve often allocated too much to building flat-screen TVs, leaving little for constructing even a modest space station in orbit, let alone an interstellar spaceship. It's as if the planet offers a finite amount of resources, challenging its inhabitants to focus on space travel. Only a species wise enough to stay on track can unlock the universe's resources. Otherwise, we risk ending up like Australian pines, choking ourselves out in our isolated star systems, having wasted our potential.

Imagine it like interstellar travelling having a single path to achieve it while the path to self destruction is limitless.

LodeMike ,

It's very very obviously the speed of light.

Contramuffin ,

My thought is the evolution of intelligent life itself. If you think about it, intelligence is contrary to most of the principles of evolution. You spend a shit ton of energy to think, and you don't really get much back for that investment until you start building a civilization.

As far as we can tell, sufficient intelligence to build technological civilizations has only evolved once in the entire history of the Earth, and even then humans almost went extinct

magikmw ,

I think it's incompetence.

Cryophilia OP ,

Fermi, to aliens: "git gud"

AA5B ,

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

Cryophilia OP ,

Why would risk go up over time? For humanity, we're pretty much at the point that very little could end our species now.

Brickhead92 ,

Well except, obviously, for humanity. That's our greatest enemy, and it seems to be shown more frequently.

Cryophilia OP ,

We would be hard pressed to end our own species either. Even global thermonuclear war would end civilization but not our species.

DeanFogg , (edited )

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 instantly

Spacehooks ,

Universe 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.

squirrelwithnut ,

We're currently in it. Failing to create a clean, renewable, and scalable energy source powerful enough to run a society that is ever increasing in both population and technology without destroying their only inhabited planet has got to be the most common great filter.

Asteroids strikes, super volcanoes, solar CMEs, and other planetary or cosmetic phenomena that exactly line up in both severity and timing are too rare IMO.

Every society that attempts to progress from Type 1 to Type 2 has to deal with energy production. Most will fail and they will either regress/stagnate or destroy themselves. Very few will successfully solve the energy problem before it is too late.

Tudsamfa ,

A filter for sure, but not a great one. Call me optimistic, but I don't think that will set us back more than 10.000 years. If humanity can survive, society will re-emerge, and we are back here 2-3000 years into the future.

Is +5°C Earth a good place to be? No. Will the majority of humans die? Absolutely. Will the descendants get to try this society thing again? I believe so.

On a cosmic scale 10.000 years is just a setback, and cannot be considered a great filter.

Kyrgizion ,

Unfortunately we've pretty much used up all easily available resources. Anyone 'starting over' would have a much harder time getting the things they need to really get the ball rolling again.

When humans first discovered gold they practically only had to scoop it out of rivers. You'll be hard pressed to find any streams with such appreciable production anywhere in the world today.

Cryophilia OP ,

We've already discovered fission and photocells. We're past the point of needing fossil fuels for a new civilization (or existing civilization). Fossil fuels are only hanging around for economic reasons.

Spacehooks ,

Assuming that knowledge and resource locations are retained. Roman's had great concrete. Took a long time to reestablish what Humans already had and mixing raw materials is not complicated.

After the Roman Empire, the use of burned lime and pozzolana was greatly reduced. Low kiln temperatures in the burning of lime, lack of pozzolana, and poor mixing all contributed to a decline in the quality of concrete and mortar

We need a Foundation project to restart society If we want to avoid this. Worst case solar cells becomes myth like Greek fire.

Tudsamfa ,

I think that is thinking a bit too narrow. A lot of the stuff we use today might just be our bronze to our successors iron - you can build an unstable society on either. And what we do use up today could still work if used more efficiently - we might not have enough rare metals to give everyone a smartphone in the post-post-apocalypse, but I could see us still launching satellites if only big governments had computers - because they did.

Tudsamfa ,

We have had Millions of years of (presumably) intelligent Dinosaurs on this planet, but only 200.000 years of mankind were enough to create Civilization IV, the best Strategy game and peak of life as we know it.

So clearly, Civilization™ is what sets us apart.

Jokes aside, the thing evolution on earth spend the most time on is getting from single celled life-forms to multicellular life (~2 billion years). If what earth life found difficult is difficult for all, multicellular collaboration is way harder than photosynthesis, which evolved roughly half a billion years after life formed.

naevaTheRat ,
@naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Sort of fallacious to go from one case of time to happen and derive probability from it.

I'm no biologist but I don't think any of our models of super early stuff are sophisticated enough to speculate on what stages are the most or least likely.

Tudsamfa ,

You are correct, but that doesn't mean I can't speculate about it.

The ability to do photosynthesis is widely distributed throughout the bacterial domain in six different phyla, with no apparent pattern of evolution., according to this random paper I found on the internet (I'm not a biologist either).

What I can glance is that photosynthesis has (probably) evolved independently 6 time in Bacteria and 3 times in Eukaryotes.

Plants evolved to photosynthesise after photosynthesising bacteria already existed for billions of years.

(But then we have to also acknowledge that multicellular life evolved like 25 times in Eukaryotes, and the Eukaryote - aka Mitochondria-"Powerhouse of the cell"-haver- is the real big step as it only happened once to our knowledge).

bradorsomething ,

The Dark Forest theory is a great answer to this paradox. Anyone more advanced has a rational choice to exterminate all competition. We haven’t found any other advanced life because it hasn’t shown up and killed us yet.

KevonLooney ,

Why would they eliminate the competition if it was way behind in technology? Do we eliminate uncontacted tribes because they might be "competition"?

If aliens exist they probably have rules against interfering with primitive species. We are more like a band of chimps than an uncontacted tribe.

bradorsomething ,

We don’t eliminate uncontacted groups any more because we’ve contacted everyone we want stuff from, and it didn’t work out well for them. Lower technology groups in the 1800’s submitted or were killed off. In a finite universe, any competition could one day try to take you out, so you take them out.

I don’t believe anyone can fathom another alien race, much less assign them ethical rules about interfering with other species. And apes are slowly being driven out of their habitat as we continue to expand.

weststadtgesicht ,

Who said that they eliminate competition that's way behind technologically? They haven't eliminated us, so apparently they don't.
But it seems plausible that they eliminate civilizations that are on the verge of becoming dangerous - still a great filter, but probably a bit further in the future.

CaptainBlagbird ,
@CaptainBlagbird@lemmy.world avatar

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).

Martineski ,

Time.

Cryophilia OP ,

Is on my side

bamfic ,

Yes it is

DeanFogg ,

Fear. Right now we're on the edge of facing fear or succumbing to it

rsuri ,

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.

KevonLooney ,

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.

rsuri ,

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

KevonLooney ,

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.

Cethin ,

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.

ammonium ,

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.

Cethin ,

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

Cryophilia OP ,

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

retrieval4558 ,

It's gotta be the development of what we recognize as "intelligent". Our brains are not the goal of evolution, just a weird thing that happened.

littlecolt ,
@littlecolt@lemm.ee avatar

I would say it's the size of the universe and the fact that it is still expanding at an accelerated rate.

If the speed of light is really the "top speed" of the universe, it is inadequate for interstellar travel. It is barely good enough for timely communication, and not really even that.

Life can be as likely as it wants to be, but it seems to me that we're all quite divided, to the point of not being able to communicate at all with other potential intelligent species.

androogee ,

Isn't the fermi paradox specifically dealing with detection tho? Not just travel or communication.

littlecolt ,
@littlecolt@lemm.ee avatar

I suppose I was focusing on detecting some sort of communications. It still matters that when we see objects at great distance in space, it's the objects in the distant past

Tlaloc_Temporal ,

This universe being unfriendly to interstellar and especially intergalactic travel would seriously hamper a galactic civilization, and thus be less likely for us to notice them.

There might be hundreds of civilizations out there, each having only expanded to a few dozen stars, not caring to go further. Even the makeup of the interstellar medium might be incredibly dangerous, basically necessitating generation ships to cross. Large scale expansion might simply be too hard.

SLVRDRGN ,

That expansion at an accelerated rate - that's just so eerie when you think about it. The furthest objects we can see right now will slip away out of reach forever for the next generation, and so on. It's crazy to think that as time goes on, there will be less and less universe to observe.

littlecolt ,
@littlecolt@lemm.ee avatar

One of the weirdest facts. One that really makes you feel so small.

androogee ,

That's something really interesting, though. When we look at distant objects, we aren't limited by the distance they're at right now. We're limited by the distance they were at when they emitted the light.

So the observable universe is still growing because the edge of that bubble is such a long time ago that everything was still much closer together.

SLVRDRGN ,

But the light that reaches us is constantly getting stretched (red-shifted), so I'm not sure that our bubble is growing. Instead when they're stretched too thin, we won't be able to see it. I'm not 100% sure on the expansion rate of the universe and the pace of red shifting.
Also, eventually all the galaxies are expected to be pushed so far away from each other due to the pressures exerted by Dark Energy, that soon we'll only be able to see just the stars of our Milky Way.

Tramort ,

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.

Cryophilia OP ,

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.

Tramort ,

Regardless: photosynthesis is a possible solution to avoid the filter. Not the filter itself.

You can't filter something in

Cryophilia OP ,

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.

Tramort ,

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!

Cryophilia OP ,

I'm sorry to tell you this, but I think you might be stupid.

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