What if the great filter of humanity is to overcome it's own nature that made it the dominant species of the planet and what if that is the universal great filter that makes the cosmos silent
The the DNA brick wall we've been climbing is exactly that.
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We tend to focus on distance from it's star and size to determine a planet's habitability, but one of the most distinctive things about Earth is that it is essentially a two-planet system with the moon. The ratio of planet size to orbital object is pretty unique. The moon has all kinds of benefits, like tides and deflecting objects from Earth.
Then there's the magnetosphere, which Mars doesn't have and look what happened to it. And Jupiter’s massive size and gravitational influence play a crucial role in protecting Earth from extraterrestrial objects, including comets and asteroids.
Even with all that the Earth might never have developed intelligent life.
I don't think that's an "if" at all. I firmly believe that that's exactly it.
The same behaviours that we needed to evolve are harmful now that we've reached a potential "post-scarcity" stage.
To put it more bluntly, the drive to compete for resources in order to survive is what made us the dominant species. Now that post-scarcity is essentially upon us, our nature is to create artificial scarcity in order to satiate that drive for competition. And it will be the ultimate end of us.
Here's the thing about the question "where is everyone then?"
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
-Douglas Adams
We have had the ability to receive signals from space for roughly 100 years. 100 light year radius is NOTHING. Then there is the problem of the inverse square law making broadcast radio signals really hard to detect from that kind of distance.
100 years is an infinitesimal amount of time against the backdrop of the universe. Time is the great enemy here. Space and time are brutal masters.
To physically travel to the very closest star to our own would take over seventy thousand years at speeds we are currently capable of.
Space is almost entirely empty. The great filter could simply be trying to leave one's own planet for any length of time. We are forever isolated, forever tied to the planet from which we arose.
I like the idea that the Great Filter is really just civilizations turning inward. Like they all get to a point where they realize that space travel is just really not viable and so they stop looking to explore the universe or find other life. Instead they turn to virtual worlds to prolong their existence with what resources they have available in their own star systems. Not even Dyson spheres or anything, they just go into digital hibernation and live out the rest of their lifetimes in a fabricated paradise for however long they can. Maybe they're able to use drugs/genetics/whatever to slow time down to a crawl where it feels like they live thousands of years within a normal lifespan.
Then we would start 'behavorial sink' and slowly decline in population. Someone else mentioned Calhoun and his rat utopia the other day and I looked it up. It seems like we are going through our version of behavioral sink.
Like uploads? If so, couldn't they have all this fun while slowly traveling the universe?
"We're sorry to interrupt everyone's simulation, but we're happy to remind you that you're a person on a spaceship and we just found something interesting!"
I don't know if this theory has a proper name but I have seen it multiple times.
If a species has the ability to push their technology to the point they could become a space faring species, that technology will destroy the civilization before it can get there
It may depend on the rate they get to that point. Add in a dense energy source that's suddenly available and the rise of tech may be lethal. Perhaps the lucky ones don't have something like petroleum so their species matures long before they ruin their world.
In the grand scale of the universe we aren't even a blip, any "permanent" damage we cause will be reversed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years after we've wiped ourselves out.
And even if there was some kind of damage that couldn't be reversed, the next cycle of life would just adapt to whatever the issue is
I mean the earth has already survived having the first moon crash into it, as well as a giant meteor that caused an ice age. We have t quite gotten to that level, yet.
It's something people don't realize. We may be a scourge on the Earth, but we're still nowhere even near the top of the list of worst things to happen to this planet.
As the other reply brought up, Theia crashing into Earth. Flood basalt events. The Chicxulub impact.
We may be able to cause some real awful shit, but we still are nothing compared to what the forces of nature can produce. And just to clarify, I'm not saying this to in any way downplay the seriousness of climate change, or that we should do nothing about it.
The thing is we could largely retain all our advances and live in a more fecund environment. A large portion of our pollution is unnecessary and tied to whatever you call this global economic system / social paradigm we've backed ourselves into. It's only either or between forest and urban blight because we've made it so
The Archers, Pikes, Kirks succeeded by being bold and daring, confronting dangers, fighting to survive. The Siskos and Burnhams instigated war on a galactic scale. They were violent, reactive, risk takers
a couple centuries later, the Picards confronted greater obstacles but with reason, compassion, self-sacrifice. If Kirk had faced Q, that would have been the great filter, but Picard succeeded as a human evolved past his violent reactions