So you know the Great Filter, right?
It’s what happens when you look up at the stars and ask “Where the fuck is everyone”.
There are so many planets out there, yet it’s radio silent. The intelligent life to planet ratio is really, bad. So far we’re the only ones.
You gotta ask, why?
Enter, the Great Filter. Something, at some point in the pipeline, prevents planets from developing and maintaining intelligent life capable of electromagnetic communication.
We don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a quirk of chemistry that makes the chance of multicellular life forming ridiculously low. Maybe it’s a quirk of biology that makes sapience incredibly rare. Maybe it’s a hyper intelligent space worm that eats any civilisation that makes too much noise. Maybe it’s runaway climate change.
The thing is, we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that filter, because that suggests that an imminent demise is in our civilisation’s future. And with every discovery of non-intelligent life on other planets, it becomes increasingly likely that we’re on the wrong side of that filter.
Enter, the recent discovery of life on Venus. It means that we’re much more likely to be on the wrong side.
But, watching that debate tonight, I began to feel a sense of relief. At least if we’re on the wrong side of the filter, it’s not as though we’re wasting a once-in-a-galaxy chance. We’re just yet another civilisation that failed to get past that filter. I can live with being unexceptionally mediocre.
Hard SF writer here, although I’m not a scientist. I read all the comments. I recommend people check out Richard Lewontin and Christopher Caudwell’s thoughts on science and dialectics. There’s a cool novel called “The Killing Star” which deals with this as well. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s online.
Regarding the great filter, we’re pretty sure that single-celled life is at least common in the solar system, possibly thanks to unusually high concentrations of phosphorous in this region of space during the sun’s formation. (Life as we know it is impossible without phosphorus I believe—it’s part of ATP production (?) in cellular respiration.) If you play space engine, you learn pretty quickly that the galactic core is way too radioactive for multicellular life, meaning that anything complex is probably living elsewhere. As for detecting it, anything more advanced than us is probably using quantum entanglement rather than radio waves to communicate over interstellar distances. Current technology can’t detect that. Radio waves from civilizations similar to our own are probably just too weak to pick up. It’s also possible that the singularity, if it actually even happens, is not the end of so-called “evolution” or development. Some species may ascend to a godlike state that we aren’t able to understand. Or they may conclude that just hanging out on their homeworlds in a primitive communist state is best. Or maybe climate change or nuclear war does them in. We don’t know. What we do know is that you could use rockets to colonize the galaxy in a few million years, which is much less time than the Milky Way’s age. It seems like no one has tried to do that. But maybe they just didn’t come here!
I think that not all stories about UFOs or alien abductions can be easily explained, and I also think that most scientists are rich liberals who are biased toward finding “realistic” explanations for things like possible Dyson Swarms, Oumuamua, life on Venus, Navy UFOs, etc. They’ll lose their cushy jobs if they start ranting about little green men. Mack’s book about alien abductions is pretty frightening, and the Harvard professor concluded (after talking with dozens of patients) that something was definitely up. He couldn’t say what it was, however. He also nearly lost his tenure at Harvard because of that.
Anyway I think about this shit all the time and love that you guys are talking about it. Fingers crossed, in a few months I’ll have a trilogy of novels ready which are sort of like Star Trek: Enterprise but not shitty and way more muscular when it comes to communism. They’re going to be published as ebooks by a small publisher and should be pretty cheap, but I may be able to give them away here for free in exchange for reviews if anyone is interested.
Ok, hit me with this Harvard professor book. I need to be little-green-man pilled.
Also, you should definitely post about your books when you finish.
I’m gonna need a link (DM me if you don’t want to post publicly) I’m looking for new stuff to read and am a huge fan of hard sci-fi.
