What if the great filter of humanity is to overcome it's own nature that made it the dominant species of the planet and what if that is the universal great filter that makes the cosmos silent
Here's the thing about the question "where is everyone then?"
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
-Douglas Adams
We have had the ability to receive signals from space for roughly 100 years. 100 light year radius is NOTHING. Then there is the problem of the inverse square law making broadcast radio signals really hard to detect from that kind of distance.
100 years is an infinitesimal amount of time against the backdrop of the universe. Time is the great enemy here. Space and time are brutal masters.
To physically travel to the very closest star to our own would take over seventy thousand years at speeds we are currently capable of.
Space is almost entirely empty. The great filter could simply be trying to leave one's own planet for any length of time. We are forever isolated, forever tied to the planet from which we arose.
I like the idea that the Great Filter is really just civilizations turning inward. Like they all get to a point where they realize that space travel is just really not viable and so they stop looking to explore the universe or find other life. Instead they turn to virtual worlds to prolong their existence with what resources they have available in their own star systems. Not even Dyson spheres or anything, they just go into digital hibernation and live out the rest of their lifetimes in a fabricated paradise for however long they can. Maybe they're able to use drugs/genetics/whatever to slow time down to a crawl where it feels like they live thousands of years within a normal lifespan.
I don't think that's an "if" at all. I firmly believe that that's exactly it.
The same behaviours that we needed to evolve are harmful now that we've reached a potential "post-scarcity" stage.
To put it more bluntly, the drive to compete for resources in order to survive is what made us the dominant species. Now that post-scarcity is essentially upon us, our nature is to create artificial scarcity in order to satiate that drive for competition. And it will be the ultimate end of us.
The Archers, Pikes, Kirks succeeded by being bold and daring, confronting dangers, fighting to survive. The Siskos and Burnhams instigated war on a galactic scale. They were violent, reactive, risk takers
a couple centuries later, the Picards confronted greater obstacles but with reason, compassion, self-sacrifice. If Kirk had faced Q, that would have been the great filter, but Picard succeeded as a human evolved past his violent reactions
Wow, it’s like talking to an Alien ….. while I do occasionally use Windows, my main laptop is OSX, my home servers are Raspian and Suse and at work I use Red Hat, Debian and whatever Amazon Linux is, and my media consumption is Linux or iOS
Exactly. Everyone thought nuclear war might be one of the great filters but we survived the Cold War. Nuclear weapons are no longer a concern, right? Right?
The thing is we could largely retain all our advances and live in a more fecund environment. A large portion of our pollution is unnecessary and tied to whatever you call this global economic system / social paradigm we've backed ourselves into. It's only either or between forest and urban blight because we've made it so
The the DNA brick wall we've been climbing is exactly that.
You've reminded me of some of my favorite hip hop lyrics of all time. If you never heard Eyedea before he died (27 club, I think?), Eyedea had Eminem level potential. Fucking incredible lyricist. If this tickles your fancy, go peep the album First Born.
In the grand scale of the universe we aren't even a blip, any "permanent" damage we cause will be reversed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years after we've wiped ourselves out.
And even if there was some kind of damage that couldn't be reversed, the next cycle of life would just adapt to whatever the issue is
I mean the earth has already survived having the first moon crash into it, as well as a giant meteor that caused an ice age. We have t quite gotten to that level, yet.
Humanity aside, exterminating thousands of species of animals is just bad, not for any practical effect it has on humanity or "nature" but just because it, in itself, is morally bad.
The argument I've heard is that new species will evolve to fill new niches and one day earth will host the same biodiversity again.
I can't say I find that one anymore convincing. I'm with you on this, it's pretty gross how blasé some people are about dragging countless other species into extinction along with us.