Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter

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Recommends joshbaptiste · 2018-02 · on “Life Exists in the Driest Desert on Earth. It Could Exist on Mars, Too”

"Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter" Great short video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell [this video]

Recommends systemEarth · 2023-10 · on “Together We Can Avoid the 'Great Filter' That Ends Advanced Civilizations (2022)”

There is also a good video from Kurzgesagt explaining the great filter; for if video is more your thing. [this video]

Recommends gwd · 2024-10 · on “First images from Euclid are in”

How long did it take modern humans to completely colonize Earth, such that there are few places you can go on Earth and not meet any humans? Less than 10k years for sure. If we become a space-faring civilization, how long will it take us to colonize the galaxy, such that there are few places you can go and not find evidence of humans around? Not more than a million years or so. So if intelligent life -- capable of becoming a space-faring civilization -- is common, why is the galaxy not colonized already? Kursgesagt has a good video on this: [this video]

Cites doctoboggan · 2018-02 · on “Probing Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies Using Quasar Microlensing”

I think it comes down to the fact that it appears in 10,000 - 1,000,000 years (very soon relative to earth's birth) humans will be able to colonize nearly the whole galaxy using von Neumann probes[0] It would not require technology much more advanced that we have now. If life evolved on a planet a billion years before earth, why haven't they colonized the galaxy? Kurzgesagt recently published a video covering the idea of the "Great Filter".[1] The idea is that there must be something (some "filter") preventing life from colonizing their galaxy. [0]: [LINK] [1]: [this video]

Cites proctor · 2019-08 · on “What If We Haven’t Met Aliens yet Because They’ve Messed Up Their Planets Too?”

reminds me of the "Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell" youtube video "Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter"[0] that discusses many of the same ideas! [0] [this video]

Cites est31 · 2020-07 · on “First Ever Image of a Multi-Planet System Around a Sun-Like Star Captured by ESO”

We can't detect life at our stage of development from afar, or from earlier stages, but things that extremely advanced civilizations build like dyson spheres can't be hidden really. The issue is that the universe is extremely old compared to how long it took for earth to develop life. It's ample time for civilizations to develop technologies extremely far more advanced than ours. So why isn't there a single civilization that's so advanced that it builds these things? So there must be some "filter" that prevents civilizations from doing that, whether they are alive or dead. Maybe they just don't want to, but then ALL of them have to not want to do it, which would be weird. If we detect life c

Critical PlotCitizen · 2020-08 · on “I Hope the Search for Extraterrestrial Life Finds Nothing (2008) [pdf]”

This article reads alarmingly similar to the Kurzgesagt video about the great filter ( [this video] ). Of course, the Great Filter isn't a new concept, but provided that this is an argument made by somebody other than the person who coined the term (that was Robin Hanson I believe), combined with the fact that I read almost the entire article before then going on to find the video, I find the two too similar to write it off to simple chance. There have been criticisms of Kurzgesagt in the past, one I can recall being the following, in video form ( [LINK] ). I've now found out that the original video was retracted and the creator issued a public apology ( [LINK] ), in addition to Kurzgesagt commit