Ask Lemmy

I always thought my Pür was great. /s

I personally find the kardashev scale a pretty terrible way to measure the success of a civilization. Maybe the most successful life forms don't become technologically obsessed materialists determined to colonize everything habitable and drain the resources of everything else, yknow?

The way the news has been going I wouldn't be surprised if plastic is a candidate. After a little less than a century of rapid development in petrol-plastics we're starting to figure out the long term effects. But the next 1000 generations may be dealing with the fallout.

sentience. I think it usually immediately leads to suicide

Maybe it's wisdom.

Every species that might have grown advanced enough, would have gotten over the point of fighting themselves. So they would be wise enough to have something like the Prime Directive in Star Trek (not interfering with less advanced species' until they reach a certain milestone).

My guess would be self-replicating biological organisms capable of significant rates of mutation.

But then my preferred solution to the paradox as a whole is basically the "nobody tries" idea.

I don't think there's tremendous reason to try to make ones-self detectable at long distances. It's an expenditure of non-trivial resources for an uncertain result. Since there isn't really any robustly sound logic for making the attempt outside of dramatized sci fi stories, I imagine a vanishingly small percentage of occurrences of intelligent life would make a serious, high-powered attempt at any point.

I think that for a technological civilization to rise, you need some things to line up. First, life has to be evolved enough to have animals, beings with a brain. Then, a species has to evolve intellence to become a tool making species. This species also has to become the dominating species on the planet. Meanwhile, extinction events, ice ages, climate change and population bottlenecks are always influencing the evolution process.

This is for me the great filter, to have all these conditions line up perfectly for an intelligent, tool making species to evolve and thrive.

I don't think there is a single universal Great filter, and living and then potentially sentient beings with various traits will face various obstacles.

First, life needs suitable materials for polymers and a lot of energy. Most places don't have both.

Next, basic blocks of life that would be self-replicating and adaptive should be randomly generated, which is extremely unlikely and literally took over a billion years on Earth, a planet with generally great conditions for such process.

Then, those blocks should be able to get together to form complex structures - ideally, many separate ones, so that one event wouldn't destroy the entire effort. Earth had it easy, with billions of super simple life forms.

Next, assuming life survived up to this point in a potentially unfriendly and ever-changing environment, bombarded by UV light and exposed to myriad of sources of damage, it should not destroy itself or environment too badly to never recover. Earth had periods when life generated too much carbon dioxide or too much oxygen (yes, that too was a thing), and those were critical points at which our story could very much end.

Then, life has to evolutionize and get into complex forms, either by forming multicellular organisms or by making a cell a powerhouse of everything.

Then, life has to get sentient, and some kind of response system should be available and get highly complex.

Then, most of the sentient creatures just won't be tribal, and civilization requires society and a common effort.

Then, many more won't be expansionist, and will die out in some small region.

Many also won't be competitive, which would slow down evolution.

For those species who are competitive, they shouldn't destroy each other while they're at it, and this is currently one of the risks of our own.

And after all that, they should develop space travel and either get as developed and decisive and resource-rich as to send a generational ship to some random planet named Earth populated by genocidal monkeys, or to somehow hyperdrive here. They can very much decide it's not worth it, and they may be so far away we couldn't see signs of their civilization.

I don't think life is rare, nor photosynthesis, but complex life might be. A planet needs to be really thriving with life for it to be worth it to go down the path to something like animals

But I think the bigger filter is much stranger.

Humans are a hive-like species. We're not just social - we're insanely interdependent, we don't function on our own and yet we've ended up in this place where we (often) try to individually succeed, even at the cost to our community

We're greedy enough to want the stars, yet interdependent enough we could only swarm over them in endless numbers

There's many problems with the fermi "paradox", but personally I think one of the largest is assuming all species would spread like a cancer blotting out the stars

A more individualistic and long lived species might instead be careful explorers, taking what they need and leaving little sign of their passage. A more communal species might be careful and control themselves to not destroy pointlessly. They might also feel no desire to contact other species

We're just the right mix to want everything a star could give, and to want to find others at great energy cost

Capitalism I can imagine how capitalism could be inevitable. I can't imagine enough controls on it to make it sustainable