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What do you think the Great Filter is? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

229 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Personally I think it's photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.

I have no data to back that up, just a guess.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Howabout a reasonably advanced civilization destroying itself and its homeworld after exploiting and then running out of petroleum?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Oil has a bad reputation but how lucky we are to have it. How does a civilization on a planet without hydrocarbons make the leap to a technological species?

It's not impossible, but it's got to be a lot harder.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Kelp farms? Domesticated bamboo? We need large areas of land to grow food anyway, we just skipped the charcoal agriculture step. Lathes and the three plate method are the real heroes of industry any way.

A slower ascension into the computing age could mean a more stable set of cultures and a more uniform global situation to avoid anthropogenic filters. Bright candles and all that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I think it's a fair thought that any form of life doesn't perfectly recycle their resources and all forms of life give off waste for other life to utilize. That said, a reasonably advanced civilization might just inevitably grow to the size where the waste they put off makes their planet unlivable for them before they can take action to control it.

For us, it's carbon dioxide.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Don't forget plastics and pesticides! Those get everywhere, and many are bioavailable by design.