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.
we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy,
haha dude, error #1. we can do everything right and still be toast if all our eggs are in this one fucking basket. the universe is a big place and the earth is a very small, vulnerable one.
No truly cataclysmic events occurred in the last millions of years, so we’re probably safe enough.
Fucking up the planet in an anthropogenic way is clearly a bigger concern, and launching giant stuff into space contributes to that.
In other words, maybe later it could be worth it, but only if we solve the problems right here. Otherwise, we won’t make it there, either.
No truly cataclysmic events occurred in the last millions of years, so we’re probably safe enough.
Just because nothing happened so far, doesn’t mean nothing will happen in the future. Just look at some of the volcanoes we have around. They may lay dormant for millennia, until they don’t. Same principle for pretty much everything this universe has to offer. It’s safe until it suddenly isn’t.
Also, we have several billion people on this planet. I think we can handle tackling multiple problems at once.
With our current understanding, the universe is a vulnerable place. Heat death of the universe may be a thing that’s inescapable.
may or may not be. i’ve had long discussions about that with people. i struggle to get a clear answer from people. everybody gives evasive answers.
Evasive answers like “we really can’t know what will happen in billions of years”? xD
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.
Honesty we should just sell the moon to private equity
It would be worth it if Elon Musk would move there.
It’s free real-estate!
The issue isn’t just flying saucers not landing in downtown Manhattan, the problem is the universe has been silent so far for us. A universal tendency towards planetary protection doesn’t explain why we don’t see a cosmos awash in artificial electromagnetic signals. Everything we find seems to have a natural explanation. If life really was as common as it should be, we would see it broadcasting out into the dark like we are. The universe is old, big and filled with the stuff life needs. Life SHOULD exist, the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre. Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
That just indicates nobody is beaming an uncompressed signal directly at use. Something not on a tight beam directed at us would disperse and get lost in the noise. A compressed data stream would be indistinguishable from noise if since we don’t know the compression algorithm and with any kind of interference at all there wouldn’t be any way to distinguish it from noise.
Getting a radio signal basically requires there to be an alien race that knows we’re here and wants to talk to us.
Yupp could be a whole species of beings out there with their own space programs trying to send and recievesignals but they’re left in the dark just like us, forever out of reach and drifting further from each other.
We may be receiving weak signals all the time that come across as noise, but receiving a message is a different story with specific motivations and efforts behind it.
The universe is old
Actually it’s very young, like a baby young compared to what it could be
Life SHOULD exist
That’s a very bold statement without any evidence to it
the fact that we haven’t found any real evidence of it yet is bizarre
You could call it bizarre if you had some data where there should be a lot of evidence. We don’t have that data, just fantasies.
Some fundamental part of how we understand the universe is wrong.
Likely most of it. Or even our “understanding” as a concept is not there yet. I mean our “understanding” was meant to find food, prey, etc. And we were pretty bad at that.
“We need to spread to the stars to ensure the survival of our species.”
Why? Why does our species need to survive? Why would anyone care about that? I don’t think anyone really does. People just want to do cool stuff, as entertainment. To alleviate boredom. That’s it.
No one reading this will “go to the stars”. It’s unlikely more than a handful will visit Mars in your lifetime. Why anyone would want to go to Mars is beyond me, it’s extremely inhospitable to humans. There’s nothing there.
We thought, after going to the moon we’d continue on in that vain, and have space hotels by 2001. It didn’t happen, don’t think anything will be different this time.
Stop thinking we can trash this planet, “but it’s okay because we’ll find a different one.” That’s not going to happen. It’s far, far more likely we’re going to kill ourselves off long before we can get anywhere close to doing that. That’s the reality.
That would solve the Fermi paradox too. Smart species stayed on their home planet, dumb ones tried to leave it. While trying, they ruined their best chance of survival. While in space, they found out that survival out there is nearly impossible without a planet. That’s why we don’t hear from them.
Maybe. But this would still only filter some.
The great filter to me is a vast mix of filters. Sime 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.
You are very young, aren’t you? I’m guessing 14-17?
They not like us.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Did space hurt you, somehow?
Username does NOT check out
right, all eggs one basket? sure Jan.
A Great Filter needs to explain why we don’t hear radio transmissions from alien civilisations.
space big explains it pretty clearly tbh
Does it?
The Fermi Paradox which proposes the great filter suggests that despite the vastness of space we should still be able to detect radio waves from other civilisations.
The question of the great filter would not be posed, if we were unlikely to detect other civilisations because of the expanse of space.
Inverse square law. We’re probavly bombarded by millions of alien signals. They’re just not very loud
Oh wow you’ve cracked it. To think there are great physicists like Frank Drake who have made this search their life’s work, and pondered this very question for decades, and you’ve deduced the solution with your astonishing intellect. Bravo.
It was a thought experiment meant to provoke discussion at the time, not a rigorous theorem. Check the
fccoefficient, there’s much debate about its value and definition of detectability.You’re aware Drake was one of the instigators of the SETI program right? He spent a significant portion of his life on a project that would have been pointless if you are correct.
You may have just upset every scientist in the room at the suggestion that people only expend time on money on science that will only produce positive results
Also dark forest theory
I think the only reason this theory exists is because it’s kinda spooky and fills us with dread.
If such a civilisation existed with the power, intention, and tech to zoom around killing off other species:
- how do other planets know they need to hide?
- why haven’t we been killed off yet ?
- what is the motivation of these civilisation-squashers?
- and finally… if everyone was hiding out avoiding making any radiowaves, the killers would have long since switched to looking for the conditions that support life, the same way we do.
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
Well, in a few million years the sun will burn out, and we won’t have any choice but to migrate.
Not quite an immediate concern tho. Maybe for aliens, too?
what makes you think that waiting makes spaceflight easier?
Technology development is related to time. I feel like that sounds sarcastic, but I don’t mean it to be.
If we approached deep space flight anew in three hundred years after working on non internal combustion engines for other purposes in that time, we’d probably be much better able to reduce the total emissions from space flight than if we work on it continuously for the next hundred years, even if we reach zero emissions in a shorter timeframe that way.
The same is true for material sciences and trying to figure out how to reduce the level of metallic ions released into the ozone layer by spacecrafts. Hell, we’ll probably have more advanced international cooperation in three hundred years and language education/translation software, giving us a better ability to respond to an emergency in space.
i doubt that. the basic physics behind rocketry is well-understood. we know why electric propulsion cannot be used for lift-off (rocket equation), nuclear-thermal propulsion induces its own problems (nuclear waste), etc.
there’s just no way that you’re gonna circumvent the ways that physical laws push you into, even if we wait 300 years.
*billion
good ending
