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What do you think the Great Filter is?
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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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I don't think there is a single filter. My personal gut feeling however is that the jump to "specialised generalists" would be a major hurdle.
Early human civilizations are very prone to collapsing. A few bad years of rain, or an unexpected change of temperature would effectively destroy them. Making the jump from nomadic tribal to a civilisation capable of supporting the specialists needed for technology is apparently extremely fragile.
Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.
I suspect a good number of civilizations bottleneck at this jump. They might be capable of making the shift, but get knocked back down each time it starts to happen.
Speaking of our moon, the fact that it's roughly the same size as the sun as seen from earth and the fact that this is a complete coincidence blows my mind. Like there's no reason for that to be the case. Total eclipses like ours (where you can see the corona) are very rare.
Even more so, the moon is slowly moving away from the earth. A couple of million years ago, it would have completely covered the sun. In a couple of million years, it will not fully cover the disc.
A million years is a long time for humanity, but a blink on the timescale of moons and stars. We didn't just luck out with the moon's large size, but also with the timing of our evolution.
That's nuts. In two million years, humans will be sighing and saying wistfully "if I had a time machine, I'd want to go back to the time of the full eclipses, like 2024"
There seem to be so many coincidences that make our solar system unique that it's really upsetting lol It's like we are so perfect for stability because of things like Jupiter keeping the inner system "clean" of large impactors, our part of the galaxy being more "quiet" than typical as far as supernovae, stuff like that which makes it seem even less likely for life to exist anywhere else. :(
Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren't actually that bad.
The problem is, we can't detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won't recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.