Like, we’re destroying the one place we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy, but instead the world’s richest man is trying to expand to other planets while this one’s ability to sustain life is in jeopardy. IMO that makes us potentially a very stupid species compared to a species that doesn’t really care about meeting other aliens because they value the life on their own planet far more than we do.
The “great filter” is simply basic physics and chemistry, the Periodic Table of the Elements, the fundamental forces and engineering limits.
We’re not going there, they’re not coming here.
I think the universe being the same wall to wall means life is probably very common, and will follow pretty much the same rules and limits as here. We’re not special, neither are they.
I continue to read sci-fi under the lens that it represents our racial (as in human race) tendency to fear the other and enjoying war and destruction despite screaming that we’ve evolved beyond that. We’re a bunch of tribal war-like destructive plains apes with computers and guns.
Star Trek isn’t real, there will be no warp drives, transporters, Dyson spheres, Ringworlds, Space Elevators, or even just a basic flush toilet on the Moon.
Forget it. Build something worth living for here cuz out there is a deadly radiation-blasted nothing with nothing in it.
They not like us.
Maybe. But this would still only filter some.
The great filter to me is a vast mix of filters. Sime never leave their planets because they are oceanic only and forever, some because the gravity is too high to ever escape, some because they die out, others due to no genetic intrinsic motivation to expand at all, etc. There can by myriad possible filters all applying at the same time
The issue isn’t just flying saucers not landing in downtown Manhattan, the problem is the universe has been silent so far for us. A universal tendency towards planetary protection doesn’t explain why we don’t see a cosmos awash in artificial electromagnetic signals. Everything we find seems to have a natural explanation. If life really was as common as it should be, we would see it broadcasting out into the dark like we are. The universe is old, big and filled with the stuff life needs. Life SHOULD exist, the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre. Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
The universe is old
Actually it’s very young, like a baby young compared to what it could be
Life SHOULD exist
That’s a very bold statement without any evidence to it
the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre
You could call it bizarre if you had some data where there should be a lot of evidence. We don’t have that data, just fantasies.
Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
Likely most of it. Or even our “understanding” as a concept is not there yet. I mean our “understanding” was meant to find food, prey, etc. And we were pretty bad at that.
That just indicates nobody is beaming an uncompressed signal directly at use. Something not on a tight beam directed at us would disperse and get lost in the noise. A compressed data stream would be indistinguishable from noise if since we don’t know the compression algorithm and with any kind of interference at all there wouldn’t be any way to distinguish it from noise.
Getting a radio signal basically requires there to be an alien race that knows we’re here and wants to talk to us.
Yupp could be a whole species of beings out there with their own space programs trying to send and recievesignals but they’re left in the dark just like us, forever out of reach and drifting further from each other.
We may be receiving weak signals all the time that come across as noise, but receiving a message is a different story with specific motivations and efforts behind it.
Or, perhaps, the “Great Filter” is just a question of “Can a species come together, or will greed of a person outweigh life of people?”
The ones who hoard all the resources destroy everything for everyone else.
Seems very plausible if other life is like our own.
If all it takes for a species to never leave their planet, is just a few bad eggs, then that would be a defining great filter. All life eventually develops idea of altruism (helping others without anything in return) but that makes egoism even more beneficial strategy, because egoistic individual will have much more resources and higher chance of survival than altruistic one.
Seems plausible.
Honesty we should just sell the moon to private equity
It would be worth it if Elon Musk would move there.
It’s free real-estate!
Evolve or die
“We need to spread to the stars to ensure the survival of our species.”
Why? Why does our species need to survive? Why would anyone care about that? I don’t think anyone really does. People just want to do cool stuff, as entertainment. To alleviate boredom. That’s it.
No one reading this will “go to the stars”. It’s unlikely more than a handful will visit Mars in your lifetime. Why anyone would want to go to Mars is beyond me, it’s extremely inhospitable to humans. There’s nothing there.
We thought, after going to the moon we’d continue on in that vain, and have space hotels by 2001. It didn’t happen, don’t think anything will be different this time.
Stop thinking we can trash this planet, “but it’s okay because we’ll find a different one.” That’s not going to happen. It’s far, far more likely we’re going to kill ourselves off long before we can get anywhere close to doing that. That’s the reality.
I get the hype about traveling to and living on Mars/Luna/Space Stations, I think. It’s that most people are not dedicated to understanding it, they just see cool scifi/scifantasy settings. Star Trek finding neat planets everywhere and some hot women, Star Wars being full of cooperative lifeforms and beautiful high tech worlds, Guardians of the Galaxy slinging through another rainbow nebula with a killer Playlist, and Stargate bringing us to beautiful British Columbian pine forests every week. Even stellar dramas and tragedies all follow the one successful main character(s) that survives, thrives, and entertains us even in the worst of situations. Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, Mission to Mars, The Red Planet, Space Cowboys, Total Recall, Project Hail Mary, and Gravity come to mind.
The key thing, to me, is that all of this feels like someone else already made the situation survivable and the person can always return home. Mars is “right there” in solar system terms. And so often, even when a dire earthly situation is what triggered the movie events in the first place, they tend to be solved by time the protagonist returns. There’s no ultimate feeling of loss. It all works out. And I think that’s the extent of thought by the gen pop when it comes to space travel. It’s survivable and earth is always fixable, because SomeoneElse^TM made it work.
I play a game called Elite: Dangerous. I’m currently 20,000 lightyears from home. It’s lonely and empty. For reference, I could make it to a large colony (Colonia, for the 3 ED players) in about 2 hours of game play and make it back to Earth in probably 8. But I don’t do that because I want to scan and search each system I jump to, looking for valuable plant life and valuable planets to scan. 90% of the time there’s nothing of value. Thats a lot of time looking into an empty bag. And even when I do find something, it’s often a long flight to the POI. I generally enjoy it for being a calm game out “in the black”, but I absolutely get space madness like Tommy Lee Jones’ character in Ad Astra. I keep looking and keep finding nothing. The irony there being one of the movie’s “extrasolar planets” was just a normal picture of enceladus, a local moon. The game has many planets that look similar. Nothing! Nothing here! Nothing there!
We are not representative of the common understanding of stellar travel. It looks cool, but you and I know nothing about it will be cool from a living experience. All that’s cool is knowing the first people out will provide a ton of feedback to improve the next trip. The next trip, performed by someone else, as the trips will be one-way death sentences for quite some time to come.
I agree with most points except not wanting the human race to survive.
I very much want the human race to survive but to do it in a way that isn’t destructive to our planet. Which IS possible.
I think the great filter is more likely a hyper individualistic mindset that creates a “well I lived so why do I care if other lives after me?” Mindset.
You’re line of thinking mixed with access to nuclear weapons destroys us all. And that’s very likely what will end up happening.
We should all want humans to survive as long as possible BUT be working towards a way that we can do that without being destructive.
Ultimately though yes the end is certain as they say. Heat death of universe and all that (if that’s even what happens, no physicist I know of has been consciously there when its happened and able to report back)
But yes. All life animals, plants, humans and otherwise should be kept alive it really is our duty as intelligent beings to facilitate that.
that makes us potentially a very stupid species
No thanks. Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
If you’re upset that humanity doesn’t punish this person, it’s because we’re trapped in a system of violent control. It’s not because people are stupid, it’s because we fear for our lives. Nobody wants to be murdered, locked in a box, etc. We’re not going to end this system by calling ourselves stupid. That just further serves our masters.
Maybe that’s a filter? Any civilisation that lets itself get trapped in a system of violent control under fear of death gets wiped out by the worst of itself?
Where did the world’s richest person get his money? What is money?
Why blame humanity for the crimes of one person?
It’s not one person that needs to be held to account, dis-empowered, guillotined, reformed and stripped of their ill-gotten gains. It’s an entire class of billionaire oligarchs, cabal of political/global elites and exploitative corporations.
I refuse to believe that capitalism is the terminal emergent quality of life in the unuverse.
I refuse to believe as much for humanity.
“it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”
Well i was engaging in my community and accepting mutual benefit as compensation but i guess I’ll give up on that and go back to doomscrolling and jerking it in isolation to my grok gf. (she loves me)
engaging with your community is nice but it’s not going to save the world. often people’s engagement with their communities leads to negative social consequences, like the housing crisis. the housing crisis is a direct consequence of community engagement and folks seeking to control who can live near them.
Oh i see. So by sharing resources, knowledge, and keeping an eye out for them, and by receiving those benefits in return, I’m actually harming them. (I’m addicted to narcan)
that’s because capitalism is built into our nature. we are greedy little monkeys. most of us are motivated by the social need to feel like we are superior to other monkeys and easiest way to show that is to have more than they do.
people can daydream all the want that aren’t wired this way, but those are the same people who browbeat each other over the ‘true’ interpreation of marxism or whatever. their own version of monkey standing. and their ‘leaders’ are all grifting trust fund types .
Some are, and they have loud voices. We’re also helpful little monkeys who groom each other and take care of our sick and elderly. The quiet monkeys are a silent majority
Unfortunately, the greedy monkeys want our sick and elderly to die, so they can have their money.
Actually we’re hardwired for cooperation, as a hyper social animal. A single greedy human will out compete a social one, but a social group will out compete a greedy group.
The result of a zillion years of evolution in which the monkey that can gather more food and resources, also gathers followers, and gets laid more.
Fast forward a zillion years, and those fat greedy apes now control the world.
Now that we’re aware of the mechanism, all we need to do is spend the next zillion years forcing humanity down a different, more cooperative evolutionary path. That shouldn’t be any problem at all.
Sarcasm or?
maybe the real treasures are the natural resources we destroy along the way!
Nah. They invent generative AI and their civilizational progress stalls forever.
They (we) become Wall-E human style characters.
And I guess the AI never actually becomes advanced enough to explore the cosmos itself? Otherwise that would be the alien life we run into, right?
So they get addicted to AI, but it’s only marginally better than our shit AI. lmao great.
Notice how there is only one species that thinks of doing things like, sending shuttles into space.
Even if there is life, how likely do you think it would be for the exact type of intelligence that humans have, to emerge?
They then have to have more luck, and not die out. And we have no species to compare ourselves to, except the now extinct hominids, who are our cousins anyway.
On top of that, they died off.
Now how likely is it for a planet to even have that?
We’re talking about nearly infinite planets, but also an infinite timeline, so while life, even life very similar to ours is likely among those numbers, that it exists at the same time as us and close enough to make contact is just very unlikely unless they are technologically advanced way beyond us and have overcome those factors, in which case they surely could make contact, but seeing the apex predators of this planet behave the way we do, they’d likely feel like we’re too far below their intelligence and keep their distance, especially with the fucking morons we keep making rich and famous while calling them “leaders”.
nearly infinite
lol come on now. There’s finite and infinite. There’s no such thing as “nearly infinite”.
There is when the finite number is so large that it’s almost irrelevant that it’s a finite number. “An incomprehensible large number”, better?
Meanwhile I believe time is actually infinite in the sense that I believe the big bang was part of a cycle of entropy and then concentration that has happened and will happen forever. It’s just a belief though, and about as spiritual as I get.
Yeah at the very least learn how to be sustainable so they can use the time they have to live sustainably to advance tech to where its actually possible to move. I mean we have something like a billion years so 100mil should be a pretty safe bet sun wise. I mean we should do some space research but heck we even need to figure out how to sustainably use orbital space.
Quite a few assumptions being made and quite a lot of hyperbole.
- The richest man in the world is not representative of the human race. Also, settling Mars (within timelines that musk is suggesting) is not treated seriously by any institution with significant power.
- We aren’t putting earth’s ability to host life in jeopardy. Not even close. Yes, human caused climate change is bad. Worst case outcomes lead to most human settlements going under water and extinctions in a manner that the planet has seen only a few times. But again, not even close where we need to abandon earth cuz we “ruined it” or whatever. Not even nuclear war would lead humanity to come to this conclusion.
As for why a civilization should be interested in spreading out as much as possible in case it wants to survive:
- spreading out reduces the probability of extinction. Right now, one gamma ray burst that’s close enough, and that is aimed at earth can render the entirety of humanity extinct. But if we were more spread out, not all humans would have to die. The same logic can be applied to relativistic weapons aimed at earth.
- spreading out gives us access to a lot of resources. Earth’s gravity and atmosphere makes it hard to manufacture and launch megastructures. Megastructures can allow us to create really cool stuff.
- many humans find exploring the universe really cool!
If alien species are anything like us, I highly doubt that they’d come to the conclusion that you’ve posited.
Wish I had your optimism. I think the Earth is gonna shake humans off like a bad habit if we don’t stop climate change. Crop failure will kill everyone, not just poor people.
Yeah. You don’t wanna carry all your eggs in one basket.
Also, it’s human nature to explore. Show people a place they can’t go and they’re going to want to find a way to get there. It’s just what we do. We’re curious little monkeys.
I can point to examples of many civilizational collapses based on comparatively minor climate abnormalities in the last mere 7,000 years, and can say with certainty the earth has gone at least 5,000,000,000 without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.
I think any alien civilization with basic math would prioritize the bird-in-hand.
Civilization collapsing doesn’t equal to species end. A gamma ray burst or yeah something that has already happened in the planets past, a big enough asteroid hitting us. Can mean the end of the species.
Of course civilizations collapse should be avoided even just for the reason of avoiding lots of people dying. We shouldn’t completely discard expanding into space either. Our population and civilization is big enough that both things can be done at the same time.
Working towards both will probably provide a better overall goal for common people as well instead of currently working just to line the pockets of CEOs and pedofiles.
At this point civilization collapse would effectively terrestrially lock us in. There aren’t enough easily accessible raw materials to reindustrialize to a space-faring point.
Yep.
If you burn through all the readily available energy resources, civilization collapses, then tries to rebuild itself…
It can’t. Their ancestors kicked over the ladder of progress, and broke it.
Attempt 2 at civilization now has to figure out another tech tree, because they cannot cost effectively lubricate an industrial economy and logistics with fossil fuel.
Not strictly impossible, per se, but they have an even more difficult task.
You can point to those civilizations because their collapse was not the end, life continued on. We haven’t been hit by a gamma ray burst or any other complex life ending disaster since we are here to discuss the scenario. But that’s no guarantee that we won’t be.
The odds of anything happening to render Earth totally uninhabitable are very small… in our lifetimes. But as long as we keep existing, the time frame will keep growing, the opportunities for disaster will keep accumulating and the odds will keep multiplying. The basic math looks very different when you multiply by infinity. Even the sun won’t last forever.
Obviously, this is no reason to neglect Earth and rush to other planets. But it is reason enough to reject the idea that we should never spread to other worlds because Earth will always be enough.
without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.
you wouldn’t know that. deep-sea life would probably survive any gamma ray burst, i guess.
and it turns out, there’s a surprising amount of deep-sea life: bacteria and complex life.
on this diagram, it would throw us back by 300 mio. years max.
Won’t ocean acidification kill a lot of that life? Isn’t it already?
Other positive things to mention about space exploration:
- If humanity spreads out across the stars, there is less of a danger for us dying from ANY centralized disaster including the cosmic ones and those we might cause ourselves
- Similar to the above, it will be harder to create centralized governments due to extreme distances and just communication limits set by the speed of light; ergo, if some colony falls prey to a dictatorship it is unlikely to spread easily across all of humanity
- We have lots of questions about the universe which may be answered if we travel it. And, when scientific discoveries are made they often have applications outside their initial field.
- We have lots of questions about biology that living in novel environments would teach us (also lots of other scientific fields too of course)
- Forming colonies will force many small groups of people to work collectively, causing those colonies to form a sense of community—something that is lacking in humanity presently
- Isolation caused by communication limits will be scary but also will decrease our access to 24/7 terrible non-local news (inhibiting our ability to doomscroll) which will likely have a positive impact on everyone’s mental health (…maybe not on earth but in the colonies at least)
- Exploration becoming a possibility will also likely make people happier just by showing that humanity has a future. Also, knowing that there are places you can go to escape society all together is quite a freeing thought for some
- Last but not least WE GET TO GO TO SPACE!
He’s as rich as he is because people agreed to give him money out of faith in what he claims he wants to achieve.
He’s one of the world’s most supported humans according to humanity’s most dominant merit system.
Ooh do you listen to John Michael Godier by any chance?
