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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Capitalism I can imagine how capitalism could be inevitable. I can’t imagine enough controls on it to make it sustainable
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.
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.
Regardless: photosynthesis is a possible solution to avoid the filter. Not the filter itself.
You can’t filter something in
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.
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
Why would risk go up over time? For humanity, we’re pretty much at the point that very little could end our species now.
Well except, obviously, for humanity. That’s our greatest enemy, and it seems to be shown more frequently.
We would be hard pressed to end our own species either. Even global thermonuclear war would end civilization but not our species.
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We’ve been producing noticeable radio waves for a matter of decades. We’ve been capable of detecting even super-powerful, super-deliberate, super-targeted broadcasts for even less time.
And on top of that, it doesn’t look as though our civilisation is going to exist for more than a handful more decades, in any detectable-from-light-years-away form.
The chances of that onionskin-thin slice of lightcone intersecting with that of any other civilisation out there seems ludicrously remote.
