Why Alien Life Would be our Doom - The Great Filter

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Third option: There isn't a filter and all the galaxy level civilizations avoid us and hide because we're that planet.

We are living our great filter now. Humanities greatest challenge is now. If we can overcome the next 100 years without destroying the planet, I believe we have a solid chance of becoming a multi-planetary species.

An interesting thing about the great oxygenation event (which predated and enabled the development of multicelular life) is that it's a strong candidate for being The Great Filter. Physics is physics, and therefore organic chemistry is organic chemistry. Therefore the early life on any planet is going to have a chance to stumble onto photosynthesis. The thing is the early pre-photosynthesis Earth was being kept warm by methane, but that had to be coming from somewhere. Quite possibly early single cell bacteria itself. Once oxygen production really got going and oxygen started leaking out of the oceans into the atmosphere it bound up all that methane into other compounds and caused a near global ice age. That presents early life with two different ticking time bombs. If life waits too long to start producing oxygen that thickening blanket of methane eventually turns Earth into Venus. Broils the planet and kills everything. On the other side if life figures out that trick too early then the resulting ice age is even worse, and if life is completely wiped out then when volcanic and solar activity melts things again what's left isn't the same primordial soup because of all the oxygen reacting to things. The initial state of free organic molecules is quite possibly a one-time opportunity. We threaded a needle that might be a lot narrower than we realize.

I've often kind of felt like an alien race advanced enough to discover other life planets would also be advanced enough not to have any desire to travel to them.

2018: we dont know if the filter is in front or behind us 2020: Its right in front of us

Everyone: Please... have mercy... No more existential crisis, Kurzgezagt: Creates existential crisis playlist

What if the filter is internal discourse? Almost everyone yearns for world peace, because world peace would allow us to focus on the small problems slowly breaking us apart. We would be able to speed up research immensely with cooperation, and we would never be under the threat of war, dictators, or lack of resources. But internal discourse is nearly impossible to eliminate, since that would mean 8 billion minds would have to converge on one single idea. Only a hivemind would be able to solve this, and that might have problems on its own. Technology allows a single being to become so powerful that it separates one from another. But space travel is impossible without these inventions. The world is one bomb away from dying out completely. The launch of one nuke would trigger every other country that has access to fire their own. Only 50 25,000 megaton bombs would send the world into a nuclear winter killing crops.

What is if we find a more advanced civilization? If we don't think about how they treat us, isn't it a sign that there isn't that much of a great filter?

Fun fact: if they were observing us from millions of light years away, they would be looking at dinosaurs

I’m sure if we ask the filter nicely, it will move out of the way

Well.. uh-oh.

While it's constructive to think out this problem, it's important to realize that we really have no idea whether the filter is behind or in front of us or which is more likely. There are so many variables associated with the concept of a great filter, almost all of which we don't know. Even the world's leading scientists would just be throwing darts at a colossal dart board. The emergence of the first eukaryotic cell could have had a one-in-trillions chance of happening, then there's the step to intelligence, the survival and evolution of that intelligence...the likelihood of each step occurring as it did is practically incalculable because we just don't have any relevant, reliable data to reference. Considering the probability of the great filter being ahead of us is impossible as we are now.

0:01 I skipped "Imagine" and i was horrified

The lag would be insane if you’re trying to match make with someone in the other side of your galaxy.

How about the filter being more complex than a single event, but rather a long, difficult process that we're in the middle of and currently doing our best to get through

2023 Update: The filter is definitely in front of us.

Life: exists The universe: We need to build a WALL

Colonize the solar system? Britain intensifies

Another option is mentioned in the Three Body Problem: Advanced civilizations that don't hide effectively are immediately destroyed by other advanced civilizations.