The Great Filter Comes For Us All

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven't any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-great-filter-comes-for-us-all
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This is based on a discussion I had in 2016 on the Boing Boing message boards: Let's talk Great Filter - general topics - Boing Boing BBS

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Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is more than three times farther than that and yet still within the Sunā€™s domain. (2012)

It is the farthest spacecraft from Earth and, as of 2013, the only one in interstellar space. Nearly forty years out, the radio signals from Voyager take over 18 hours to reach Earth. Voyagerā€™s RTG energy source will give out around 2025. Voyager, deaf, dumb, and blind, will reach the next nearby star in 40,000 more years.

If Voyager was aimed at the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive.

The most ā€¦ appropriate song on the golden record attached to Voyager. If there was, or is, anything out there to hear it.

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Or, life will reply to us within 1500 years from now?

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A topic Iā€™ve always found interesting. One thing Iā€™ve observed is humansā€™ conceit. Since our star is at the edge of just one arm of our Milky Way galaxy - and we cannot really ā€œobserveā€ those planets that may be orbiting the hundreds of thousands of stars in the other arms - why would an advanced civilization want to travel to other arms without first exploring those stars/planets in their own arm first? The idea of ā€œwe are important so ETs should visit usā€ is contrary to the fact that first we went to the moon, then to the planets in our own solar system, and finally onward and outward into inter-stellar space - without knowing where we (both Voyagers) are actually heading. Why would we expect other lifeforms to do anything different? Could it be they could simply be exploring/visiting their own solar system and galaxy before entertaining the idea of visiting other solar systems and galaxies?

For several millennia we had the idea the Earth was the center of the solar system - everything evolved around us. As we developed as a species, we assumed we were ā€œimportantā€ and ETs should be contacting/visiting US. Maybe they arenā€™t interested in us, if they even know about us in the first place. There also is the possibility that other life forms could be in the ā€œsame boat as usā€ - it simply takes too long to travel to other solar systems/galaxies to bother. Logic would dictate one develop oneā€™s self first; then slowly expand outward within their own limited means.

Another concept Iā€™ve given much thought to is even if there were advanced civilizations in more ancient galaxies, why in the world (pardon the pun) would they even consider traveling to ā€œyoungerā€ galaxies billions of light years away?

Regardless, I do believe in our quest to explore. I am a member of the National Space Society and the Planetary Society (monthly donation for over 20 yrs). Iā€™ve also contributed to various endeavors such as the Light Sail project. I have a 1 square cm of the sail from Light Sail 1 and have a personal message on board the craft visiting Europa. I also had my fatherā€™s name added on a gold DVD on another space craft, since he was an avid space enthusiast. His collection dates from the early years of flight (Wright Flyers aircraft (Wright Brothers)) to early rocket development to the Space Shuttle program. His collection (Attil Pasquini Collection) donated to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum (formerly known as the Schenectady Space Museum).

A little trivia on the Space Shuttle program. When I was ~16 yrs old, my father showed me 2 photographs of Space Shuttle launches and asked me if I noticed anything different between them. When I didnā€™t, he pointed out the main boosters on one were painted white and on the other only had a primer coat. He said an employee tasked with painting the boosters realized how much weight the white paint weighed that he was using. He suggested not painting over the primer and using that weight for additional payloads. He was awarded $14,000 for his idea, which NASA did employ.

Ad astra! (To the stars!)

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Personally I think that itā€™s just a case of

Space is big. You just wonā€™t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think itā€™s a long way down the road to the chemistā€™s, but thatā€™s just peanuts to space.

It may be teeming with life, but detecting it (or others detecting us) is just really hard. And the speed-of-light barrier doesnā€™t help either.

But hey, hereā€™s another (somewhat darker, depending on how you look at it) idea that I havenā€™t seen anyone talk about.

See, when you get right down to it, all that we humans do is to try and generate pleasure and avoid pain. All our struggles are really directed to this end goal. We might think that weā€™re trying to explore the vast mysteries of space, but really weā€™re just after the high that comes with a new discovery.

So what happens when we can get it directly? As our technology advances, eventually we should be able to directly interface with our minds. And thenā€¦ wellā€¦ hereā€™s a concept: The Pleasure Pod.

Take one human, and discard all the unnecessary parts. Basically leave just the brain and maybe some of the spinal cord. Put it in a jar with life support and add electrodes to all the right places. Stimulate the brain to produce the maximum amount of pleasure and leave it there for eternity.

Sure, youā€™ll also need a flock of robots that tend to the jars and maybe relocate the whole facility to a new star system once every few billion years, but thatā€™s also doable.

Aaand thatā€™s where everyone is. Once the Pleasure Pod of Immortality becomes available, it kinda becomes pointless to try and do anything else.

Some people might disagree and think that such a pod would be very unpleasant or unsatisfying, but by definition it wouldnā€™t. Entering it would be the most awesomest thing anyone could ever do.

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The everything gets smaller theory is interesting, but you should be confronted by an implication of this prediction. If things do indeed get smaller, a form of Mooreā€™s law should end up applying and they also accelerate. This is in addition to any truth to other existing acceleration theories.

As things miniaturize, the travel time of any interaction should shrink, and the population should grow, and so time should seem to move faster and faster in terms of evolutionary progress. Even if thereā€™s no hard lower wall on miniaturization, you have to wonder if the rate of acceleration from miniaturization and thus observability from scope of impact of extended evolution and the lower observability from evolution of miniaturization would be in equilibrium or be biased toward greater observability.

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I think thereā€™s a pretty hard wall for miniaturization. You canā€™t shrink elementary particles and you need at least so many of them to do useful stuff.

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If you are interested in this topic, you might want to read about Robin Hansonā€™s ā€œGrabby Aliensā€ theory. That is the cleanest and most plausible resolution of the Fermi Paradox I have seen yet.

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I think that the Fermi paradox has been convincingly explained by Sandberg et al as an artifact of point estimates; if you look at full probability distributions instead, our sadly solitary state is unsurprising:

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

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Humans depend on the warmth of the sun, on fresh air to breath, on water to drink, on grass to grow and on insects and fish and animals to help with it all. We are a local phenomenon.

If you can convince yourself that we went to the moon you can dream about other space journeys. Just as you write, that is only after one ā€œdoes away with all physical stuffā€.

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My theory: the filter is behind us, and itā€™s the leap from single- to multicellular life.

Fossil evidence says that this took a whopping 3 billion years on Earth. Thatā€™s a quite significant chunk of the age of the universe.

Itā€™s not all that unlikely that we got lucky and the mean time for this to happen is actually so long that it hasnā€™t happened anywhere else yet.

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On the other hand there are billions of galaxies much older than the Milky Way, so why would it be unlikely that this hasnā€™t happened in any (many) of those? Because of the vast distances, the universe may be teaming with life - we just canā€™t see itā€¦ yet.

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Some other possibilities:

  • Aliens are already here. I guess itā€™s established by now that UFOs do exist, albeit with an unusual interest in military. Maybe they are the aliens weā€™re looking for.
  • Alien life forms are so different that we donā€™t recognize them. Maybe they are smaller, or so much bigger, or just work in ways we donā€™t comprehend.
  • We live in a simulation, and in that case itā€™s likely that even if there is life in more than one solar system, all life has been seeded at the same time. Or the ā€˜creatorā€™ is waiting for us to reach some development threshold before adding aliens to the game.
  • Maybe every species that develops far enough to capable of interstellar travel is also so far advanced that they donā€™t see the point of exploring other civilizations. Maybe they have simulations that already discovered every possible species. Maybe they prefer to spend their life in a virtual world. Once you reach a certain level of knowledge, you canā€™t learn from other civilizations anymore.
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Another aspect - either faster-than-light (FTL) communication is possible, or itā€™s not. Therefore:

  • If itā€™s not possible (this btw also rules out FTL travel, because you could just take a thumbdrive with you), then interstellar (let alone intergalactic) communication is slow as hell, and we shouldnā€™t be surprised that we havenā€™t received any signals yet. In fact, you canā€™t even do anything more than broadcast ā€œweā€™re hereā€ and hope that someone gets it. We just havenā€™t gotten it.
  • If it is possible, then it will quickly replace the older, slower methods for interstellar/intergalactic communications. And since we donā€™t know the trick yet, we canā€™t participate.

Either way, we shouldnā€™t expect a whole lot of interstellar chatter to be going on in the universe that we could eavesdrop on.

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Movie suggestion: The Thirteenth Floor

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Itā€™s a cool take, and itā€™s interesting that multiple medias (tv, videogames, books, etc) have fantasized/theorized/explored multiple ways regarding that, in all 3 great filters.

Star Trek for one, goes into the ā€œuniverse is full of different peopleā€ (and ignoring the reasoning given for most of species looking like humans is that we all have one common ancestor that sew their seeds everywhere, which in my opinion feels like itā€™s a post concept to explain our regular human actors cosplaying other races without spending much in 3D lol) and you could say that each planet had itā€™s own Great Filter (#1) as each has itā€™s dominant civilization, and now the human space exploration is just tying these different civilizations together (being space-nosy) bringing every planet into an entire spaceā€™s great filter situation (which could be the Borg assimilating everyone - filter #3, etc).

The great filter #1 and also #3 ā€œAlmost no life makes it to this pointā€ has been beautifully explored in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, in the Endwalker expansion (spoilers ahead lol):

The thriving ancient civilization of eos ago (of the planet your character is from) had powers to create anything at will had as one of their citizens, a guy curious about the possibility of other civilizations elsewhere, created sentient ā€œprobesā€ (Meteion and her sisters) that were sent across space in order to find other civilizations. What each found was pretty much the great filter #1 happened AKA there were other civilizations in different planets BUT with a mix/caveat that all of them had already been past a second Great Filter of sorts, which exterminated all of them.

The ā€œUltima Thuleā€ region explores 4 civilizations (Dragons, Ea, Omicrons, one necropolis thereā€™s no actual name of the race, from what I remember) and the dungeon ā€œThe Dead Endsā€ explores this too, with the ā€œprobeā€ showing us players 3 of such other civilizations, all of them in different civilization levels, but that shows that each civilization had went past the filter #1, into their bigger filter:

  • A blue, mostly water planet, fell into pestilence and started rotting inside out. And the people started blaming the people who fell ill rather than the illness/curse (that disfigured and made them die and/or become a monstrosity), and the extermination of the race itself happened.
  • A brilliant planet, who managed to eradicate all diseases, before starting to eradicate all lives that have been saved by *- and I feel it was a pinch at USA) - * trying ā€œgreater freedomsā€, buying peace with ā€œfire and steelā€ (aka war and conflict) until every single person died. It was even poetic since when someone asked ā€œWhatā€™s the point?ā€, there was noone else to answer as they were the last one alive
  • There was a planet without any conflict whatsoever, but also no other issues or joys, to the point they all became apathetic to everything and even life. So they created a creature to ā€œreleaseā€ them from this world, so their only joy was to wait for said creature to come and die. Until all died.

In the narrative, seeing so many of said planets going through different filters but all of them ending in death made the ā€œprobesā€ kinda just assume everything in the entire universe boils down to pain, suffering and deathā€¦ And they started attacking the ancient guyā€™s civilization because thereā€™s nothing else to be had.

Itā€™s pretty cool reading about these Great Filters after experiencing the gameā€™s expansion years ago, I can totally see how the filter theory can apply to these different fantasy/fiction civilizations and how they could be used as theory examples for our IRL predictment of ā€œwhere are the other civilizationsā€.

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