The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)
mason.gmu.edu
mason.gmu.edu
Assuming something like octopuses evolved into a relatively long lived tool-using species with complex communication, they would be infinitely hampered by their environment. Even if they were lucky, as we were, and their planet had available great reserves of fossil fuels, they could not burn them. They cannot invent fire. Without fire, they have no way to invent metallurgy. Or glassworks. Or plastics.
What are the odds of having enough water for life to spark without having so much of it that it blankets the surface? Anything evolving on worlds with little land seem unlikely to ever escape their world.
Life could be commonplace, but if most worlds it evolves on are 99% water, we would never see it or hear it. The universe would be silent.
It may be our luck in simply being terrestrial rather than aquatic that separates us from our apparently absent galactic cohabitants.
Being in a position to be capable of taking advantage of burnable trees, and later coals and oils may be beyond rare in the universe.
Hm, sounds like a good premise for a SciFi novel. :-)
[UPDATE] Just to be clear: there's obviously no way to know whether this would happen. I'm only arguing that it could happen, and so lack of land is not necessarily a show-stopper for industrial civilization to emerge.
The article makes reference to a million year time horizon, however even earthly nuclear energy reserves may become strained on a thousand year time horizon. As we're all acutely aware, the great biochemical battery of fossil fuels is already operating on diminished capacity. Planet's such as mars lack the hydro-cycle to drive renewables, the organic legacy to support fossil fuels, and potentially the tectonics to enable surface extraction of nuclear fuels.
While a theoretical expansion outside of the confines of earths gravity to acquire resources from asteroids, or produce high concentrations of solar energy is currently achievable on a 20-100 year time horizon, supporting the energy demands of the aerospace supply chain or considering regular space launches may be difficult in 2 centuries. On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive when considering the concentrated energy demands of blast furnaces or industrial mining.
Similar collapse events have occurred historically due in part to the exhaustion of limited resources such as forests have occurred in the past in both Europe and polynesia. If a similar event occurred in the future it's entirely plausible that a future civilization would be unable to muster the resources to ever "unlock" the next set of energy production capabilities.
On the other hand speculating about the technological limits of humanity a million years in the future is difficult when we've only come up with nuclear energy a few decades ago, and while progress in some areas has been overdue, generally there seem to be quite a few "research trees" with potential for scifi-tech.
We are used to a very energy extensive economy, but most of the world would be habitual without any home heating or cooling for example. Similarly, a network of street cars need something like 1% of the energy as individual cars for everyone in a city. Historically, rivers, streams, and canals where similarly quite efficient long distance transportation networks we have largely forgotten about.
Like you say, there are enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency across all of society.
Take building insulation, for example. Where I'm from, triple glaze windows were made mandatory 30 years ago, every single existing apartment building was forced to retro-fit. Yet when I moved to the US less than ten years ago, apartment ads would regularly highlight "DOUBLE GLAZING" as if that was some incredibly expensive and luxurious feature.
Also where I'm from, I used to own an apartment in a building from the 1940s. But a bit more than ten years ago, new strict energy efficiency requirements went into effect, so my building - and every building like it in the country - had to fix it, often by adding a thick layer of insulation on the outside.
I still own an apartment there, it's newer, but the outside walls are 30cm thick and made of concrete for insulation purposes. And yet, here in the US, I regularly see new housing construction that's essentially just plywood for every single wall, inside and outside.
The US is incredibly behind when it comes to insulation and energy efficiency, because the economics of it doesn't make sense. If energy were to become much more expensive, this would change pretty damn fast.
I understand it to some extent: TONS of people can't afford to just...replace all of their windows, for example.
New construction, apartment buildings and single-family homes alike, all have to abide by the same updated rules.
A similar story exists for bio-weapons and other means. It's definitely possible to end civilization today, but such technologies are unlikely to end humanity - worst case, rehabitation of the main continents takes 1-2 centuries for the worst fallout to decay and enable farming.
While I don't subscribe to the view, there is modest evidence that scientific progress behaves like any other process of discovery - as a series of S curves where early progress is slow but speeding up every year, followed by a spike of progress and ultimately a steady period of diminishing returns.
But the question isn't mere survival -- can intelligent life thrive to the point where we can achieve interstellar travel?
The real question isn't "how badass were stone age humans", it's "can the smartphone generation re-invent stone age technology quickly enough to survive"?
https://www.outsideonline.com/2411125/lynx-vilden-stone-age-...
There are certainly some ecosystems such as fishing communities north of Vancouver that would do well and be shielded from any nuclear exchange, but the wild deer population in Massachusetts would likely not be sufficient for any significant number of modern stone age men to survive.
As for the great filter, I've always thought that the real danger is something that would cause say, one person, to have an outsized destructive power. Imagine if we successfully invent nanobots that can self-replicate, for example, and anyone with the right set of skills could program them. In that scenario, it's within the capability of any individual to create a deadly disease. You just need one unhinged person to trigger a horrible disaster. Nanotech could be much more dangerous than nukes, and if you combine strong AI and nanotech, I could see that being an immense survival risk.
- Dust - Supply chain - ~40% less watts/square meter
Of these the most unproven is the supply chain problem. The link below summarizes why solar doesn't work in the short-term for mars habitation missions - it's an open question as to whether there are economically extractable deposits of silicon, cadmium, and other materials to build out a solar farm. Bear in mind, terrestrial resource extraction makes extensive use of water.
https://medium.com/swlh/solar-power-is-never-going-to-work-o...
As for dust, the Mars rovers have shown it's not a real issue, wind removes most of it, and if we actually have people there, we can occasionally clean the arrays too.
Would I rather bring a nuclear reactor to Mars? Sure, but I also think we can make it work with just solar if we have to.
I used to believe this, until the pandemic. Now I think bio weapons are infinitely more dangerous than nukes. Imagine if COVID was a few times more contagious and as deadly as it's close relatives SARS and MERS. Not a big stretch really.
We would be pondering extinction right now. If the power was still working.
The current pandemic revealed how fragile our supply chains are, and I still consider it a small miracle that the impact so far was so small. Lots of people are in dire straits, yes, but the world structurally didn't change much.
A pathogen could kill fast, in which case some islands would be warned in time to close borders and survive.
Or a pathogen could have a long incubation, in which case it is surely going to be somewhat survivable by some percentage of the population
Making it spread through the atmosphere worldwide, while remaining virulent in sunshine for weeks, would be a hard problem to solve.
No, they won't. Even if we restrict to just fission power, on a thousand year time horizon we can expect thorium reactors and extraction of uranium from seawater, which multiplies the available energy by a factor of at least a thousand.
Furthermore, on that time horizon we can expect fusion to be available, and deuterium from seawater multiplies the available energy by a factor of about a billion.
Not to mention that on a thousand year time horizon, we should be making full use of the available solar energy in Earth's vicinity by means of orbital power stations, in which case we won't even need any other energy source on that time horizon except for specialized uses like fast spacecraft.
> On a thousand year time horizon it's entirely plausible that maintaining a purely renewable economy makes the production of certain materials impractically expensive
And it also makes it practically certain that any material that's that expensive to produce won't be needed anyway, since cheaper substitutes will be found.
"Limited resources" by itself simply doesn't strike me as a plausible Great Filter.
That life must evolve in enough number of planets doesn't mean that the next one is close. And that interplanetary travel is practical doesn't mean that interstellar or intergalactic travel must be. And considering the speed of our current technological development, vs the time needed to get to the next stage in colonization, something big may emerge in the middle. Or something different and unexpected.
In some way, we are like churches deciding what and how a god may think. We are not at the right stage to judge based on our lack of knowledge or perspective. It may not be just one road forward, and going galactic may be the wrong one.
I prefer to take one step at a time, and solve our current roadblocks, if we can. Maybe we have the great filter in front of us in plain view and we can't recognize it.
The same goes for some assumptions behind the great filter concept, like exponential growth and biological needs. Maybe the ideal goal is just a silent self-suficient culture in an small outpost far away from any galaxy.
(Ed: fixed a couple stats, removed a bad statement about quotients. :P )
Two things I think are true though. First, women have fewer children than they want, even if what they want is declining over time. Second, women who don't want children, or who want children below replacement, won't ever become the majority of the population - at least not for any significant amount of time. Such women will be replaced by women who, genetically or memetically, want more children.
That's not necessarily true. The rural population has shrunk significantly, even as rural family sizes tend to be bigger. The kids largely move to cities (following the gigantic trend towards urbanisation, and in responses to economic realities), and then proceed to have fewer kids in the urban context.
If there's a context with high birthrates, you've got to account for replacement rate within the context: there's a tendency for the kids to find their way to other contexts and thus revert to the mean. Insane "quiverfull" people have lots of kids, but it's not clear to me that they manage to keep up the crazy across generations.
One candidate, if we take ourselves as the primary example, is biogeochemical crisis following rapid discovery and exploitation of environmental resources or energy reserves without sufficient consideration of the consequences
Comparatively speaking, asteroids and/or ice ages being more frequent than expected seems more plausible.
Any process which requires scaling intelligence from competitively local and tribal (or any equivalents) to integrated and planetary will do.
You either pass that test or you fail it. If you fail it, stagnation and eventually devolution beckon.
What was critical in parent's comment was the irrecoverability of the civilization, after such an action. Scaling intelligence is more of a repeatable "trial and error" step (as the article puts it, in a biology context).
There used to be iron deposits etc. on the surface. They were recovered by pre-industrial societies. Now we are digging deeper and deeper for resources, but once we lose that ability, it's possible we won't be able to regain it.
What do you do once the nuclear power plant's core has melted, the mine is full of water, and there is nobody around who knows what these things are even there for because all the people who did died years ago of old age. You can't read it up either once we've moved our stored knowledge from paper to machines in what the ancient texts refer to as the mythical "US-EAST-2 region".
Of those, it feels like the only irreconcilable one is scale: e.g. something you need so much of, repeatedly, that no less-efficient substitute is viable.
And of those, geologically-created, carbon-based energy sources (coal, oil) are the primaries that come to mind.
(Also, nitrogen, but I imagine the Haber–Bosch process would survive)
Also, the iron was only an example. Coal and other fossil fuels we can only burn once, then they are gone.
(The alternative is extreme plasticity, allowing lifeforms to adapt to otherwise hostile atmospheres...)
We meet that threshold, though. We are extremely adaptive to otherwise hostile environments by virtue of technology, particularly wearable one - from winter jackets to SCUBA gear.
A species at a similar development level in some other solar system with slightly better societal goals or a need for a specific resource could already be colonizing other planets or asteroids.
But it took over three billion years of relative stable conditions for it go go past the stage of single celled organisms and even the cell itself took a long time to form. Higher forms of life are only 500 million years old and the human line only started taking shape the last few million years.
Personally I think the universe is teaming with life but intelligent/sentient life is exceedingly rare.
In my country (Norway) the oldest rock is "only" 3 billion years old, life was well underway at that time.
We're really optimistic about it, dreaming up FTL and stuff, but it may turn out to be just... impossible.
A general purpose von Neumann probe is not that far off. Self-replicating micro-machinery and reasonably intelligent robots already seem on the horizon. Unless there's truly some unforeseen roadblock, certainly within 1000 years of current growth. A 1 KG probe at 0.001c takes about 90 gigajoules of energy. On the order of what an Airbus A380 uses at cruising speed.
Given lots of patience, and an only slightly higher level of current technological development, interstellar colonization does not seem like an insurmountable challenge.
10-20 generations and it will most likely be all but forgotten. Zero impact on our solar system. Might as well be a story in a videogame.
Perhaps it would be worth it if we worked on extending our lifespans first.
1) Our knowledge of physics is still very small. ~20% of the universe is 'dark matter'. All we really know about it is that it falls down. It outweighs the stuff you, I, and the all the stars in existence are made out of by ~4x. The other ~75% of the universe is 'dark/negative energy'. We know even less about it beside that it seems to fall ... up (?). And it's the super majority of what we know it out there. Give it another 200 years, and even this understanding is going to be embarrassingly outdated. Any other civ that is just 10k years ahead of us is going to be working in physics that we can't even imagine.
2) That leads to the larger issue: Time. The difference in our lives and the lives of the earliest humans is literally astronomical, in that we have people living up in space now. That same rate of difference separates us from any neighbors out there. Their understanding of our universe is likely to be so vast that we're essentially amoeba to them. Though intelligent life may exist out there in bushels, we're still infants in what 'intelligent' means. We may be surrounded by olde gods rendering us effectively alone all the same, and those gods themselves surrounded by yet grander deities rendering them alone as well.
I also think distance and time is preventing us from detecting any other like us, but I'm pretty sure some exists somewhere out there. It's just that the reality of physics (even with more knowledge) prevents easy travel and contacts.
Another thing is that we have barely looked at the sky. The SETI project is very underfunded and most other projects have just recently started looking for planets and signatures that can indicate life (not intelligent life). Many think we have surveyed all of space in as much detail as our current technology allowed but we are _far_ from that.
> "This result dissolves the Fermi paradox, and in doing so removes any need to invoke speculative mechanisms by which civilizations would inevitably fail to have observable effects upon the universe"
But there could easily be hundreds or thousands of technological civilizations in the Milky Way, which has a diameter of over 100,000 light years. We wouldn't necessarily have spotted any of them yet, depending on how far away they are, when they exist(ed), what their tech level and orientation is, what's important to them, etc.
The other argument people tend to pile on to try to claim that we should have seen something is the idea of expansion via colonization, or civilizations using enormous resources to broadcast messages, but all of these have there own huge set of problems.
People try very hard to fill gaps in their knowledge even when it's not really possible to do so.
- Alien megastructures visible at long distances are plausibly not a thing, due to material limitations or something.
- But, even very slow expansion into space should have covered the galaxy long ago, so the aliens should be here or in the archaeological record.
A possible explanation for the latter is, what if the aliens are everywhere but they don't go near stars? Once you have a kind of generation ship that can function essentially forever in interstellar space, why would you risk going near a star or whatnot? That would also be consistent with the "dark forest" viewpoint.
This explanation is much more plausible than a Great Filter. Here's a great comment summarizing the argument very intuitively:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17562439
I also found this one very helpful:
The paper argues against this in that you don't need a few very improbable. In fact, there are many parameter choices where none of the probabilities in the Drake equation are particularly low, yet the resulting number of intelligences is still staggeringly small.
tl;dr: All parameters can be a bit lower. Then you don't need any events that are extremely improbable.
Isn't that just elaborated way of saying that some of the parameters of the Drake equation have to be much smaller than we think?
Let's use the simple example you reference from the paper. If we just use the mean as point estimates, then indeed we obtain an extremely low probability that there's no other intelligences:
def prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(p):
prob_of_intelligence = pow(p, 9)
planets = 100e9
return pow(1-prob_of_intelligence, planets)
prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(0.1) -> 3.720086311124783e-44
prob_of_no_intelligence_in_galaxy(0.05) -> 0.8225792614407508
See also my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25811359
Also: The Drake equation has one factor which is the avg number of planets per star, of which we are already quite confident it is above 0.1.
I don't see how it's any different from the great filter explanation. It's just great filter with statistical distributions.
However, as per my other comments, you can update the distributions of your parameters in different ways, such that none of the events in the Drake equation have a particularly low probability.
Then the Great Filter disappears and there's no specific or few set of events to point to - it's just that the probability of all events succeeding in combination is extremely low.
Outside of the very nearest neighbouring systems, any interstellar colony would instantly become an isolated new civilisation. There's simply no plausible way for interstellar trade or even just meaningful communication.
All a colony at say, 82 Eridani - a sun-like star about 20 ly from Earth, would have a two-way communication time of 40 years. Even digital "goods" aren't worth exchanging if it takes 20 years to send them and another 20 years to receive any kind of payment.
At a very optimistic 30% lightspeed, ships would take 67 years to get there. This means no one can make the journey within a single human lifetime, unless the lifespan is dramatically increased or some form of hibernation technology is used.
In any case, colonists would be completely removed from Earth and all that effort pretty much requires a suitable target planet to be present. Without radical genetic changes, humans wouldn't be able to thrive and survive on a Super Earth or in poisonous atmospheres. So another factor would be spending tens of thousands of years and unfathomable amounts of energy terraforming planets or changing the human genome beyond recognition.
The same issues would apply to extra-terrestrial intelligences as well, which is why I don't think interstellar colonisation would even be all that desirable in the first place.
First you have to find a suitable host star. Next you need to find a matching planet. Then you need to scout potential candidates (likely using automated probes), which would take about a century even for just the nearest stars...
While all this is certainly doable, it's really not all that attractive given that you instantly "lose" the colony anyway simply due to the distances involved.
A civilisation with advanced enough technology and (by our standards) infinite amounts of time and resources could indeed have groups of individuals seeking exactly that.
Still a far cry from founding galactic empires, but a reasonable motivation that I haven't really considered thus far.
Such reasons for expanding outwards would, however, match our observations (or specifically lack thereof) perfectly: groups that seek isolation or refuge from their parent civilisation likely wouldn't bother broadcasting their existence to everyone or build easily detectable solar system-scale mega-projects like Dyson Swarms.
The probe is near Pluto, and so able to sky 10 times darker than Hubble, but isn't observing the modelled galaxies extrapolated from Hubble observations.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-finds-fewer-galaxies-th...
For example, it explains why the sky would be darker from the POV of Pluto than the POV of Earth orbit (Zodiacal dust is relevant at this level).
That said, I’m still surprised that the estimate was ever as high as 2 trillion; I thought the estimate had been the lower 100 billion value for most of my life.
It took over four billion years to get from simple replicators to what exists here now. It is quite possible that most biospheres simply don’t make it that long without such an event.
We don’t know the probabilities, but over billions of years the continuous probability of biosphere extinction need not be very high to filter out almost all biospheres before they develop something capable of interstellar signaling or flight.
Keep in mind that another prior we don’t know is the probability of a diverse biosphere developing this type of intelligence. We have no idea if that is likely or not even given sufficient time and energy inputs.
Intergalactic flight is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar flight, which in turn is many orders of magnitude harder than interplanetary flight. If the probability limits such intelligences to no more than an average of 1-2 per galaxy then there is your answer. We would be extremely unlikely to see intelligent aliens any time soon, even if we do find a lot of microbes.
Given where Earth is now I would be surprised if it does not hatch an interstellar scale intelligence at some point in the remainder of its habitable life. Will that be us? Hopefully so. Given that we are already almost there (on evolutionary time scales) it is reasonably likely it will be us or an AI we create.
May soon reach? I doubt it. I'd say there's a significant filter between our technology level and large-scale inter-solar-system colonization. It's not at all clear that there is a strong motivation for that - except for a continuous-growth economy, which is kind of unsustainable anyway. Once the population stabilizes and human civilization is basically energy-neutral (i.e. not taking more than the sun provides), where's the great need to colonize someplace else (as opposed to communicating)? And if we don't stabilize - civilization will burn itself out soon enough, colonization or no.
> Even if life only evolves once per galaxy, that still leaves the problem of explaining the rest of the filter
No it doesn't. It's extremely unlikely that one planet with life will travel to a different galaxy. Even with intelligent life it's extremely unlikely. Only if instantaneous travel were possible would this be likely.
What is beyond the universe? What is beyond time? What IS the universe?
We simply do not know the answers to these questions. Hell, we barely understand what consciousness and sentience is.
Maybe by the time we make it to the heat death of the universe, we will have answered these questions, and can reverse entropy. Maybe not.
But the quest to get these answers and to overcome our elements is what gives us purpose. Everything we do in our mortal lives stuck on the rock of our birth, is in one way or another, in the quest to achieve that.
Some people find that too overwhelming, and choose either religion or nihilism. I think there is a middle ground.
Just to take one such theory emerging from heat death ideas. Once the fundamental touchstones of mass and structure disappear, scale also disappears. The infinitely large universe becomes physically identical to an infinitesimal one, and is reborn in a new Big Bang — with all the mass and energy of the previous universe once again jammed together into a tiny space.
These sort of cyclic cosmology ideas are held by prominent physicists including the recent Nobel prize winner, Roger Penrose.
Like all us, I have no idea what is true but its hardly a closed subject.
Assuming this was "settled" (whatever that means in science let alone theoretical physics), mavericks like Penrose are frequently proven right. 'Kuhnian' paradigm shifts are the norm in science, particularly in a field like this. Expect many more...
To be clear, assuming there was an infinite reboot sequence I'm not saying that there would be life again, let alone intelligent life. I'm just making a statement on the fate of the universe.
Personally, (not that anyone asked) I think we're in quarantine. I think that most intelligent species rapidly reach a peaceful "win-win" equilibrium, that we humans are rare or even unique in our violence, that this is because of some specific but forgotten event (maybe the Younger Dryas, I don't know) that traumatized us and triggered the development of agriculture and cities, that those are degenerate forms of civilization that perpetrate the trauma that leads to our current malfunctions, and that we are essentially in a hospice-type situation vis-à-vis the little green men.
So, um, there? Have a nice day y'all.
The quality of our sensors - both smartphones held by everyone, and telescopes, satellites and radar by governments has improved exponentially, without a corresponding increase in detection, so I think it's reasonably likely we are not currently in contact with otherworldly intelligence.
Once I made this argument to a friend, and they sent me this xkcd comic.
The tin foil always finds a way.
How many detections have we had? The camera argument to me is ignorant of how hard it is to get a good picture of something small in the sky. People are constantly taking videos of dots they say was a UFO but it's impossible to identify what they captured.
With respect, have you gone and looked? To me it feels like the folks who present that objection haven't actually gone and checked, they're making an unfounded assumption.
About once or twice a year I lose a day to a youtube hole wherein I go through all the recent videos of {Bigfoot,UFOs,Cryptids,Ghosts} for fun. There's a lot of crap out there, fake videos and hoaxes, but there are more and more very good candidates for "real" videos.
The US Navy just released video of UFOs buzzing jets off the coast, eh?
The picture is so grainy, a lot of the interest comes from the vivid eyewitness accounts.
I have looked at some accounts, for example listened to Lex Fridman interview with one of the Navy pilots.
To me, I need a photographic evidence that isn't some blurry smudge. If you start going down the eyewitness testimony route then you get some evidence for saints/miracles and also ghosts that meets similar criteria.
The phenomena reported in eyewitness statements in the 60s-80s at least some seems possible to capture with satellite/phone camera. It's possible that UFOs more cautious now or government is surpressing this but I take the lack of clear photograpic evidence as a reason to update beliefs.
This reminds me of a short story where Earth exists in a Bermuda Triangle-like sector of space, known as the Veil of Madness, that all other civilizations avoid: https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind
The life itself might be an extremely rare event. Multicellular life might be where the first great filter is.
Hell, we haven't even managed to guarantee human rights to every person on the planet yet. We've got a ways to go.
Not any more. As technology has advanced, and agriculture has become less labor intensive, there's been a sizable cutback in populated area in the US and Japan, at least. Farms in less productive areas are not competitive and those areas are emptying out.[1] Towns which serviced the farms are dying off with them.[2]
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/u-s-population-change-by-co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...
This video by Kurzgesagt explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL4yYHdDSWs
We should just send robots and move all the messy stuff off the planet so we can try to restore the planet to being a human-oriented paradise.
Is that your candidate for the Great Filter?
There's just no way every commoner gets their own Caribbean cabin. Unless we find some unlikely physics hack in the last few vestiges of scientific unknowns, any interstellar travel seems impossibly difficult.
An alternative future: we live forever as brains in the vats, plugged into infinite virtual worlds devoid of scarcity, life-threatening danger or physical constraints. Most of the human activity takes place there, with occasional interactions between the virtual and the real. No new physics required, just a series of incremental improvements in biology and computing.
A stable future can plausibly take many forms, not all of them are nice.
Historically, it has been an advantage to have a strongly tribal drive. Cohesive groups achieved much more than individuals and yet were small enough that they could effectively self-police and agree on common goals.
However, as the capabilities of each tribe increased and the world became smaller through travel (and now the internet), tribalism, us-versus-them still remain part of our basic instincts and subconscious, however it is now the source of international and high powered conflicts.
10000 years ago, our tribal programming resulted in the survival of a group of families and the development of townships and emergence of societies. If a tribe got particularly bloodthirsty, their impact was almost purely local and perhaps eventually their notoriety resulted in a decline.
Now, sticks and stones have been replaced by nuclear weapons and ICBMs. A first strike capability is no longer dangerous to just one village, but entire continents.
Perhaps our technological evolution has outpaced our biological and social evolution, and the behavior that was optimal even 1000 years ago is now a grave danger?
Any intelligent organism will have to overcome the biological local optima that brought it to the intelligent state before further developing as a species.
We already have explored a variety options, each with their own advantages and downsides:
1. Free individuals in a distributed system in a cottage industry economy.
2. Semi-free individuals who gather in tribes formed around value-generation (i.e. corporations).
3. Centralized system with individuals who are assigned functions.
Future progress will have to be technological and will change what it means to operate in the afore-mentioned scenarios 1,2,3.
Our current biggest challenge is to make ourselves 'smarter' (i.e. less susceptible to the biases baked into our DNA). Otherwise, it's likely only a matter of time before we cripple ourselves into an extended Dark Age or worse. Constant setbacks resulting from too many of us having ignorant, emotional reactions to incomplete stories with insufficient facts means we're all dancing on shifting sand. It's not a good foundation upon which to build a durable interstellar civilization.
In many cases the promiscuous nature of information works heavily against human welfare. One aspect of that is that incorrect information spreads as well -- sometimes better-- than correct information.
People have been able to share incredibly stupid ideas with high efficiency even before the social media.
How do you decide which is which?
That is definitely a credible theory, and it's currently catalogued as number 2.2 on Wikipedia's list of hypothetical explanations for the Fermi Paradox, where it is given the haunting title: "It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...
Humanity? Unlikely.
Even in the absolute worst case scenarios, climate change doesn’t wipe out humanity. Life would be very different (and would frankly suck), but some humans would still survive.
The question is how long it takes to get back to our current level (hopefully with lessons learned!)
Under these circumstances we will be unable to become as space faring species.
The worst part is that the hot earth is a stable system and returning to the our current state will take millennia.
Any hope of contact or expansion requires an extremely long period of sustainable existence in a state of constant technological development. Most of modern humanism is antithetical to this. The entire world today seems focused on expanding consumption. This is especially true of both colonialism and immigration. Economist today judge an economy by its internal consumption rather than older notions like export productivity. Seems like we’re going to have to reconsider policies and priorities if we want to make it out of here.