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THE GREAT FILTER AND WHY HUMANITY IS FUCKED

Started by tyrannosaurus vex, September 18, 2014, 02:03:01 AM

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tyrannosaurus vex

OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER IS OBVIOUS: THE FOLLOWING BULLSHIT IS 100% CONJECTURE


It's a safe bet that the term "Great Filter" is already known to most of the people on this board, but because typing is fun, I'll give a brief explanation here anyway. Statistically speaking, based on a few safe assumptions dealing with the size and age of our galaxy, the prevalence of certain elements in the cosmos, and various things we know from the history of biological life on Earth, the universe should be teeming with alien life. Life should be more common than fat people at Wal-Mart. That there is life "out there" should be a safer bet than guessing that the neckbeard who lives across your street in his parents' basement listens to Rush and has at least one imitation Samurai sword. Our galaxy alone should be home to something like seventy quadrillion metric fuckshits of advanced civilizations. All the math that goes into this assumption is as sound as we can make it, and even Republican scientists are more or less certain of its truth.


The problem is, if our galaxy is so full of people, WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY? We have no evidence of alien life anywhere, unless you listen to that asshole Georgio Tsoukalos or various hillbillies who can't tell the difference between a girlfriend and a cousin. Even considering the vastness of space, the relatively slow speed of electromagnetic wave-based communication, and our recently developed ability to eavesdrop on said communication, we should be receiving so many god damn artificially generated signals that talking to our own satellites should be like trying to tell the guy in the fishnet turtleneck whether you want X or acid at a Skrillex gig. But space is silent. Why?


There are a number of competing theories as to why this might be the case, from "your math is just wrong" to "they are there, they're just using some kind of communication we don't understand." But the funnest theory is the Great Filter, which basically says that life is common -- even intelligent life similar to ourselves -- but that some Awful Thing prevents it from achieving interstellar travel or communication. So there could be billions of worlds like earth, each of them infested with horrible little worms like us, but they are all quarantined by the Great Filter. Usually it is assumed that they end up blowing themselves up with nuclear weapons or something before achieving anything like what we dream about in Star Trek.


While nuclear or biological or chemical warfare is a perfectly plausible explanation, I don't think it is the right one. Humans, for example, have had a good 75 years with access to nukes, and we haven't killed ourselves off yet. And, what's worse, all signs point to our collective lack of being serious about playing with our best toys continuing indefinitely. No, we will not be sterilizing the planet, at least not on purpose. I think the Great Filter is much more sinister than just an innocent collective autocidal incident.


It comes down to what makes a society a society. In order to achieve what we call civilization, our species relies both on collective intelligence and individual ingenuity. We must be able to function cognitively at a high level as distinct members of the whole, as well as to communicate with each other and our progeny efficiently in order to maintain the systems and infrastructure we construct. The problem is that at a certain point in every successful civilization, the relative comfort and convenience afforded individuals leads to a breakdown of the "social instinct." It becomes acceptable and even prudent to put oneself before one's community, because the individual loses sight of the fact that a society, like any kind of team, only works when it works together as a unit.


Such breakdowns are apparent throughout history as the causes of all kinds of social decay and collapse. But the real Great Filter comes in when we consider what kind of sacrifices would be required from individuals if their civilization attempted to colonize the stars. It is a task of such magnitude and scale, economically and temporally, that it holds no real interest for the individuals who would need to contribute to it. Those who began the process would have no hope of seeing it even halfway through. Biological life does not allow for lifespans that would make it worthwhile to travel from our star system to another one, for colonization or any other purpose. In order to accomplish that task, we would have to completely eliminate the entire concept of "I" and become a new sort of life form, multi-multicelled organism. Not in a figurative sense, but a real, literal sense. An actual colony organism where the individual cells are completely disposable and expendable, where intelligence resides in an organ or a process that cannot be comprehended by any of the individual units.


And we are unwilling to even take small steps in that direction. We are all about ME ME ME and MY MY MY. MY stuff. MY money. MY taxes. MY rights. Humanity is horrible at cooperating for anything other than fighting off an existential threat, and even then that threat must be immediate enough to directly threaten individuals (see: climate change). We just don't do things on a scale large enough to leap from our star system to any other. I think it is because everything we have achieved is because we are wired for individualism, and that wiring prevents us from achieving anything of any magnitude larger than maybe a planetary government (which will of course be a government of self-interested assholes that exists to facilitate the marginally interesting lives of other self-interested assholes).


So that is the Great Filter. That we are constitutionally prevented from shedding our egos to accomplish a task we can only dream of because we have egos.


Or something.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

That's an interesting hypothesis.

It's also possible that because all matter in the universe is approximately the same age, that all life in the universe is also all approximately the same age and at the same stage of development.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


tyrannosaurus vex

Quote from: Your Mom on September 18, 2014, 04:53:56 AM
That's an interesting hypothesis.

It's also possible that because all matter in the universe is approximately the same age, that all life in the universe is also all approximately the same age and at the same stage of development.

I think that's a stretch, to be honest. First, there are a number of factors that have both sped and slowed our own development. Climactic changes, the fact that we have large pools of nearly ready-to-use fuel hanging around at depths we can easily drill to, an absence of multiple competing (and genetically incompatible) top-of-the-food-chain predators, for example. We also know (or are pretty sure) that our own planet is about 1/3 the age of the universe in general, and that there are many far more ancient planets. There were star systems complete with planets billions of years before our sun ever sparked into being. There's no guarantee that other intelligences would develop at a rate comparable to our own. They might be much smarter, or dumber (though that's hard to imagine). My hypothesis pure amateur conjecture is that civilization itself requires a combination of individualism and collectivism where the emphasis is a little to high on individualism for viable interstellar civilization to ever be possible, or at least practical, but civilization is a prerequisite for even imagining such a thing.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: V3X on September 18, 2014, 05:01:13 AM
Quote from: Your Mom on September 18, 2014, 04:53:56 AM
That's an interesting hypothesis.

It's also possible that because all matter in the universe is approximately the same age, that all life in the universe is also all approximately the same age and at the same stage of development.

I think that's a stretch, to be honest. First, there are a number of factors that have both sped and slowed our own development. Climactic changes, the fact that we have large pools of nearly ready-to-use fuel hanging around at depths we can easily drill to, an absence of multiple competing (and genetically incompatible) top-of-the-food-chain predators, for example. We also know (or are pretty sure) that our own planet is about 1/3 the age of the universe in general, and that there are many far more ancient planets. There were star systems complete with planets billions of years before our sun ever sparked into being. There's no guarantee that other intelligences would develop at a rate comparable to our own. They might be much smarter, or dumber (though that's hard to imagine). My hypothesis pure amateur conjecture is that civilization itself requires a combination of individualism and collectivism where the emphasis is a little to high on individualism for viable interstellar civilization to ever be possible, or at least practical, but civilization is a prerequisite for even imagining such a thing.

Eh, I don't have it in me to go into it right now so I'll just say that there are reasons that it is perfectly plausible that other life in the Universe is of similar age, and there are also perfectly legitimate reasons to think that other planets that harbor life are very similar to our and have followed a similar path, mass extinctions and all. But I'm tired so I might just try to remember to come back to it at another time.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Let me amend that: life within the reachable Universe. The laws of physics governing our Universe causes there to be areas that are unreachable for us. For our purposes, they don't exist.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Let me take it a step further and propose that even if we did develop interstellar travel, it would be far more practical and economical, and probably have a better expectation of survival, to simply infect a big mass of frozen rocks with our DNA and jettison it out into space. I mean, if all that matters is perpetuating our DNA elsewhere in the Universe.

Just sayin'.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


tyrannosaurus vex

I'm sure there are many perfectly sane and reasonable reasons to expect such a thing, but I don't think those reasons are being all that careful to avoid making unnecessary assumptions just because we have only one example.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

tyrannosaurus vex

Quote from: Your Mom on September 18, 2014, 05:16:08 AM
Let me take it a step further and propose that even if we did develop interstellar travel, it would be far more practical and economical, and probably have a better expectation of survival, to simply infect a big mass of frozen rocks with our DNA and jettison it out into space. I mean, if all that matters is perpetuating our DNA elsewhere in the Universe.

Just sayin'.

Sure, but that wouldn't really count in most people's minds, for exactly the reasons I gave in the OP. It isn't them experiencing it first-hand or second-hand, so it's unlikely to ever be a thing we do.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: V3X on September 18, 2014, 05:19:21 AM
Quote from: Your Mom on September 18, 2014, 05:16:08 AM
Let me take it a step further and propose that even if we did develop interstellar travel, it would be far more practical and economical, and probably have a better expectation of survival, to simply infect a big mass of frozen rocks with our DNA and jettison it out into space. I mean, if all that matters is perpetuating our DNA elsewhere in the Universe.

Just sayin'.

Sure, but that wouldn't really count in most people's minds, for exactly the reasons I gave in the OP. It isn't them experiencing it first-hand or second-hand, so it's unlikely to ever be a thing we do.

It's probably far more likely than actual interstellar travel, though. But if we get to that point... what, really, would even be the point? Why undertake something that is such a massive resource-drain using actual meat animals who will never experience the joys and rewards of finding new planets?

But here's another thought, which oddly you pooh-poohed the first time I mentioned it. Any solar systems with life-bearing planets that are near us enough to reach us within a time-span that might make it possible and/or worth their while from an ego-perspective are about the same age and stability as our own. That means that the geological processes of their planets have also recently chilled the fuck out enough (literally) to give the latest round of life forms a chance to maybe evolve high levels of intelligence complete with a sense of self. Now, lets look at a fairly simple rule in biology; if it can be shown that something is, the most likely condition is that that condition is what is most likely. In other words, the unlikely is unlikely. That means that by virtue of existing, life is likely, and that life as we know it, having been observed, is already more likely than life that is unlike anything we've ever seen. While we don't know, we can at least reasonably guess that we may, in fact, be fairly representative.

That's not a very sexy notion, though, so until/unless we actually meet spacefaring species, we will probably continue imagining them as unimaginably strange.

Just an aside, but the age of the universe in general does not promise a much-earlier earlier existence of solar systems with planets capable of sustaining life. The early Universe was probably a much more hostile place.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Good Reverend Roger

Quote from: V3X on September 18, 2014, 02:03:01 AM
OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER IS OBVIOUS: THE FOLLOWING BULLSHIT IS 100% CONJECTURE


It's a safe bet that the term "Great Filter" is already known to most of the people on this board, but because typing is fun, I'll give a brief explanation here anyway. Statistically speaking, based on a few safe assumptions dealing with the size and age of our galaxy, the prevalence of certain elements in the cosmos, and various things we know from the history of biological life on Earth, the universe should be teeming with alien life. Life should be more common than fat people at Wal-Mart. That there is life "out there" should be a safer bet than guessing that the neckbeard who lives across your street in his parents' basement listens to Rush and has at least one imitation Samurai sword. Our galaxy alone should be home to something like seventy quadrillion metric fuckshits of advanced civilizations. All the math that goes into this assumption is as sound as we can make it, and even Republican scientists are more or less certain of its truth.


The problem is, if our galaxy is so full of people, WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY?

Gonna wander into theism, here.

Suppose you're God, right?  And maybe you set all this shit in motion, from your Acme Big Bang Kit.  And you create humans out of primates.  There's the big addition; big fucking frontal lobes.  And while you're napping, they start setting off hydrogen bombs in their own environment, like insane sea monkeys.

Do you run right out and make loads of other intelligent life forms, or do you quietly shove the whole mess into the garage and hope the wife forgets about your little experiment with not reading the directions?  Sooner or later the monkeys will choke on their own shit or nuke themselves or maybe just get in the way of a comet, and the problem is solved...The universe is nice and quiet again, just like before you had that horrible idea on day 6.

So where the fuck are they?  Still in the packing material, and that is right where they'll fucking stay.

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

P3nT4gR4m

Whilst it's statistically unlikely that we're the only civilization in the universe, it's also a logical fact that there would have to be a first. Just like there has to be someone who wins the lottery (only with much longer odds)

So maybe we are the only ones for the time being? Somebody has to be.

I'm up to my arse in Brexit Numpties, but I want more.  Target-rich environments are the new sexy.
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walking the fine line line between genius and batshit fucking crazy

"computation is a pattern in the spacetime arrangement of particles, and it's not the particles but the pattern that really matters! Matter doesn't matter." -- Max Tegmark

Junkenstein

Or maybe everything else is already dead.

True equality means allowing even alien entities the capacity to be just as stupid and evil as you or I. Who would it really shock if the first trip to an alien world found plenty of evidence of civilisation.... a long while ago. If it's a statistical possibility that there's life galore out there, it's surely at least possible that there was lots, and they fucked it up just as much as we have/can/will do.


Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

LMNO

Nigel touched on a point that bears another look.

On one hand, the conditions that make up life as we know it (for the sake of brevity, we're not going to speculate about creatures that are other than carbon-based, or somehow exist in environments currently unfatyhomable) are extremely rare.  A brief look at what we can see of our galaxy seems to show that to be true.

On the other hand, you've got essentially an infinite universe.  Simple probability insists there should be life out there.

But Nigel has noted that there is a horizon.
Quote from: Your MomThe laws of physics governing our Universe causes there to be areas that are unreachable for us. For our purposes, they don't exist.

"Infinite universe" though it may be, we'll never know about it.  Just on the other side of the horizon, there could be massive Star Trek and Firefly type civilizations that bounce from star to star.  Maybe there's a solar system where five planets, reachable by nothing more clever than an Apollo-type rocket, are habitible and serve as some galactic council.  We'll never know, and they'll never know about us. 

And when you start thinking probalilistically (is that even a word?), it's far more likely that there's unreachable life, rather than some sort of cataclysmic barrier to being an interstellar species.

hooplala

I don't think our cosmic neighborhood is all that unique. There is life around, but not what we would consider intelligent.  I would imagine the rest of the universe is similar.

However, if the multiple universes theory is true, then there is plenty of human life out there, and truly inaccessible to us.

In the multiple universe theory, we can be alone in the universe(s), and not alone, at the same time.
"Soon all of us will have special names" — Professor Brian O'Blivion

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"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
— Walt Whitman

LMNO