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Comment by slipframe | Hacker News Reader

I think that ubiquitous global communication is the "Great Filter" that prevents intelligent civilizations from colonizing the universe. Before any intelligent species can hope to tackle a problem like that, they invent something like the internet. And once they've invented an internet, they become addicted to low latency communication and will never stray far from it, at least not in significant numbers. Even one year of latency becomes utterly intolerable once an intelligent species has been using an internet for a few generations.

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> at least not in significant numbers

That's ok. Insignificant numbers are more than enough to colonize an entire galaxy on geologic timescales.

The thing about the "Great Filter" is that it is great. If you can even imagine an exception for your candidate filter, then it's not great enough.

I'm thinking that if you sent a dozen people to Alpha Centari, it wouldn't make any difference because that is under the threshold of people that would be required to establish a self-sustaining colony that, in turn, sends out similar expeditions in the future.

Do that sort of stunt as much as you like, it won't become something more. It's like trying to jump over a building by hopping a bunch. You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.

under the threshold of people that would be required to establish a self-sustaining colony

Such a small group of people, armed with current genetic engineering and future artificial means of reproduction, could bring with them enough genetic diversity and reproductive capacity to reach colonizing scale.

You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back to square one.

Despite the first part of my reply, this point about minimum activation energy is relevant to a lot of contexts, from escaping poverty to switching careers, from getting fit to overcoming medical conditions. This is a pretty good analogy that I might use in the future.

I think genetics is actually the easy part. A few dozen or so people, selected for strong health, probably contain enough genetic material in their groins to start a colony. More would doubtlessly be better, but I think such things have been done by humans on earth before. Frozen eggs/sperm and women willing to be surrogate mothers help a lot too; you wouldn't need artificial womb technology, necessarily.

The hard part I think is "playing factorio IRL" on a planet we weren't evolved to cope with. Bootstrapping industry sufficient even to create additional shelters would be very challenging. Maybe we could practice this on Mars.

I want to see it, but does a Mars colony have any chance before we’ve tested solutions for the major issues that Biosphere 2 quickly ran into?

Maybe not, though a Mars colony might not have to run as a totally isolated system. Perhaps solar power could be used to extract oxygen from the rocks or something. It's definitely a tricky nut to crack though and I'm far from confident that it will happen.

NASA has already extracted enough oxygen (out of the atmosphere) for about 5 minutes of breathing, on Mars. The nut is already cracked. 8)

>The thing about the "Great Filter" is that it is great. If you can even imagine an exception for your candidate filter, then it's not great enough.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but that gets the idea dangerously close to the theory of unfalsifiability.

Personally I am more inclined to the believe that we haven't heard any radio signals from space because you don't run a multi-galaxy civilisation on light-limited transmissions.

Invent the ansible and then maybe we will find the galaxy theming with life.

I suspect the Great Filter is that sufficiently intelligent life has no interest in expansion, and doesn't communicate at all.

Only stable if the whole society can force itself to not even want to expand.

If 1 per billion wants to expand, out of a population of 8 billion, you have 8 expansionists. If each of them breaks the social conventions and have twice as many offspring as the sustainers (and if the desire is heritable), after 30 generations they’re now equal in number to the sustainers. Cambridge University is in the order of 30 generations old.

https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_p...

Humans will never make it, but our computers will. The internet is the singularity now.

This comment is probably about 3 or 4 decades too early.

You had to say probably. For me, that's enough. It could have already happened.

> You had to say probably. For me, that's enough. It could have already happened.

This is the inverse of the intended interpretation. By "probably x decades early", I mean "at least x decades early". I did not mean "it has probably not happened".

The singularity is not guaranteed to happen and with a high confidence has not already happened.

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