[HN Gopher] The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
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The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 89 points
Date : 2021-01-17 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mason.gmu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (mason.gmu.edu)
| tyfon wrote:
| I think the "great filter" is evolution itself. Life formed
| almost immediately that the conditions allowed for it.
|
| But it took over three billion years of relative stable
| conditions for it go go past the stage of single celled organisms
| and even the cell itself took a long time to form. Higher forms
| of life are only 500 million years old and the human line only
| started taking shape the last few million years.
|
| Personally I think the universe is teaming with life but
| intelligent/sentient life is exceedingly rare.
| [deleted]
| bserge wrote:
| Or we just can't detect any, and neither can they. Space is
| incredibly vast, and interstellar travel and communication
| might actually be insurmountable obstacles.
|
| We're really optimistic about it, dreaming up FTL and stuff,
| but it may turn out to be just... impossible.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| You don't need FTL or anything exotic. On the scale of O(100
| million) years, expansion at 0.001c is enough to colonize the
| galaxy.
|
| A general purpose von Neumann probe is not that far off.
| Self-replicating micro-machinery and reasonably intelligent
| robots already seem on the horizon. Unless there's truly some
| unforeseen roadblock, certainly within 1000 years of current
| growth. A 1 KG probe at 0.001c takes about 90 gigajoules of
| energy. On the order of what an Airbus A380 uses at cruising
| speed.
|
| Given lots of patience, and an only slightly higher level of
| current technological development, interstellar colonization
| does not seem like an insurmountable challenge.
| bserge wrote:
| Yes, I'm talking about "within a lifetime" and with
| feedback/observable results. As it is, that kind of
| colonization would mean nothing to Earthers.
|
| 10-20 generations and it will most likely be all but
| forgotten. Zero impact on our solar system. Might as well
| be a story in a videogame.
|
| Perhaps it would be worth it if we worked on extending our
| lifespans first.
| beamatronic wrote:
| "Intelligent life" destroyed its own climate so a few could
| profit. "Intelligent life" won't wear masks.
| tlb wrote:
| While those things are indeed dumb, all forms of human
| stupidity including wars have killed at most a few percent of
| any generation. At the Great Filter scale, those aren't a
| significant evolutionary pressure.
| jug wrote:
| I sometimes think of how Earth is so OLD. It's a third of the
| age of the Universe. That is just mind boggling. While I have
| trouble mentally grasping ages on the magnitude "billions", I
| do know what a third is. It's a very sizable chunk. And for
| this very old thing with life as you say very early -- it's
| crazy how we're here only now. The sample size is small though.
| I have no idea if quirks on the path took evolution unusually
| long or if we're early, or what. Still, yes, this is something
| to consider.
| tyfon wrote:
| Even more mind boggling, in Canada you can find bedrock that
| is 4.28 billion years old and have survived bombardments,
| erosion and plate tectonics. I'd like to have one of those
| rocks one day :)
|
| In my country (Norway) the oldest rock is "only" 3 billion
| years old, life was well underway at that time.
| Balgair wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 1) Our knowledge of physics is still very small. ~20% of the
| universe is 'dark matter'. All we really know about it is that
| it falls down. It outweighs the stuff you, I, and the all the
| stars in existence are made out of by ~4x. The other ~75% of
| the universe is 'dark/negative energy'. We know even less about
| it beside that it seems to fall ... up (?). And it's the super
| majority of what we know it out there. Give it another 200
| years, and even this understanding is going to be
| embarrassingly outdated. Any other civ that is just 10k years
| ahead of us is going to be working in physics that we can't
| even imagine.
|
| 2) That leads to the larger issue: Time. The difference in our
| lives and the lives of the earliest humans is literally
| astronomical, in that we have people living up in space now.
| That same rate of difference separates us from any neighbors
| out there. Their understanding of our universe is likely to be
| so vast that we're essentially amoeba to them. Though
| intelligent life may exist out there in bushels, we're still
| infants in what 'intelligent' means. We may be surrounded by
| olde gods rendering us effectively alone all the same, and
| those gods themselves surrounded by yet grander deities
| rendering them alone as well.
| tyfon wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not saying we are peak intelligence, but it took us
| almost 4 billion years to reach the point where we even can
| ask the question "Are we alone?". Much of the early universe
| had conditions that were not as stable and favourable as the
| last 4 billion years.
|
| I also think distance and time is preventing us from
| detecting any other like us, but I'm pretty sure some exists
| somewhere out there. It's just that the reality of physics
| (even with more knowledge) prevents easy travel and contacts.
|
| Another thing is that we have barely looked at the sky. The
| SETI project is very underfunded and most other projects have
| just recently started looking for planets and signatures that
| can indicate life (not intelligent life). Many think we have
| surveyed all of space in as much detail as our current
| technology allowed but we are _far_ from that.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Kurzgesagt has a ten minute video on the subject:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
| gizmodo59 wrote:
| When you realize that even if by some miracle we find a way to
| travel at really fast speeds we will never explore 99.99999% of
| the universe is mind boggling.
|
| This video by Kurzgesagt explains it well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs
| orbgirlgi98 wrote:
| Humans are doomed to die at the Heat Death of the universe.
| Science tells us our universe had a definite beginning, the Big
| Bang, and that this event will not repeat: there will be no Big
| Crunch, no reboot. SciFi authors prefer to ignore science so they
| can imagine immortal humans who survive the cycle of infinitely
| rebooting universes. If we colonize the stars and galaxies we can
| postpone our death a few trillion trillion years, but eventually
| the last star will snuff out, the last black hole will evaporate,
| and there will be no energy left to power the phenomena of
| intelligence and consciousness, and life shall be no more. The
| last humans will have to bravely face certain and inevitable
| death just as our prehistoric ancestors did, and just as you and
| I must.
| deanCommie wrote:
| That's choosing an arbitrary finite point on an infinite
| spectrum.
|
| What is beyond the universe? What is beyond time? What IS the
| universe?
|
| We simply do not know the answers to these questions. Hell, we
| barely understand what consciousness and sentience is.
|
| Maybe by the time we make it to the heat death of the universe,
| we will have answered these questions, and can reverse entropy.
| Maybe not.
|
| But the quest to get these answers and to overcome our elements
| is what gives us purpose. Everything we do in our mortal lives
| stuck on the rock of our birth, is in one way or another, in
| the quest to achieve that.
|
| Some people find that too overwhelming, and choose either
| religion or nihilism. I think there is a middle ground.
| orbgirlgi98 wrote:
| You don't need to fully understand something to know that it
| will die. I don't need to know what the billions of
| transistors in a MacBook CPU do in order to understand that
| the CPU will cease to compute if placed in an incinerator and
| burned to gas and ash. I don't need to understand how the
| human brain works in order to understand that it will no
| longer work when our star balloons to a red giant and
| incinerates the brain to gas and ash. You don't need to
| understand things in order to understand that they will end
| when physically destroyed. Everything in our universe will be
| physically destroyed at the Heat Death. Time, Space, Matter,
| and Energy will all end. There is no "middle ground". It will
| all end. If there is an eternal God who exists outside the
| universe and who will sustain the immortality of souls, as
| Plato thought 2400 years ago and all noteable Judeo-Christian
| philosophers have held, then something of humans will exist
| after the Heat Death. Otherwise, we know it will all die, and
| we don't need to know how it works to know that it will die.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Science tells us no such thing, and when you're talking the
| ultimate fate of the universe then there is no consensus, just
| different theories. There's the big freeze, the big rip, the
| big crunch... all manner of ideas. Then there is the universe
| itself. Well what is that? What about multiverses etc?
|
| Just to take one such theory emerging from heat death ideas.
| Once the fundamental touchstones of mass and structure
| disappear, scale also disappears. The infinitely large universe
| becomes physically identical to an infinitesimal one, and is
| reborn in a new Big Bang -- with all the mass and energy of the
| previous universe once again jammed together into a tiny space.
|
| These sort of cyclic cosmology ideas are held by prominent
| physicists including the recent Nobel prize winner, Roger
| Penrose.
|
| Like all us, I have no idea what is true but its hardly a
| closed subject.
| orbgirlgi98 wrote:
| Scientific observation has ruled out the Big Crunch. The Big
| Rip happens in the remote future if the equation of state
| parameter w is less than -1, where w is the ratio of dark
| energy pressure to its energy density. If this is true it is
| only a minor detail of the Heat Death as far as life within
| this universe is concerned: all biological life and
| biological consciousness will end whether the Big Rip happens
| before the Heat Death or does not happen. (If there is non-
| biological Life after Death as various religions maintain,
| then consciousness will survive the Heat Death, but otherwise
| it will not.) The Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) of Penrose
| is speculative and has zero strong empirical evidence to
| support it. They've studied the CMB but it has made no
| testable and verifiable predictions. The astrophysics
| community at large sees the observational inevitability of
| the end of the universe as we know it: the universe is flying
| apart and cooling, and nothing can change this.
| jmfldn wrote:
| The universe flying apart and cooling doesn't contradict
| Penrose, it's part of the theory just to address that
| point. An infinite structureless, massless universe is a
| singularity, or so the theory goes.
|
| Assuming this was "settled" (whatever that means in science
| let alone theoretical physics), mavericks like Penrose are
| frequently proven right. 'Kuhnian' paradigm shifts are the
| norm in science, particularly in a field like this. Expect
| many more...
| orbgirlgi98 wrote:
| Penrose's CCC predicts all biological life on our planet
| and all biological life on all other worlds within our
| universe will end, just like the conventional Heat Death.
| To point out this fact - that all biological life is
| doomed to die - was the purpose of my original post. We
| can talk about nuclear war, climate change, hostile
| aliens, and other short term threats to human survival.
| We will survive these short term threats or we won't. But
| in the long term it is 100% certain we don't survive. We
| only survive the Heat Death if it turns out we are living
| in a Matrix of sorts and the computers of the Matrix are
| hosted in a datacenter universe that is truly eternal,
| unlike our universe which will die the Heat Death. Or we
| survive the Heat Death if there is an eternal God who
| gives us a post-biological existence after the Death of
| our universe. My point is that present humans and far-
| future humans are in the same boat as prehistoric humans:
| we all must learn to face death bravely. Future humans
| will never have permanent biological immortality, because
| our universe does not allow it. Neither does Penrose's
| universe. Furthermore, Penrose's only testable prediction
| (CMB concentric rings caused by past reboot of universe)
| proved unable to be replicated by three independent
| attempts. Einstein's theory in contrast said the orbit of
| the planet Mercury should have an observable precession
| if true: so we pointed our telescopes at Mercury and lo,
| Mercury did indeed precess just as his set of equations
| said it would.
| jmfldn wrote:
| Sure we will all die, assuming humanity was alive at the
| end. To be specific about my objection, you said that
| this event will not repeat and I'm saying, I'm not sure
| and neither are certain others. An eternal recurrence is
| not ruled out. Nothing would survive a reboot though,
| sure.
|
| To be clear, assuming there was an infinite reboot
| sequence I'm not saying that there would be life again,
| let alone intelligent life. I'm just making a statement
| on the fate of the universe.
| TheMechanist wrote:
| It's low orbit pollution with high speed space junk by any
| technological civilization,resulting in an inevitable self-
| interdiction of space flight: https://www.economist.com/science-
| and-technology/2000/03/23/...
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I find this improbable. Kessler syndrome could well make it
| impossible to keep a satellite in orbit at certain altitudes.
| However it is unlikely to create a "shell" that prevents space
| flight entirely. Kessler in LEO would be cleared fairly quickly
| (a generation or less) and at higher orbits the debris would be
| less dense due to the volume of orbital space it covered, which
| expands at the square of altitude. If we were really determined
| to get off the planet, I don't think it would stop us.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Geoffrey West's work on the laws of life and metabolism might
| provide some insight. He shows that adaptations tend toward
| crashes so that survival requires constant ongoing adaptation to
| avoid self disruption. This means it is highly likely that
| advanced civilizations will tend to crash whether it is from
| their own consumption of resources or catastrophic changes that
| go beyond capacity for adaptation.
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9324566
|
| 2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=597461
| lumost wrote:
| While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity
| extinguishes itself, it's easy to imagine scenarios which make
| civilized society difficult, and could preclude future advanced
| civilizations from ever emerging on Earth, these may constitute a
| variety of "hidden filters" which make exiting ones own solar
| system or mustering the energy to make oneself known impractical.
|
| The article makes reference to a million year time horizon,
| however even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained
| on a thousand year time horizon. As we're all acutely aware, the
| great biochemical battery of fossil fuels is already operating on
| diminished capacity. Planet's such as mars lack the hydro-cycle
| to drive renewables, the organic legacy to support fossil fuels,
| and potentially the tectonics to enable surface extraction of
| nuclear fuels.
|
| While a theoretical expansion outside of the confines of earths
| gravity to acquire resources from asteroids, or produce high
| concentrations of solar energy is currently achievable on a
| 20-100 year time horizon, supporting the energy demands of the
| aerospace supply chain or considering regular space launches may
| be difficult in 2 centuries. On a thousand year time horizon it's
| entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy
| makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive
| when considering the concentrated energy demands of blast
| furnaces or industrial mining.
|
| Similar collapse events have occurred historically due in part to
| the exhaustion of limited resources such as forests have occurred
| in the past in both Europe and polynesia. If a similar event
| occurred in the future it's entirely plausible that a future
| civilization would be unable to muster the resources to ever
| "unlock" the next set of energy production capabilities.
| throwaway189262 wrote:
| > While it's difficult to imagine a scenario in which humanity
| extinguishes itself
|
| I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio
| weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if
| COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's
| close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really.
|
| We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was
| still working.
| jononor wrote:
| While the COVID-19 pandemic has struck hard in some
| countries, it has not been on a scale which threatens
| humanity in any form? Excess deaths for 2020 are in the
| ranges 10-300 per 100k, meaning under 0.3% in the worst case.
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-
| detail/2020/07/15/tracking... Not that pandemics cannot be
| properly devastating. During the bubonic plague up to 50% of
| the population died in many areas across the world. It was
| still no threat to humanity though.
| sgt101 wrote:
| A pathogen as deadly as the plague and as mysterious or
| intractable to medicine as the plague was in the 1200's
| released into a connected world such as ours would have an
| astonishing impact.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The threshold that matters isn't extincting humanity, but
| collapsing modern technological civilization. That's much
| easier to do.
|
| The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains
| are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the
| impact so far was _so small_. Lots of people are in dire
| straits, yes, but the world structurally didn 't change
| much.
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| Scenarios where humanity extinguishes itself are easy to come
| by: We are still living under the threat of accidental or
| intentional launch of a great number of nuclear weapons. The
| remaining civilizations might be unable to survive or thrive
| with what's left.
|
| On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of
| humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've
| only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while
| progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem
| to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-
| tech.
| Retric wrote:
| Industrialization would be slower without fossil fuels, but
| that doesn't mean it can't happen. Small scale wood smelting
| can eventually make way to hydro powered electric based
| smelting.
|
| We are used to a very energy extensive economy, but most of
| the world would be habitual without any home heating or
| cooling for example. Similarly, a network of street cars need
| something like 1% of the energy as individual cars for
| everyone in a city. Historically, rivers, streams, and canals
| where similarly quite efficient long distance transportation
| networks we have largely forgotten about.
| henrikschroder wrote:
| > We are used to a very energy extensive economy
|
| Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging
| fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of
| society.
|
| Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from,
| triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago,
| every single existing apartment building was forced to
| retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years
| ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE
| GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and
| luxurious feature.
|
| Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a
| building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago,
| new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect,
| so my building - and every building like it in the country
| - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of
| insulation on the outside.
|
| I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside
| walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation
| purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new
| housing construction that's essentially just plywood for
| every single wall, inside and outside.
|
| The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and
| energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make
| sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this
| would change pretty damn fast.
| count wrote:
| There's also a US approach to 'grandfathering' in
| existing structures as building codes are updated. The
| only time I will ever 'have' to bring something in my
| house up to date is if I voluntarily do something like
| open a wall or install a new HVAC unit. And then the only
| thing impacted is that item, nothing else even gets
| inspected for safety/compliance.
|
| I understand it to some extent: TONS of people can't
| afford to just...replace all of their windows, for
| example.
| ghaff wrote:
| I live in an early 1800s farmhouse which has had a lot of
| work done on it over the years--to code--and has had new
| top-of-the-line windows put in as well. But if the whole
| house suddenly had to be fully compliant with modern
| code? You'd probably just need to tear it down and start
| from scratch.
| lumost wrote:
| It's really difficult to "extinguish" all human life. Even in
| a full nuclear exchange between all major nuclear powers,
| places such as patagonia, and new zealand will likely be
| unscathed. Particulate matter does not generally cross the
| border between the northern and southern hemisphere and the
| vast majority of weapons will be detonated in the northern
| hemisphere. This doesn't include the countless habitable
| islands with the potential to sustain reasonably sized
| villages.
|
| A similar story exists for bio-weapons and other means. It's
| definitely possible to end civilization today, but such
| technologies are unlikely to end humanity - worst case,
| rehabitation of the main continents takes 1-2 centuries for
| the worst fallout to decay and enable farming.
|
| While I don't subscribe to the view, there is modest evidence
| that scientific progress behaves like any other process of
| discovery - as a series of S curves where early progress is
| slow but speeding up every year, followed by a spike of
| progress and ultimately a steady period of diminishing
| returns.
| klyrs wrote:
| The US has an interesting problem right now. Wild hogs are
| wreaking utter havoc and we don't have effective means to
| control their population. I'm fairly confident that humans
| will win that battle. But what if we nuked population
| centers? Most of the hogs would survive, but only a
| fraction of the humans. Who would win out in the decades to
| come? Hogs can eat all sorts of roughage, survive out in
| the elements, etc., humans are much more dependant on their
| technology. Want crops? Sorry, hogs ate 'em. Wanna eat
| hogs? They're smart, and after your ammo stores are
| depleted, you're back to the stone age.
|
| But the question isn't mere survival -- can intelligent
| life _thrive_ to the point where we can achieve
| interstellar travel?
| Retric wrote:
| I think you're underestimating Stone Age humans, we used
| to hunt freaking lions and other big cats with stone
| tools. We started causing mass extinctions long before
| industrialization.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'm not underestimating stone age humans -- I've spent
| much of my life learning and using stone age skills. Not
| enough that I can actually live as a stone age human,
| mind, and there's the rub. In that learning, I've met a
| very small number of folks (like [1]) who are actually
| equipped to survive a stone age. Judging by my
| experience, by watching other "good" students in those
| classes... with good training by masters, we still fail
| hard on our first few times out. And we're well-fed,
| moderately well-equipped, and _not suffering from
| radiation poisoning_.
|
| The real question isn't "how badass were stone age
| humans", it's "can the smartphone generation re-invent
| stone age technology quickly enough to survive"?
|
| https://www.outsideonline.com/2411125/lynx-vilden-stone-
| age-...
| tachyonbeam wrote:
| You can very much use solar panels on Mars. There's also a
| clear advantage that right now, there's nothing on Mars, lots
| of land to place said solar panels, but IMO, that's not going
| to be an issue. We will probably master nuclear fission within
| the next few decades. Lots of progress has been made, and it
| will solve our energy needs. What if we run out of deuterium or
| tritium? Not a problem, by that time, in a few centuries, we'll
| likely be able to build bigger, better reactors that can fuse
| "normal" hydrogen and maybe even helium.
|
| As for the great filter, I've always thought that the real
| danger is something that would cause say, one person, to have
| an outsized destructive power. Imagine if we successfully
| invent nanobots that can self-replicate, for example, and
| anyone with the right set of skills could program them. In that
| scenario, it's within the capability of any individual to
| create a deadly disease. You just need one unhinged person to
| trigger a horrible disaster. Nanotech could be much more
| dangerous than nukes, and if you combine strong AI and
| nanotech, I could see that being an immense survival risk.
| lumost wrote:
| Martian solar energy production has a few "unique"
| challenges. Including
|
| - Dust - Supply chain - ~40% less watts/square meter
|
| Of these the most unproven is the supply chain problem. The
| link below summarizes why solar doesn't work in the short-
| term for mars habitation missions - it's an open question as
| to whether there are economically extractable deposits of
| silicon, cadmium, and other materials to build out a solar
| farm. Bear in mind, terrestrial resource extraction makes
| extensive use of water.
|
| https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-
| work-o...
| Balgair wrote:
| The comparison would be for locally produced solar. We know
| that making solar panels on Earth is a net positive energy
| expenditure, from raw materials to recycle/disposal, and
| just barely so. But the cost of creation of solar panels on
| Mars is unknown relative to net energy expenditure. I'm
| fairly certain that it would be many decades, if not
| centuries, before it became net positive. Sending solar
| panels to Mars is obviously not a good use of Watts.
| [deleted]
| gmuslera wrote:
| Reaching a conclusion with so many unknowns (specially unknown
| unknowns) is risky.
|
| That life must evolve in enough number of planets doesn't mean
| that the next one is close. And that interplanetary travel is
| practical doesn't mean that interstellar or intergalactic travel
| must be. And considering the speed of our current technological
| development, vs the time needed to get to the next stage in
| colonization, something big may emerge in the middle. Or
| something different and unexpected.
|
| In some way, we are like churches deciding what and how a god may
| think. We are not at the right stage to judge based on our lack
| of knowledge or perspective. It may not be just one road forward,
| and going galactic may be the wrong one.
|
| I prefer to take one step at a time, and solve our current
| roadblocks, if we can. Maybe we have the great filter in front of
| us in plain view and we can't recognize it.
| pashsdk27 wrote:
| Yes, maybe civilizations of social biological species that have
| a relativity low replication rate like us may find contentment
| with colonizing only a few close star systems. Create a few
| dense population clusters like our current cities on select
| planets and space platforms and leave the rest to 'nature'. We
| already have a declining population growth rate of 1.1 as more
| people are opting out of starting a family and children due to
| technological advances and better global socioeconomic
| conditions. And maybe our current power fantasies of galactic
| colonization may seem trivial and 'ignorant' to our future
| generations. One could also call this a great filter. The
| possibilities are endless and allows one to enjoy it as a bunch
| of inconsequential thought experiments. Actual problems that
| require solutions are usually not fun to think about.......
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Low fertility among women is not due to desire but to demands
| of modern society [1]. Women typically desire 2-3 children
| each. In modern society they can't have them because of low
| marriage rates and increased employment among women.
|
| 1 - https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Interesting collection of stats, though I don't think the
| author's conclusions are the only possible interpretation.
| It's clear that the family size intentions really have been
| falling since the 60s, and that actual fertility is a
| fraction of that, which is unsurprising. The bigger sorry
| here, I think, is that the intended family size drops from
| 3.4 kids to 2.0. Possibly what's happening is that 'high
| producers' now make four kids instead of ten, bringing down
| the overall averages. Basically, it would be nice to see
| how the distributions of kids per woman change over the
| decades... I expect something at least bimodal, with a
| shrinking tail.
|
| (Ed: fixed a couple stats, removed a bad statement about
| quotients. :P )
| ALittleLight wrote:
| One problem with the data is that it's hard to know to
| what extent modern life changes how many kids you want.
| Meaning: if a woman knows she has to have a full time
| job, she may only want, or believe she can afford, two or
| three children. Conversely, I suppose a woman in
| agricultural setting might want 7-10 children knowing
| they could help on the farm. It's probably impossible to
| know what people would want "unconstrained" by reality,
| and maybe not even meaningful.
|
| Two things I think are true though. First, women have
| fewer children than they want, even if what they want is
| declining over time. Second, women who don't want
| children, or who want children below replacement, won't
| ever become the majority of the population - at least not
| for any significant amount of time. Such women will be
| replaced by women who, genetically or memetically, want
| more children.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| How often has low fertily held true in virgin-frontier,
| resource-rich scenarios though?
| XorNot wrote:
| We've never had one where reliable birth control was
| available, so there is no data.
| [deleted]
| beamatronic wrote:
| I agree and I've come to the conclusion that the highest moral
| purpose any intelligent beings can aspire to is to broadcast
| the information "You Are Not Alone!" by any means available.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Unless of course Dark Forest theory is correct.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLC1 "DO NOT RESPOND TO THIS
| MESSAGE!" xD
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The noun you're looking for is "hypothesis," and that's if
| we're being charitable.
| gmuslera wrote:
| At our current stage and philosophy, it may seem that way.
| That is the point. It may not be valid for most or all of
| civilizations (if they could be called that way) that are far
| from us in those and more points.
|
| The same goes for some assumptions behind the great filter
| concept, like exponential growth and biological needs. Maybe
| the ideal goal is just a silent self-suficient culture in an
| small outpost far away from any galaxy.
| walleeee wrote:
| > Maybe we have the great filter in front of us in plain view
| and we can't recognize it.
|
| One candidate, if we take ourselves as the primary example, is
| biogeochemical crisis following rapid discovery and
| exploitation of environmental resources or energy reserves
| without sufficient consideration of the consequences
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It seems a bit convenient that every species capable of
| interplanetary colonization manages to (a) possess world-
| climate-altering- industrial scale, (b) rest their industrial
| needs on a resource that threatens their ecosystem, & (c)
| remain ignorant of the threat until it's too late to do
| anything about it.
|
| Comparatively speaking, asteroids and/or ice ages being more
| frequent than expected seems more plausible.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It doesn't have to be climate and it doesn't have to be
| industrial.
|
| Any process which requires scaling intelligence from
| competitively local and tribal (or any equivalents) to
| integrated and planetary will do.
|
| You either pass that test or you fail it. If you fail it,
| stagnation and eventually devolution beckon.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _stagnation and eventually devolution beckon_
|
| What was critical in parent's comment was the
| irrecoverability of the civilization, after such an
| action. Scaling intelligence is more of a repeatable
| "trial and error" step (as the article puts it, in a
| biology context).
| est31 wrote:
| (d) their previous activities have rendered it way harder
| to rebuild a technological society
|
| There used to be iron deposits etc. on the surface. They
| were recovered by pre-industrial societies. Now we are
| digging deeper and deeper for resources, but once we lose
| that ability, it's possible we won't be able to regain it.
|
| What do you do once the nuclear power plant's core has
| melted, the mine is full of water, and there is nobody
| around who knows what these things are even there for
| because all the people who did died years ago of old age.
| You can't read it up either once we've moved our stored
| knowledge from paper to machines in what the ancient texts
| refer to as the mythical "US-EAST-2 region".
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Humans have deposited a lot of iron and other useful
| elements on the surface for the next civilization to
| start with though.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's less of an issue with recraftable materials (like
| iron) and moreso with one-way ones (like petroleum,
| fissionable uranium isotopes, helium, or some plastics).
|
| Of those, it feels like the only irreconcilable one is
| scale: e.g. something you need so much of, repeatedly,
| that no less-efficient substitute is viable.
|
| And of those, geologically-created, carbon-based energy
| sources (coal, oil) are the primaries that come to mind.
|
| (Also, nitrogen, but I imagine the Haber-Bosch process
| would survive)
| deathgrips wrote:
| Where did all that iron that we mined run off to? Is it
| not on the surface anymore?
| est31 wrote:
| 1. it might be covered in sediments requiring expensive
| movement for little gain (and how do you know where the
| iron was/is?) and 2. the structures that don't get
| covered rust away and turn into dust that erosion
| distributes over large areas. Post apocalyptic societies
| will be able to salvage iron here and there for a long
| time, but will it be enough to cover our planet with
| railways and kick off a new industrial revolution?
|
| Also, the iron was only an example. Coal and other fossil
| fuels we can only burn once, then they are gone.
| patentatt wrote:
| We don't have any evidence that there are any species
| capable of interplanetary travel. Maybe there are none.
| bserge wrote:
| Humans can do _interplanetary_ travel already.
|
| A species at a similar development level in some other
| solar system with slightly better societal goals or a
| need for a specific resource could already be colonizing
| other planets or asteroids.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Curiously, the ability to alter biomes at a planetary scale
| is also one of the prerequisites for colonization. The
| trick then is having sufficient control of industrial
| processes to 'get it right,' which requires better global
| decision making than humans have thus far demonstrated.
|
| (The alternative is extreme plasticity, allowing lifeforms
| to adapt to otherwise hostile atmospheres...)
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _(The alternative is extreme plasticity, allowing
| lifeforms to adapt to otherwise hostile atmospheres...)_
|
| We meet that threshold, though. We are _extremely_
| adaptive to otherwise hostile environments by virtue of
| technology, particularly wearable one - from winter
| jackets to SCUBA gear.
| walleeee wrote:
| Sure, I don't think there's necessarily a _single_ filter,
| or that this is it. Just that it 's a candidate. Your
| examples would presumably be much more common.
| cortic wrote:
| Could be intelligence in any form is brought about by some
| kind of grand antagonistic pleiotropy. By this i mean the
| genes that develop intelligence in any species infancy,
| inevitably lead to the conditions for your (a)(b) and (c)
| later on.
| Giorgi wrote:
| I think it's much simpler than that: if there is intelligent
| life, it is at the same level of development that we are.
| meowster wrote:
| I believe that's unlikely given that the universe is billions
| of years old, and many galaxies are older than ours.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| Life in other galaxies is unlikely to physically leave its
| own galaxy just given the vast distances involved. Life in
| our own galaxy takes a number of inputs that take billions of
| years to produce.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Most theories show that galaxies all started pretty quickly
| after the big bang. The number of mergers they have had are
| what is significantly different. When the universe was
| younger and things were closer mergers appear to have
| occurred at a higher rate leading to higher rates of star
| formation. This in turns floods a galaxy with powerful UV
| light, which in large amounts doesn't seem conductive to
| life.
| f6v wrote:
| The time between the emergence of procaryotes and the
| eukaryotes is estimated to be about 1 billion years. Last
| time I checked the Universe is thought to be 13.8 billion
| years. That's just one order of magnitude between these two
| numbers. I don't think it's inconceivable that we're the
| first intelligent life form.
|
| The life itself might be an extremely rare event.
| Multicellular life might be where the first great filter is.
| patentatt wrote:
| People always say that if life is possible, then there must
| be a bunch of aliens out in the universe. It may be
| unlikely, but one has to be first, maybe it's us? It's a
| somewhat comforting thought, I like it.
| Izkata wrote:
| Also how long dinosaurs were around before the world reset
| and how quickly human civilization developed relative to
| that.
| imhoguy wrote:
| What if there is unlimited number of The Great Filters. What if
| we are already Nth contingency plan seeded on Earth by N-1th
| parent life form(s) woring about the same problem - to survive,
| replicate further onto closest places as N+1 backup.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| The Fermi Paradox has essentially been resolved:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
|
| This explanation is much more plausible than a Great Filter.
| Here's a great comment summarizing the argument very intuitively:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562439
|
| I also found this one very helpful:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17564379
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| >This explanation is much more plausible than a Great Filter.
|
| I don't see how it's any different from the great filter
| explanation. It's just great filter with statistical
| distributions.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| The Great Filter thesis is that there has to be one or more
| _very_ low probability events in the Drake Equation.
|
| However, as per my other comments, you can update the
| distributions of your parameters in different ways, such that
| none of the events in the Drake equation have a particularly
| low probability.
|
| Then the Great Filter disappears and there's no specific or
| few set of events to point to - it's just that the
| probability of all events succeeding in combination is
| extremely low.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Eh no? The paper basically IS a great filter argument. Life is
| rare and we are alone. That means there is a great filter
| behind us.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| From the website: "The Great Silence implies that one or more
| of these steps are very improbable; there is a "Great
| Filter""
|
| The paper argues against this in that you don't need a few
| _very_ improbable. In fact, there are many parameter choices
| where none of the probabilities in the Drake equation are
| particularly low, yet the resulting number of intelligences
| is still staggeringly small.
|
| tl;dr: All parameters can be a bit lower. Then you don't need
| any events that are extremely improbable.
| seppel wrote:
| > However, the result is extremely different if, rather than
| using point estimates, we take account of our uncertainty in
| the parameters by treating each parameter as if it were
| uniformly drawn from the interval [0, 0.2]. Monte Carlo
| simulation shows that this actually produces an empty galaxy
| 21.45 % of the time.
|
| Isn't that just elaborated way of saying that some of the
| parameters of the Drake equation have to be much smaller than
| we think?
| shiftingleft wrote:
| Yeah - but they don't have to be _much_ smaller.
|
| Let's use the simple example you reference from the paper. If
| we just use the mean as point estimates, then indeed we
| obtain an extremely low probability that there's no other
| intelligences: def
| prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(p):
| prob_of_intelligence = pow(p, 9) planets = 100e9
| return pow(1-prob_of_intelligence, planets)
| prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(0.1) ->
| 3.720086311124783e-44
|
| However, there is already a 82% chance of an empty galaxy if
| the parameter p is halved:
| prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(0.05) -> 0.8225792614407508
|
| Now of course halving every probability is a lot, however now
| there's no single or few events that have a _very_ low
| probability of happening. The Great Filter disappears.
|
| See also my other comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25811359
| seppel wrote:
| Why do you have 9 factors? The classical Drake equation has
| 6 (and the L which is the avg. lifetime of the
| civilization).
|
| Also: The Drake equation has one factor which is the avg
| number of planets per star, of which we are already quite
| confident it is above 0.1.
| dvh wrote:
| Carbon is great filter
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I don't think we're far enough along in tinkering with subatomic
| physics or gravity to know whether we've passed the great filter
| or not.
|
| Hell, we haven't even managed to guarantee human rights to every
| person on the planet yet. We've got a ways to go.
| jl2718 wrote:
| The thing I keep seeing people miss is the narrow slice of time
| that we have existed in a technological state to be broadcasting
| and/or looking. Assuming exponential distribution, this is most
| likely to only last further as long as it has already. And with
| us as the only example, it would most likely be the same for
| others. So 50 years out of 5 billion on the planet and 3 billion
| since life began. Are there 100M stars within radio range? Do we
| even have time to point antennas at each one long enough to get a
| signal? That's about 15 seconds each. How many bands do we need
| to scan in that time?
|
| Any hope of contact or expansion requires an extremely long
| period of sustainable existence in a state of constant
| technological development. Most of modern humanism is
| antithetical to this. The entire world today seems focused on
| expanding consumption. This is especially true of both
| colonialism and immigration. Economist today judge an economy by
| its internal consumption rather than older notions like export
| productivity. Seems like we're going to have to reconsider
| policies and priorities if we want to make it out of here.
| carapace wrote:
| Every time this sort of thing comes up (the Fermi Paradox, the
| Great Silence) I like to point out that it says more about the
| person than the real world. To wit: there is no time or culture
| in the history of the world where humans have _not_ been in
| contact with some kind of "otherworldly" intelligence.
|
| Personally, (not that anyone asked) I think we're in quarantine.
| I think that most intelligent species rapidly reach a peaceful
| "win-win" equilibrium, that we humans are rare or even unique in
| our violence, that this is because of some specific but forgotten
| event (maybe the Younger Dryas, I don't know) that traumatized us
| and triggered the development of agriculture and cities, that
| those are degenerate forms of civilization that perpetrate the
| trauma that leads to our current malfunctions, and that we are
| essentially in a hospice-type situation _vis-a-vis_ the little
| green men.
|
| So, um, there? Have a nice day y'all.
| raldi wrote:
| Could you explain your second sentence a bit further?
| carapace wrote:
| You mean this?
|
| > there is no time or culture in the history of the world
| where humans have not been in contact with some kind of
| "otherworldly" intelligence.
|
| If so, I'm just pointing out that communication with other
| non-human beings is common to all human cultures. Every
| culture has people who communicate with angels or spirits or
| people from the sky or under the ground or some other realm,
| sometimes those folks are central to the culture, other times
| they are peripheral. I think our modern rational materialist
| fundamentalists are the first to seriously posit the idea
| that humans are strictly alone in the Universe.
| cgrealy wrote:
| > Every culture has people who _believe_ they communicate
| with angels or spirits or people from the sky...
|
| FTFY
|
| There is zero actual evidence of anyone communicating with
| any non-human intelligences.
| carapace wrote:
| > There is zero actual evidence of anyone communicating
| with any non-human intelligences.
|
| And that is _your belief._
|
| Here's a whole documentary about interactions between
| Brazilian military and something weird:
|
| > In 1977, numerous UFOs were seen in the Brazilian city
| of Colares, Para. The UFOs fired light beams at people,
| causing injuries and sucking blood from 400 witnesses.
| After a rise in local concern, the mayor of the city
| requested help from the Air Force.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0
| oli5679 wrote:
| I was more open-minded to this type of argument a few decades
| ago.
|
| The quality of our sensors - both smartphones held by everyone,
| and telescopes, satellites and radar by governments has
| improved exponentially, without a corresponding increase in
| detection, so I think it's reasonably likely we are not
| currently in contact with otherworldly intelligence.
|
| Once I made this argument to a friend, and they sent me this
| xkcd comic.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1235/
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Unless the aliens stopped showing up _because_ we 've
| developed smartphones, and they were showing up so often in
| the 1900s because they knew it was their last shot of dorking
| around with plausible deniability before camera and telecomm
| tech became mainstream!
|
| The tin foil always finds a way.
| postalrat wrote:
| > without a corresponding increase in detection
|
| How many detections have we had? The camera argument to me is
| ignorant of how hard it is to get a good picture of something
| small in the sky. People are constantly taking videos of dots
| they say was a UFO but it's impossible to identify what they
| captured.
| carapace wrote:
| > without a corresponding increase in detection
|
| With respect, have you gone and looked? To me it feels like
| the folks who present that objection haven't actually gone
| and checked, they're making an unfounded assumption.
|
| About once or twice a year I lose a day to a youtube hole
| wherein I go through all the recent videos of
| {Bigfoot,UFOs,Cryptids,Ghosts} for fun. There's a lot of crap
| out there, fake videos and hoaxes, but there are more and
| more very good candidates for "real" videos.
|
| The US Navy just released video of UFOs buzzing jets off the
| coast, eh?
| Izkata wrote:
| > I think that most intelligent species rapidly reach a
| peaceful "win-win" equilibrium, that we humans are rare or even
| unique in our violence
|
| This reminds me of a short story where Earth exists in a
| Bermuda Triangle-like sector of space, known as the Veil of
| Madness, that all other civilizations avoid:
| https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind
| andi999 wrote:
| I find the space colonization (outside own solar system) a bit
| too optimistic, while it is 'only' a technical problem, it still
| might be an impossible problem.
| qayxc wrote:
| Hm. I tend to think that it's not impossible, but simply very
| impractical.
|
| Outside of the very nearest neighbouring systems, any
| interstellar colony would instantly become an isolated new
| civilisation. There's simply no plausible way for interstellar
| trade or even just meaningful communication.
|
| All a colony at say, 82 Eridani - a sun-like star about 20 ly
| from Earth, would have a two-way communication time of 40
| years. Even digital "goods" aren't worth exchanging if it takes
| 20 years to send them and another 20 years to receive any kind
| of payment.
|
| At a very optimistic 30% lightspeed, ships would take 67 years
| to get there. This means no one can make the journey within a
| single human lifetime, unless the lifespan is dramatically
| increased or some form of hibernation technology is used.
|
| In any case, colonists would be completely removed from Earth
| and all that effort pretty much requires a suitable target
| planet to be present. Without radical genetic changes, humans
| wouldn't be able to thrive and survive on a Super Earth or in
| poisonous atmospheres. So another factor would be spending tens
| of thousands of years and unfathomable amounts of energy
| terraforming planets or changing the human genome beyond
| recognition.
|
| The same issues would apply to extra-terrestrial intelligences
| as well, which is why I don't think interstellar colonisation
| would even be all that desirable in the first place.
|
| First you have to find a suitable host star. Next you need to
| find a matching planet. Then you need to scout potential
| candidates (likely using automated probes), which would take
| about a century even for just the nearest stars...
|
| While all this is certainly doable, it's really not all that
| attractive given that you instantly "lose" the colony anyway
| simply due to the distances involved.
| aptwebapps wrote:
| Maybe by the time a civilization achieves the tech needed to
| really expand, they no longer want to.
| tlholaday wrote:
| > Maybe by the time a civilization achieves the tech needed to
| really expand, they no longer want to.
|
| Is that your candidate for the Great Filter?
| thow-01187 wrote:
| Colonizing and terraforming every single rock in the solar
| system increases the available land only by a factor of
| three: https://xkcd.com/1389/
|
| There's just no way every commoner gets their own Caribbean
| cabin. Unless we find some unlikely physics hack in the last
| few vestiges of scientific unknowns, any interstellar travel
| seems impossibly difficult.
|
| An alternative future: we live forever as brains in the vats,
| plugged into infinite virtual worlds devoid of scarcity,
| life-threatening danger or physical constraints. Most of the
| human activity takes place there, with occasional
| interactions between the virtual and the real. No new physics
| required, just a series of incremental improvements in
| biology and computing.
| PeterisP wrote:
| If we're being cynical, it's trivial to ensure that every
| commoner gets their own Carribean cabin - just reduce the
| number of commoners by a few orders of magnitude. After
| all, with some technological advancements, you would not
| need huge numbers of commoners just for their labor.
|
| A stable future can plausibly take many forms, not all of
| them are nice.
| aptwebapps wrote:
| That was what I meant, yes.
| edgyquant wrote:
| That's definitely what I believe
| einpoklum wrote:
| > among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has
| reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon
| reach.
|
| May soon reach? I doubt it. I'd say there's a significant filter
| between our technology level and large-scale inter-solar-system
| colonization. It's not at all clear that there is a strong
| motivation for that - except for a continuous-growth economy,
| which is kind of unsustainable anyway. Once the population
| stabilizes and human civilization is basically energy-neutral
| (i.e. not taking more than the sun provides), where's the great
| need to colonize someplace else (as opposed to communicating)?
| And if we don't stabilize - civilization will burn itself out
| soon enough, colonization or no.
|
| > Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves
| the problem of explaining the rest of the filter
|
| No it doesn't. It's extremely unlikely that one planet with life
| will travel to a different galaxy. Even with intelligent life
| it's extremely unlikely. Only if instantaneous travel were
| possible would this be likely.
| knome wrote:
| I've wondered if the first of the great filters isn't simply
| water.
|
| Assuming something like octopuses evolved into a relatively long
| lived tool-using species with complex communication, they would
| be infinitely hampered by their environment. Even if they were
| lucky, as we were, and their planet had available great reserves
| of fossil fuels, they could not burn them. They cannot invent
| fire. Without fire, they have no way to invent metallurgy. Or
| glassworks. Or plastics.
|
| What are the odds of having enough water for life to spark
| without having so much of it that it blankets the surface?
| Anything evolving on worlds with little land seem unlikely to
| ever escape their world.
|
| Life could be commonplace, but if most worlds it evolves on are
| 99% water, we would never see it or hear it. The universe would
| be silent.
|
| It may be our luck in simply being terrestrial rather than
| aquatic that separates us from our apparently absent galactic
| cohabitants.
|
| Being in a position to be capable of taking advantage of burnable
| trees, and later coals and oils may be beyond rare in the
| universe.
| lisper wrote:
| You don't need land to have fire. It's enough to have
| photosynthesis producing free oxygen. That produces an energy
| store at the water-air interface. That would lead to life forms
| evolving to take advantage of the benefit of living at that
| boundary and that would eventually lead to the formation of
| biological rather than geological land masses.
|
| Hm, sounds like a good premise for a SciFi novel. :-)
| oli5679 wrote:
| Recent data from New horisons mission is interesting, suggesting
| there are an order of magnitude fewer galaxies (hundreds of
| billions, rather than 2 trillion) which should be relevant update
| to Fermi/great filter reasoning.
|
| The probe is near Pluto, and so able to sky 10 times darker than
| Hubble, but isn't observing the modelled galaxies extrapolated
| from Hubble observations.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-finds-fewer-galaxies-th...
| ben_w wrote:
| The source material linked to from that article is better than
| the article itself: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-
| releases/2021/news-2021...
|
| For example, it explains why the sky would be darker from the
| POV of Pluto than the POV of Earth orbit (Zodiacal dust is
| relevant at this level).
|
| That said, I'm still surprised that the estimate was ever as
| high as 2 trillion; I thought the estimate had been the lower
| 100 billion value for most of my life.
| mellosouls wrote:
| (1998)
| Ariarule wrote:
| For anyone noting the 1998 date and not already aware, Robin
| Hason is still writing on the topic off and on at the
| _Overcoming Bias_ blog, and has had a few posts on the topic
| just this month: "Why We Can't See Grabby Aliens" -- more
| generally about life in the universe at
| https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/why-we-cant-see-grabb...
| and "Try-Menu-Combo Filter Steps" explicitly talking about the
| Great Filter idea some more at
| https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/01/try-menu-combo-filter...
| yboris wrote:
| _Dissolving the Fermi Paradox_ by Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler,
| Toby Ord
|
| > "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so
| removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which
| civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects
| upon the universe"
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
| taylorius wrote:
| I think technology acts as an amplifier to our impulses, both
| good and bad. The more technology, the more sensitive the
| balancing act, to stop civilisation going off the rails. We are
| not sufficiently balanced. The sort of tech required to conquer
| the stars, in human hands would probably lead us to wipe
| ourselves out within an hour of getting hold of it.
| stevehawk wrote:
| I love the theory of Great Filters. I'm pretty sure that #9 on
| the list should be "social media", though. Or in general, "self
| destructing human behavior."
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| When I was a kid ignorant people kept their thoughts in their
| heads safe and tucked away or maybe told a few people near them
| that knew better. Now they let them out on social media where
| they can find other ill-informed people and reinforce one
| another. I don't know a way around this filter step. Maybe it
| naturally will resolve. As Stewart Brand said, information
| wants to be free. I will be optimistic enough to believe that
| means correct information. The science and empathy just isn't
| well distributed yet. "The future is already here -- it's just
| not very evenly distributed." -William Gibson
| im3w1l wrote:
| Religion is on the decline.
| Reedx wrote:
| I think it's just changing form. Old religions being
| replaced by new religions. Old priests with new priests.
| Old gods with new gods.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Perhaps that explains why people are increasingly adopting
| dangerous secular myths, such as those about vaccines and
| the Deep State.
| Shaanie wrote:
| Seems unlikely, if that was the case then wouldn't you
| expect such things to be much more common in largely
| secular countries than the US?
| rootsudo wrote:
| Before you were a kid, people talked and shared secrets and
| inner desires with one another. What is ignorant, what isn't?
| Discussion about a king? A president? What sort of people you
| want to be around? What is dissident can become a movement
| and become superior.
|
| How do you decide which is which?
| nullc wrote:
| "Information wants to be free" is a physical law, not a moral
| rallying cry.
|
| In many cases the promiscuous nature of information works
| heavily against human welfare. One aspect of that is that
| incorrect information spreads as well -- sometimes better--
| than correct information.
| f6v wrote:
| > Now they let them out on social media where they can find
| other ill-informed people and reinforce one another.
|
| People have been able to share incredibly stupid ideas with
| high efficiency even before the social media.
| rriepe wrote:
| One that seems obvious to me (but others cheer for) is curing
| aging.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > Or in general, "self destructing human behavior."
|
| That is definitely a credible theory, and it's currently
| catalogued as number 2.2 on Wikipedia's list of hypothetical
| explanations for the Fermi Paradox, where it is given the
| haunting title: "It is the nature of intelligent life to
| destroy itself".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I have absolutely no education on the subject and have done
| almost zero research, but I wonder if this "Self Destructive
| Behavior of Humans" is merely the evolutionary local optimum of
| tribal behavior.
|
| Historically, it has been an advantage to have a strongly
| tribal drive. Cohesive groups achieved much more than
| individuals and yet were small enough that they could
| effectively self-police and agree on common goals.
|
| However, as the capabilities of each tribe increased and the
| world became smaller through travel (and now the internet),
| tribalism, us-versus-them still remain part of our basic
| instincts and subconscious, however it is now the source of
| international and high powered conflicts.
|
| 10000 years ago, our tribal programming resulted in the
| survival of a group of families and the development of
| townships and emergence of societies. If a tribe got
| particularly bloodthirsty, their impact was almost purely local
| and perhaps eventually their notoriety resulted in a decline.
|
| Now, sticks and stones have been replaced by nuclear weapons
| and ICBMs. A first strike capability is no longer dangerous to
| just one village, but entire continents.
|
| Perhaps our technological evolution has outpaced our biological
| and social evolution, and the behavior that was optimal even
| 1000 years ago is now a grave danger?
| hotstickyballs wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense.
|
| Any intelligent organism will have to overcome the biological
| local optima that brought it to the intelligent state before
| further developing as a species.
|
| We already have explored a variety options, each with their
| own advantages and downsides:
|
| 1. Free individuals in a distributed system in a cottage
| industry economy.
|
| 2. Semi-free individuals who gather in tribes formed around
| value-generation (i.e. corporations).
|
| 3. Centralized system with individuals who are assigned
| functions.
|
| Future progress will have to be technological and will change
| what it means to operate in the afore-mentioned scenarios
| 1,2,3.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| This resonates with me. I've long said that if we are to
| launch any kind of significant space-faring civilization, we
| will need to some extent to become a different species,
| through cybernetics & drugs or genetic engineering (probably
| a mix).
|
| Our current biggest challenge is to make ourselves 'smarter'
| (i.e. less susceptible to the biases baked into our DNA).
| Otherwise, it's likely only a matter of time before we
| cripple ourselves into an extended Dark Age or worse.
| Constant setbacks resulting from too many of us having
| ignorant, emotional reactions to incomplete stories with
| insufficient facts means we're all dancing on shifting sand.
| It's not a good foundation upon which to build a durable
| interstellar civilization.
| h4kor wrote:
| Climate Change will be the great filter for humanity.
| cgrealy wrote:
| Civilisation? Possibly.
|
| Humanity? Unlikely.
|
| Even in the absolute worst case scenarios, climate change
| doesn't wipe out humanity. Life would be very different (and
| would frankly suck), but some humans would still survive.
|
| The question is how long it takes to get back to our current
| level (hopefully with lessons learned!)
| Animats wrote:
| _" Life Will Colonize"_ _" So far, life on earth seems to have
| adapted its technology to fill every ecological niche it could."_
|
| Not any more. As technology has advanced, and agriculture has
| become less labor intensive, there's been a sizable cutback in
| populated area in the US and Japan, at least. Farms in less
| productive areas are not competitive and those areas are emptying
| out.[1] Towns which serviced the farms are dying off with
| them.[2]
|
| [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-population-change-by-
| co...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...
| edgyquant wrote:
| Not to mention Antarctica is a whole continent that people do
| not live on
| api wrote:
| I don't think there is a singular great filter. Instead I suspect
| there is a relatively constant probability of a black swan event
| across the entire existence of a biosphere.
|
| It took over four billion years to get from simple replicators to
| what exists here now. It is quite possible that most biospheres
| simply don't make it that long without such an event.
|
| We don't know the probabilities, but over billions of years the
| continuous probability of biosphere extinction need not be very
| high to filter out almost all biospheres before they develop
| something capable of interstellar signaling or flight.
|
| Keep in mind that another prior we don't know is the probability
| of a diverse biosphere developing this type of intelligence. We
| have no idea if that is likely or not even given sufficient time
| and energy inputs.
|
| Intergalactic flight is many orders of magnitude harder than
| interstellar flight, which in turn is many orders of magnitude
| harder than interplanetary flight. If the probability limits such
| intelligences to no more than an average of 1-2 per galaxy then
| there is your answer. We would be extremely unlikely to see
| intelligent aliens any time soon, even if we do find a lot of
| microbes.
|
| Given where Earth is now I would be surprised if it does not
| hatch an interstellar scale intelligence at some point in the
| remainder of its habitable life. Will that be us? Hopefully so.
| Given that we are already almost there (on evolutionary time
| scales) it is reasonably likely it will be us or an AI we create.
| blamestross wrote:
| Life is a search algorithm for energy utilization. Arguably the
| only evolutionary benefit of intelligence is the ability to
| bridge troughs between local optima farther than genetics alone
| can. It has limits as much as genetics does. We like to think of
| intelligence as some boundless forever bootstrapping superpower
| but all growth curves end up being sigmoid. The hard question is
| are we close to topping out or are we just waiting on the next
| punctuation in the equilibrium. I think future punctuations will
| be found in "what comes after intelligence" in the search for
| increasingly efficient energy utilization?
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