What do you think the Great Filter is?
https://lemmy.world/post/16871550
What do you think the Great Filter is? - Lemmy.World
>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
[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
[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.
Sadly it may be the speed of light.
All these intelligent species are simply trapped in their own solar systems for all eternity by an unbreakable natural law.
But surely generational ships would get us over that?
Not really, no. Generational ships might make colonizing the nearest star systems possible, but even colonizing our own galaxy would require some kind of suspended animation. The milky way is between 100,000-200,000 light years in diameter so even at the speed of light, you’re looking at a travel time that is ~33-66% of the time that humanity has even existed(homo sapiens are currently estimated to have become a distinct species 200,000-300,000 years ago)… just to go to ONE star system out of the hundreds of BILLIONS that exist in our galaxy. You’re gonna need generational ships so self-sustaining and capable that the generation that actually arrives at the destination will have long forgotten the point of the trip and1
Generational ships wouldn’t have to reach the edge of the galaxy, just the next planetary system. There’s no reason civilization needs to remain centered on Earth, either. Think of it as a wave traveling outward, where it eventually reaches the edge, by many smaller hops. It will also eventually reach earth, where they might wonder at signs of a prehistoric civilization. Actually, think of it like the Middle East, where empires rise and fall, crusades and jihads burst through, religions rise out of nowhere, people speak many different languages. A galactic civilization could be dynamic and ever changing, distance can make us strangers to each other, the fate of any planet matter only to its inhabitants and neighbors
Sure, that’s an option. It doesn’t really change my overall point though that anything beyond galactic colonization is unrealistic on any time scale. Our next nearest neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, is over 2.5 MILLION light years away, over 10 times farther than my “crossing the milky way” example, with nothing in-between to make a pit stop if needed.
And that’s just to get the next nearest galaxy. Current estimates suggest the observable universe contains 2 TRILLION galaxies.
Cryophilia