Ask Lemmy

The way the news has been going I wouldn't be surprised if plastic is a candidate. After a little less than a century of rapid development in petrol-plastics we're starting to figure out the long term effects. But the next 1000 generations may be dealing with the fallout.

sentience. I think it usually immediately leads to suicide

I think that for a technological civilization to rise, you need some things to line up. First, life has to be evolved enough to have animals, beings with a brain. Then, a species has to evolve intellence to become a tool making species. This species also has to become the dominating species on the planet. Meanwhile, extinction events, ice ages, climate change and population bottlenecks are always influencing the evolution process.

This is for me the great filter, to have all these conditions line up perfectly for an intelligent, tool making species to evolve and thrive.

the internet. or some other mass communication methodology. we have developed it before we're responsible enough to have it. there are too many bad actors ready to take advantage of our innate biological tribalism. we'll kill ourselves before we reach very far into space.

Maybe it's wisdom.

Every species that might have grown advanced enough, would have gotten over the point of fighting themselves. So they would be wise enough to have something like the Prime Directive in Star Trek (not interfering with less advanced species' until they reach a certain milestone).

For us it's conservatism and its synonyms.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds is one of my favorite scifi books and it deals with this question in an interesting way. It proposes that Time is the great filter. Life exists in this galaxy, but intelligent life is so fleeting when considering galactic distances that the probability of one sentient lifeform finding another during their "peaks" is vanishingly small. Extinction, societal collapse, evolution to a higher form, whatever you want to imagine, it all gets in the way of the fantasy of meeting a thinking being from another planet.

I don't think life is rare, nor photosynthesis, but complex life might be. A planet needs to be really thriving with life for it to be worth it to go down the path to something like animals

But I think the bigger filter is much stranger.

Humans are a hive-like species. We're not just social - we're insanely interdependent, we don't function on our own and yet we've ended up in this place where we (often) try to individually succeed, even at the cost to our community

We're greedy enough to want the stars, yet interdependent enough we could only swarm over them in endless numbers

There's many problems with the fermi "paradox", but personally I think one of the largest is assuming all species would spread like a cancer blotting out the stars

A more individualistic and long lived species might instead be careful explorers, taking what they need and leaving little sign of their passage. A more communal species might be careful and control themselves to not destroy pointlessly. They might also feel no desire to contact other species

We're just the right mix to want everything a star could give, and to want to find others at great energy cost

The Dark Forest theory is a great answer to this paradox. Anyone more advanced has a rational choice to exterminate all competition. We haven’t found any other advanced life because it hasn’t shown up and killed us yet.

Fear. Right now we're on the edge of facing fear or succumbing to it

There's a lot of possibilities.

My top contender would be a desire to explore, which probably requires consciousness. Given that we have pretty much no idea what leads to consciousness, it can be guessed (dubiously) that if it arose more easily then we'd have an explanation by now. It could be that it's an extremely rare phenomenon, and there may even be other planets with "intelligent" but mechanistic beings that act entirely for their own survival and don't build civilizations or explore much.

Second would be intergalactic and to a lesser degree interstellar travel. If we assume both 1) intelligent civilizations are extremely rare and 2) faster-than-light transportation is impossible, it could be that everyone is just too spread out to make contact.

Third, and the one I most feel is right but it requires pretending I understand quantum physics (which I don't) and probably offending many that do, is the notion that the concrete universe is not large but small and has no objective existence independent of our respective perceptions, and any part of the universe that's invisible is a mere wave function that will only have concrete reality upon our perceiving it. I make the further dubious assumption that conscious beings can't be part of the wave function. So there.

Capitalism I can imagine how capitalism could be inevitable. I can't imagine enough controls on it to make it sustainable