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.
maybe the real treasures are the natural resources we destroy along the way!
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.
Space is really, really big and the earth’s radio wave hasn’t hit all that many systems, so it’s no surprise that no one has contacted us, but why we don’t see the radio waves of the rest of the galaxy? Probably because we don’t have the tech to pick up a signal. We can barely see that stars have planet around them – I don’t think we can pick up a faint signal from one of those planets as different from the background.
Because the galaxy is fucking huge and signals attenuate
Yeah, in theory light signals shouldn’t attenuate in a vacuum, but in reality no vacuum is truly empty and the distances are literally astronomical. Then add that spherical signals necessarily drop with the square of distance, and all the interesting locations (stars) have a lot of background noise, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if communication between solar systems just isn’t possible – or requires extremely good tech for very narrowly optimized conditions (i.e. local stars only).
All speculative since this isn’t really my field, but points worth considering at least.
The galaxy isn’t a vacuum it has tons of shit and lots of background radiation.
100% agree that we should focus on fixing down here, but very bold of you to assume Fermi, Konopinski, Teller and York, as well as all of the other minds who’ve wrestled with this question have all overlooked basic physics, chemistry and engineering.
Yes, they must have. Space Nuttery is a religion for nerds. There is no future in space. The end.
Username does NOT check out
Did space hurt you, somehow?
I agree with you, but you fail to account for the absolutely insane people on earth who do dangerous and unpleasant things out of sheer boredom.
Maybe you and I won’t go to space, but Stockton Rush’s reincarnation will be living on mars in a fiberglass dome covered in their own shit. Given we make it past the global warming filter first.
Warp drive is still possible with our current understanding, Fusion is right around the corner (at least if we look at the entire human existence) and while most mega structures are fictional, a Dyson swarm is fairly easy to do and completely possible.
Humanity could still go very far till physics and chemistry are the real limiters, but human greed will wipe us out first.
Thanks for the laugh!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ooh do you listen to John Michael Godier by any chance?
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. But this would still only filter some.
The great filter to me is a vast mix of filters. Some 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 rare earth theory is the most boring but most likely explanation. Though it shouldn’t be as it’s kinda nice to be given a rare and unique opportunity, we shouldn’t squander it.
The latest estimates put habitable planets around one in five stars
Yes but once you compound other variables probability turns out actually quite low overall especially since we discover more and more civilization ending dangers as we probe. However I also feel like we ignore civilization accelerating shortcuts we have not found as well. So with n sample of 1 it’s really hard to make your mind on rare earth.
I agree it’s impossible to be sure with a sample of one. But I think “we’re not special” is a good assumption to make, and it leads to some interesting possibilities.
The great filter is some variation of the “effective altruist” scams tech oligarchs are running.
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.
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.
Well, GenAI cannot invent anything. Has no agency. So it’s stagnation until the sun becomes a red giant
We should die out on this planet.
There is a handful of people with the money to get to Mars who can go die somewhere else
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?
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.
Where did the world’s richest person get his money? What is money?
good ending
They not like us.
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.
This seems backwards to me, since the latest variant of what we call Humans is the only species on this planet, that - to the best of my knowledge - ever attempted (a) leaving it and (b) destroying their own habitable climate (along with that of a large portion of all other species) on the planet.
in my humble opinion (a) Is the marvel of international science collaboration, probably one of the highest achievements of this species, (b) on the other hand is fueled by greed and incompetence in equal quantities and according to Hanlons razor, we shouldn’t equate this to malice, even though it comes very easily to members of our species.
a) is true, but b) is not true. There have been mass extinction events in the past that have been caused by a new species evolving. Things got pretty crazy when tree bark came onto the scene. Or maybe the opposite of crazy because a lot of things died off.
Say hello to my little friend, the bacteria! And a loooong line of his cousins, reaching the rabbits and beyond.
Yeah, at least normally resources are depleted by the number of organisms, not the greed of a few examples, but this is not a new thing.
Unlikely.
We are eventually going to hit a real limit on the number of humans this planet can support. Whether or not we’ll get there, that’s not really in question. When we’ll reach that point, that’s harder to say, could be 5000 years, but I’d bet it’s closer to 500. At some point, relatively soon, we are going to need to start expanding into near space, the moon, earth orbit.
It would be the same for any intelligent species. They start their existence in relative equilibrium, until they start outperforming other species, they shape the world to fit their needs, they invent machines, medicine, and then they are no longer in equilibrium, their numbers are steadily increasing. Any intelligent species will eventually be more successful than their planet can support.
But if a star system were surrounded by a Dyson Swarm, millions or even billions of free floating habitats and space stations orbiting the star, that’s actually something we could detect. We know that isn’t happening all over the galaxy, because we actually probably wouldn’t miss that.
The Malthusian Theory. Generally considered invalid these days.
I don’t think that’s accurate to say at all. If anything, our current climate crisis points out that there are potentially multiple ways that we are nearing population limits. Sure, we could move to cleaner energy and prevent population growth from impacting the planet, but we aren’t doing that, not fast enough.
We keep using more and more land for farming, and that often means destroying existing habitats, which has a real ecological cost. We could prevent the destruction of more habitats with advances in vertical farming, but generally speaking, those methods require more energy and have larger carbon footprints.
And ultimately, even if agricultural techniques keep up, there are simply other limits. For instance, you can’t just generate more energy forever. Even with a mastery of fusion power, making free energy out of water, at some point the generation and use of energy heats the planet too much directly. You don’t reach that point until your generating energy for trillions of people, but that’s a hard limit, boiling the planet is not an option.
I’m thinking when human populations reach excessive densities, some plague will come along and thin us out. We’re probably in that zone already.
