{"id":28597,"date":"2015-11-16T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T06:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28597"},"modified":"2015-11-06T21:07:35","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T02:07:35","slug":"qotd-the-great-filter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/16\/qotd-the-great-filter\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Great Filter"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi\u2019s Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of time and space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don\u2019t see any of them. We haven\u2019t seen their colossal astro-engineering projects in the night sky. We haven\u2019t heard their messages through SETI. And most important, we haven\u2019t been visited or colonized by them.<\/p>\n<p>This is very strange. Consider that if humankind makes it another thousand years, we\u2019ll probably have started to colonize other star systems. Those star systems will colonize other star systems and so on until we start expanding at nearly the speed of light, colonizing literally everything in sight. After a hundred thousand years or so we\u2019ll have settled a big chunk of the galaxy, assuming we haven\u2019t killed ourselves first or encountered someone else already living there.<\/p>\n<p>But there should be alien civilizations that are a <em>billion<\/em> years old. Anything that could conceivably be colonized, <em>they<\/em> should have gotten to back when trilobytes still seemed like superadvanced mutants. But here we are, perfectly nice solar system, lots of any type of resources you could desire, and they\u2019ve never visited. Why not?<\/p>\n<p>Well, the Great Filter. No knows <em>specifically<\/em> what the Great Filter is, but generally it\u2019s \u201cthat thing that blocks planets from growing spacefaring civilizations\u201d. The planet goes some of the way towards a spacefaring civilization, and then stops. The most important thing to remember about the Great Filter is that it is <em>very good<\/em> at what it does. If even one planet in a billion light-year radius had passed through the Great Filter, we would expect to see its inhabitants everywhere. Since we don\u2019t, we know that whatever it is it\u2019s <em>very<\/em> thorough.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Alexander, <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2014\/05\/28\/dont-fear-the-filter\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Don&#8217;t Fear The Filter&#8221;, <em>Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2014-05-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Great Filter, remember, is the horror-genre-adaptation of Fermi\u2019s Paradox. All of our calculations say that, in the infinite vastness of time and space, intelligent aliens should be very common. But we don\u2019t see any of them. We haven\u2019t seen their colossal astro-engineering projects in the night sky. We haven\u2019t heard their messages through SETI. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,16,44],"tags":[454,85],"class_list":["post-28597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-science","category-space-science","tag-astronomy","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7rf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28597"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28598,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28597\/revisions\/28598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}