Like, we’re destroying the one place we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy, but instead the world’s richest man is trying to expand to other planets while this one’s ability to sustain life is in jeopardy. IMO that makes us potentially a very stupid species compared to a species that doesn’t really care about meeting other aliens because they value the life on their own planet far more than we do.
good ending
we know is a sure bet on where we can prosper if we keep it healthy,
haha dude, error #1. we can do everything right and still be toast if all our eggs are in this one fucking basket. the universe is a big place and the earth is a very small, vulnerable one.
With our current understanding, the universe is a vulnerable place. Heat death of the universe may be a thing that’s inescapable.
may or may not be. i’ve had long discussions about that with people. i struggle to get a clear answer from people. everybody gives evasive answers.
Evasive answers like “we really can’t know what will happen in billions of years”? xD
No truly cataclysmic events occurred in the last millions of years, so we’re probably safe enough.
Fucking up the planet in an anthropogenic way is clearly a bigger concern, and launching giant stuff into space contributes to that.
In other words, maybe later it could be worth it, but only if we solve the problems right here. Otherwise, we won’t make it there, either.
No truly cataclysmic events occurred in the last millions of years, so we’re probably safe enough.
Just because nothing happened so far, doesn’t mean nothing will happen in the future. Just look at some of the volcanoes we have around. They may lay dormant for millennia, until they don’t. Same principle for pretty much everything this universe has to offer. It’s safe until it suddenly isn’t.
Also, we have several billion people on this planet. I think we can handle tackling multiple problems at once.
Quite a few assumptions being made and quite a lot of hyperbole.
- The richest man in the world is not representative of the human race. Also, settling Mars (within timelines that musk is suggesting) is not treated seriously by any institution with significant power.
- We aren’t putting earth’s ability to host life in jeopardy. Not even close. Yes, human caused climate change is bad. Worst case outcomes lead to most human settlements going under water and extinctions in a manner that the planet has seen only a few times. But again, not even close where we need to abandon earth cuz we “ruined it” or whatever. Not even nuclear war would lead humanity to come to this conclusion.
As for why a civilization should be interested in spreading out as much as possible in case it wants to survive:
- spreading out reduces the probability of extinction. Right now, one gamma ray burst that’s close enough, and that is aimed at earth can render the entirety of humanity extinct. But if we were more spread out, not all humans would have to die. The same logic can be applied to relativistic weapons aimed at earth.
- spreading out gives us access to a lot of resources. Earth’s gravity and atmosphere makes it hard to manufacture and launch megastructures. Megastructures can allow us to create really cool stuff.
- many humans find exploring the universe really cool!
If alien species are anything like us, I highly doubt that they’d come to the conclusion that you’ve posited.
He’s as rich as he is because people agreed to give him money out of faith in what he claims he wants to achieve.
He’s the world’s most supported human according to humanity’s most dominant merit system. Sorry.
I can point to examples of many civilizational collapses based on comparatively minor climate abnormalities in the last mere 7,000 years, and can say with certainty the earth has gone at least 5,000,000,000 without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.
I think any alien civilization with basic math would prioritize the bird-in-hand.
without being bombarded by even one gamma ray burst.
you wouldn’t know that. deep-sea life would probably survive any gamma ray burst, i guess.
and it turns out, there’s a surprising amount of deep-sea life: bacteria and complex life.
on this diagram, it would throw us back by 300 mio. years max.
Won’t ocean acidification kill a lot of that life? Isn’t it already?
Civilization collapsing doesn’t equal to species end. A gamma ray burst or yeah something that has already happened in the planets past, a big enough asteroid hitting us. Can mean the end of the species.
Of course civilizations collapse should be avoided even just for the reason of avoiding lots of people dying. We shouldn’t completely discard expanding into space either. Our population and civilization is big enough that both things can be done at the same time.
Working towards both will probably provide a better overall goal for common people as well instead of currently working just to line the pockets of CEOs and pedofiles.
At this point civilization collapse would effectively terrestrially lock us in. There aren’t enough easily accessible raw materials to reindustrialize to a space-faring point.
Yep.
If you burn through all the readily available energy resources, civilization collapses, then tries to rebuild itself…
It can’t. Their ancestors kicked over the ladder of progress, and broke it.
Attempt 2 at civilization now has to figure out another tech tree, because they cannot cost effectively lubricate an industrial economy and logistics with fossil fuel.
Not strictly impossible, per se, but they have an even more difficult task.
You can point to those civilizations because their collapse was not the end, life continued on. We haven’t been hit by a gamma ray burst or any other complex life ending disaster since we are here to discuss the scenario. But that’s no guarantee that we won’t be.
The odds of anything happening to render Earth totally uninhabitable are very small… in our lifetimes. But as long as we keep existing, the time frame will keep growing, the opportunities for disaster will keep accumulating and the odds will keep multiplying. The basic math looks very different when you multiply by infinity. Even the sun won’t last forever.
Obviously, this is no reason to neglect Earth and rush to other planets. But it is reason enough to reject the idea that we should never spread to other worlds because Earth will always be enough.
Other positive things to mention about space exploration:
- If humanity spreads out across the stars, there is less of a danger for us dying from ANY centralized disaster including the cosmic ones and those we might cause ourselves
- Similar to the above, it will be harder to create centralized governments due to extreme distances and just communication limits set by the speed of light; ergo, if some colony falls prey to a dictatorship it is unlikely to spread easily across all of humanity
- We have lots of questions about the universe which may be answered if we travel it. And, when scientific discoveries are made they often have applications outside their initial field.
- We have lots of questions about biology that living in novel environments would teach us (also lots of other scientific fields too of course)
- Forming colonies will force many small groups of people to work collectively, causing those colonies to form a sense of community—something that is lacking in humanity presently
- Isolation caused by communication limits will be scary but also will decrease our access to 24/7 terrible non-local news (inhibiting our ability to doomscroll) which will likely have a positive impact on everyone’s mental health (…maybe not on earth but in the colonies at least)
- Exploration becoming a possibility will also likely make people happier just by showing that humanity has a future. Also, knowing that there are places you can go to escape society all together is quite a freeing thought for some
- Last but not least WE GET TO GO TO SPACE!
Ooh do you listen to John Michael Godier by any chance?
Yeah. You don’t wanna carry all your eggs in one basket.
Also, it’s human nature to explore. Show people a place they can’t go and they’re going to want to find a way to get there. It’s just what we do. We’re curious little monkeys.
maybe the real treasures are the natural resources we destroy on the journey!
You are very young, aren’t you? I’m guessing 14-17?
A Great Filter needs to explain why we don’t hear radio transmissions from alien civilisations.
space big explains it pretty clearly tbh
Also dark forest theory
I think the only reason this theory exists is because it’s kinda spooky and fills us with dread.
If such a civilisation existed with the power, intention, and tech to zoom around killing off other species:
- how do other planets know they need to hide?
- why haven’t we been killed off yet ?
- what is the motivation of these civilisation-squashers?
- and finally… if everyone was hiding out avoiding making any radiowaves, the killers would have long since switched to looking for the conditions that support life, the same way we do.
Does it?
The Fermi Paradox which proposes the great filter suggests that despite the vastness of space we should still be able to detect radio waves from other civilisations.
The question of the great filter would not be posed, if we were unlikely to detect other civilisations because of the expanse of space.
Inverse square law. We’re probavly bombarded by millions of alien signals. They’re just not very loud
Oh wow you’ve cracked it. To think there are great physicists like Frank Drake who have made this search their life’s work, and pondered this very question for decades, and you’ve deduced the solution with your astonishing intellect. Bravo.
It was a thought experiment meant to provoke discussion at the time, not a rigorous theorem. Check the
fccoefficient, there’s much debate about its value and definition of detectability.You’re aware Drake was one of the instigators of the SETI program right? He spent a significant portion of his life on a project that would have been pointless if you are correct.
You may have just upset every scientist in the room at the suggestion that people only expend time on money on science that will only produce positive results
Well, in a few million years the sun will burn out, and we won’t have any choice but to migrate.
*billion
Not quite an immediate concern tho. Maybe for aliens, too?
what makes you think that waiting makes spaceflight easier?
Technology development is related to time. I feel like that sounds sarcastic, but I don’t mean it to be.
If we approached deep space flight anew in three hundred years after working on non internal combustion engines for other purposes in that time, we’d probably be much better able to reduce the total emissions from space flight than if we work on it continuously for the next hundred years, even if we reach zero emissions in a shorter timeframe that way.
The same is true for material sciences and trying to figure out how to reduce the level of metallic ions released into the ozone layer by spacecrafts. Hell, we’ll probably have more advanced international cooperation in three hundred years and language education/translation software, giving us a better ability to respond to an emergency in space.
i doubt that. the basic physics behind rocketry is well-understood. we know why electric propulsion cannot be used for lift-off (rocket equation), nuclear-thermal propulsion induces its own problems (nuclear waste), etc.
there’s just no way that you’re gonna circumvent the ways that physical laws push you into, even if we wait 300 years.
We should die out on this planet.
There is a handful of people with the money to get to Mars who can go die somewhere else
right, all eggs one basket? sure Jan.
no. idk what makes you think that it would be an “either or” situation.
That would solve the Fermi paradox too. Smart species stayed on their home planet, dumb ones tried to leave it. While trying, they ruined their best chance of survival. While in space, they found out that survival out there is nearly impossible without a planet. That’s why we don’t hear from them.
I refuse to believe that capitalism is the terminal emergent quality of life in the unuverse.
I refuse to believe as much for humanity.
“it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”
that’s because capitalism is built into our nature. we are greedy little monkeys. most of us are motivated by the social need to feel like we are superior to other monkeys and easiest way to show that is to have more than they do.
people can daydream all the want that aren’t wired this way, but those are the same people who browbeat each other over the ‘true’ interpreation of marxism or whatever. their own version of monkey standing. and their ‘leaders’ are all grifting trust fund types .
The result of a zillion years of evolution in which the monkey that can gather more food and resources, also gathers followers, and gets laid more.
Fast forward a zillion years, and those fat greedy apes now control the world.
Now that we’re aware of the mechanism, all we need to do is spend the next zillion years forcing humanity down a different, more cooperative evolutionary path. That shouldn’t be any problem at all.
Actually we’re hardwired for cooperation, as a hyper social animal. A single greedy human will out compete a social one, but a social group will out compete a greedy group.
Some are, and they have loud voices. We’re also helpful little monkeys who groom each other and take care of our sick and elderly. The quiet monkeys are a silent majority
Unfortunately, the greedy monkeys want our sick and elderly to die, so they can have their money.
Well i was engaging in my community and accepting mutual benefit as compensation but i guess I’ll give up on that and go back to doomscrolling and jerking it in isolation to my grok gf. (she loves me)
engaging with your community is nice but it’s not going to save the world. often people’s engagement with their communities leads to negative social consequences, like the housing crisis. the housing crisis is a direct consequence of community engagement and folks seeking to control who can live near them.
Oh i see. So by sharing resources, knowledge, and keeping an eye out for them, and by receiving those benefits in return, I’m actually harming them. (I’m addicted to narcan)
Unlikely.
We are eventually going to hit a real limit on the number of humans this planet can support. Whether or not we’ll get there, that’s not really in question. When we’ll reach that point, that’s harder to say, could be 5000 years, but I’d bet it’s closer to 500. At some point, relatively soon, we are going to need to start expanding into near space, the moon, earth orbit.
It would be the same for any intelligent species. They start their existence in relative equilibrium, until they start outperforming other species, they shape the world to fit their needs, they invent machines, medicine, and then they are no longer in equilibrium, their numbers are steadily increasing. Any intelligent species will eventually be more successful than their planet can support.
But if a star system were surrounded by a Dyson Swarm, millions or even billions of free floating habitats and space stations orbiting the star, that’s actually something we could detect. We know that isn’t happening all over the galaxy, because we actually probably wouldn’t miss that.
The Malthusian Theory. Generally considered invalid these days.
The great filter might be likely happen due to some shape of truth in this world that we didn’t yet understand, and understanding which will make you want to quit. Death by knowledge.
Nah. They invent generative AI and their civilizational progress stalls forever.
They (we) become Wall-E human style characters.
And I guess the AI never actually becomes advanced enough to explore the cosmos itself? Otherwise that would be the alien life we run into, right?
So they get addicted to AI, but it’s only marginally better than our shit AI. lmao great.
