Somewhere, sometime, the Great Filter lies waiting for us...
It is patient beyond our fathoming
It is patient beyond our fathoming
We could have already exhausted all of the easy to obtain energy and resources, and that would make growth very hard to sustain at a level where we can expend extra effort on space exploration.
Imagine an alien civilization that didn't have a Carboniferous period where energy was just left sitting around and accumulating for future use.
Now imagine us exhausting it before we expand beyond our planet. That's the worry. Will we be able to tap into renewables in a way that sustains growth? Maybe. We're not there yet, though.
In fact, the filters on our past are things with odds of survival that we estimate by counting orders of magnitude. At the same time, you will have a hard time getting estimates of survival lower than 1% for the known filters on our future.
Unless there is something really surprising with space travel, we are past the Great Filter.
Now we still have basically all of those -- because realistically we're still not at the point where we have anywhere to colonize and survive long term without a living earth, even if we had the tech to try -- but we also have the ways in which we can eliminate ourselves, like causing our own climate crisis (which we are gleefully doing right now) or nuclear annihilation.
Now tell me, what odds do you place on humanity killing itself before we learn to live in space?
But if we kill earth before we've fully worked out how to terraform somewhere for permanent living without restocking from a living planet, of which we know of only one for sure, that might extend human living for like.. 50 years or something but certainly not a million.
I think we're realistically a long long long way away from that, and most of the ways in which we might "kill the earth" will have a negative impact on our ability to achieve it to begin with.
And again, the odds of a planet-killing asteroid hitting the earth haven't changed materially in probably like a few million years. We're no less vulnerable to that than we were 20k years ago. So I don't see why you think we're less vulnerable now just because we've managed to throw some tin cans in orbit.
An almost planet killing asteroid hits us every 50 million years or so. Thus the probability of one not hitting us in a thousand years is around 99.99%. Certainly you are not proposing the great filter has a 99.99% survival rate? So talking about asteroids is absolutely a non-starter.
For comparison, I was talking about a filter with survival rates of around 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% (more a few zeros, but who is counting?). What odds you place on a nuclear war?
Your assertion is that the things that face us now are somehow less likely to destroy our species than the things we faced before, thus the "great filter" must be behind us. Ignoring for a moment that we certainly don't even know all the potential species-killing events we potentially face (ie. unknown unknowns), I haven't seen you explain why any of the ones we have faced are less of a problem now, or why any of the ones we face now are less dangerous than the ones we faced before. You just assert it as true and then when pressed try to haggle on some percentages you seem to have pulled out your ass.
Of course, we can be hit by a big asteroid, or the planet sterilized by a nearby supernova or some other totally unexpected events out of our control, but we keep turning our present reality something unsustainable in many ways.
We should not be surprised if we hit the barrier we built in front of us.