Incredible. 300 light years away and photographed by a ground based telescope. We keep pushing the boundaries. I’m excited for the next couple of decades of astronomy. What more will we see?
Let's say for the sake of argument that a civilization exists in our nearest neighbor system, Proxima Centauri. Let's assume that it has developed with a similar impact to their system as humans have had to our own -- radio emissions, a handful of interplanetary and interstellar space probes, nuclear tests, etc. Could we detect them? Everything I have read concludes that we currently could not. The concept of being able to receive interstellar TV transmissions is such a sci-fi trope I don't think very many people consider that it is essentially impossible.
But all this doesn’t really matter since you can’t apply frequentist logic in bayesian situation: what we observe is exactly the same as someone in the long tail of distribution would observe, i.e. we can’t distinguish between this being unlikely situation and being first, or this being proof of Great Filter.
The issue is that the universe is extremely old compared to how long it took for earth to develop life. It's ample time for civilizations to develop technologies extremely far more advanced than ours. So why isn't there a single civilization that's so advanced that it builds these things?
So there must be some "filter" that prevents civilizations from doing that, whether they are alive or dead. Maybe they just don't want to, but then ALL of them have to not want to do it, which would be weird.
If we detect life close to us, it makes it more likely that there is tons of life around the galaxy, which makes it more likely that the filter is ahead of us. If we detect no life close to us, it makes it more likely that the filter is past us.
See this Kurzgesagt video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjtOGPJ0URM
I don't know how you square a utterly stupid idea like exponential population growth with the word advanced in advanced civilization. Instead this sounds like blinkered mid twentieth century thinking. Or the old science fiction trope of seeing the future as like the present but more of it.
I wouldn't call the universe very old. It's only like 13.x billion years old. If you take into account the amount of time it takes for heavier elements to be created, the time for the universe to settle down I'd say we are in the first cohort. It took us 4.5 billion years to evolve and if humanity got wiped out life on Earth would most likely continue on as it has for millions of years before with megafauna.
Looking at how life appeared immediately after the planet cooled down and had liquid oceans most likely indicates abiogenesis is common, multicellular may be much more rare and intelligence probably is exceedingly rare given how expensive big brains are. I just don't think there was enough time in the early universe for intelligent civilizations to have evolved.
So there may be millions of civilizations that can get into orbit with chemical or nuclear rockets, but not a single one that can carry out a megaproject that could be seen from Earth.
It's not my domain, but there are apparently some markers of genetic complexity that give some weight to this theory: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1304/1304.3381.pdf
Anyways, let's assume life originated at some other planet and it has started life at half of the galaxy at the time it reached earth (so we weren't lucky to be "close" to the origin).
Earth is 4500 million years old, and life is assumed to have existed here since 4400 million years. So intelligent life took 4400 million years to "develop" here on earth. Light speed allows you to colonize the milky way comfortably within a million years. What if it takes 100 million years less on some other planet? Or it took just 10 million years less?
Either earth is very close to the real origin (or has been at the start of life), or the filter is in the past, or some other explanation.
I don't buy it though -- we're in an average planet on an average star, nothing about our environment seems to be particularly rare.
There are a number of Earth's attributes that we don't understand and have poor extra-solar data on. Particularly, the following:
Technically active plates after 4.5 Byrs. Effective magnetic core after 4.5 Byrs. Large amounts of surface water, presumably from our late heavy bombardment. Small enough to leave with a chemical rocket while meeting the above.
Also, at our current tech level, planets are very hard to even observe for existence, let alone their geographical features.
We simply don’t have data to support that claim, and the parameters required to make earth habitable for life (as we know it) are vastly more numerous than most people acknowledge.
This explanation does not work, because of the timescales.
Five thousand years ago, we built the Pyramids. Fifty years ago, we landed on the Moon.
In contrast, it took four billion years to go from single-celled life, to the pyramids.
The odds of us being first by happenstance are astonishingly small. It's much more likely that either we are unique, or that civilizations don't leave much of a trace outside of their solar systems, regardless of whether or not they die out in the blink of a cosmic eye.
You must complete energy collection on current planet for XP to advance to level 2.
Isn't is the other way around? I though that the main argument for the filter ahead of us is that we haven't found any civilization, which means civilizations cannot develop past some level at which they can be detected by us. But if we'll have found one, this means that such level of civilization can be passed, and therefore reduces the chances that there is a filter.
- The filter is ahead us
- There is no filter
- The filter is behind us, but ahead of the other planet
- Both planets have successfully got past the filter
We'll still be debating :). Then we'll go crazy trying find evidence of life in more planets.
- We're one of the first nearby and we're going to help build a filter
The various AI we give birth to over the next two centuries are going to dominate several galaxies. There are many filters - competing standards - throughout the universe, our galaxy doesn't yet have one. Humans will cease to exist as we think of them now, within those two centuries (and not due to climate change or any other similar event).
if we detect life so near to us and _yet_ we still have yet to encounter life from another planet means there's likely still _some_ kind of filter. So I don't think the likelihood of no filter is high if we detect life
according to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter):
> So by this argument, finding multicellular life on Mars (provided it evolved independently) would be bad news, since it would imply steps 2–6 are easy, and hence only 1, 7, 8 or 9 (or some unknown step) could be the big problem.[4]
Also not finding other civilizations wouldn't be a proof that we passed any filter at all, maybe plenty of civilizations have been incredibly successful already, they're just so far beyond our comprehension of the world and consciousness that we can't meaningfully interact with them.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_e...
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TxcRbCYHaeL59aY7E/meditation...
We're going to have a hard time dumping enough anything into the atmosphere (or causing some other kind of pollution) to kill ourselves entirely. We'd osculate around an equilibrium where we dump some pollutant into our environment to the point where our population decreases, natural processes remove it and our population increases, wash, rinse, repeat. You can see similar population and resource usage patterns in many ecosystems.
And before anyone tries to twist my words to saying global warming isn't a bad thing, that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that humans as a species will likely survive it.
My point is that we won't go extinct, we'll bounce back and get another try.
>especially if we've extracted all the easy to extract natural resources making
Would you rather hollow out a mountain to mine minerals or dredge through what used to be a major city? We've concentrated all sorts of useful things on earth's surface. If anything the next civilization will have it easy.
>harder for our ancestors to rev back up, or if large parts of the planet become uninhabitable.
Large parts of the planet were more or less uninhabitable. The few people who lived in the arctic and the deserts mostly just followed food/water sources. They contributed little to civilization's progress (mostly in the field of astronomy because desert nights and polar winters give you plenty of time to look at the starts) because they didn't have the spare resources to engage in those pursuits because they were too busy surviving. Progress has always come from the places that are easy to live in and therefore have resource surpluses.
For us it's not just CO2 pollution that is a problem, there are many other resources that we are over-utilizing in an unsustainable way. And it seems that we are completely incapable of coordinating as a planet when the sacrifices are large. The hope of the techno-optimists is that technology will save us. It's a high-stakes bet that technology will figure it out before it's too late. Maybe the Great Filter is that when this bet is made across the universe the odds are generally in favor of losing.
Maybe some other life form could have one after enough time has passed, but we can’t bootstrap ourselves a second time.
(Edit: to be clear, I’m agreeing with you.)
That's probably what someone said in the middle ages when they finished deforesting Scotland.
We still have nuclear. There's an obscene amount of energy in it. It's just not attractive while we still have other "easy" options.
If you know that radioactive isotopes exist, it sounds like steampunk, 1850s, level tech could build a power plant, but perhaps not a bomb.
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/57peek/can_y...
I don’t think it’s that hard to build a vessel full of warm radioactive pebbles to boil water.
Sorting ore by chemical element, and then making a fluid / gas / solution of the fuel element to sort by isotope mass in a centrifuge may or may not be doable for “blacksmith” level technology, though. Hard to say.
My own speculation on the Great Filter is that any intelligent alien civilization is almost certainly a race of social predators that evolved - and thus are in competition for resources.
I worry that competition between individuals and individual states necessarily ends in the destruction of the environment on which they depend and quite likely in direct destruction in war with advanced technology.
Us humans need to find some other paradigm under which to move forward, capitalism and competition, which have brought us such amazing results to date could well also be our undoing.
I want humanity to reach another galaxy someday.
Supporters of ethical hedonism hold that the enjoyment of life holds axiomatic value, and life itself is a prerequisite for enjoyment.
Our best chance of survival is finding out about one as soon as possible.
...so the only path remains forward.