I love the theory of Great Filters. I'm pretty sure that #9 on the list should be "social media", though. Or in general, "self destructing human behavior."
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Now, sticks and stones have been replaced by nuclear weapons and ICBMs.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...