Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Bostrom has a long article that is well worth reading with an interesting interpretation why on the failure of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) for the past half a century is good news and why the discovery of life on Mars could foretell our doom. Bostrom postulates a "Great Filter," which can be thought of as a probability barrier and consists of one or more evolutionary transitions or steps that must be traversed at great odds in order for an Earth-like planet to produce a civilization capable of exploring distant solar systems. The Great Filter must be sufficiently powerful that even with many billions of rolls of the dice, one ends up with nothing: no aliens, no spacecraft, no signals. If the filter is in our past, there must be some extremely improbable step in the sequence of events whereby an Earth-like planet gives rise to an intelligent species and it follows that we are most likely the only technologically advanced civilization in our galaxy. But if the Great Filter is still ahead of us, that would mean that some great improbability prevents almost all civilizations at our current stage of technological development from progressing to the point where they engage in large-scale space colonization — perhaps some very powerful weapons technology that causes its extinction. If we discover life-forms on Mars, the effect would be to shift the probability against the hypothesis that the Great Filter is behind us. If Mars is found to be barren, we would have some grounds for hope that all or most of the Great Filter is in our past and in that case, we may have a significant chance of one day growing into something greater than we are now."
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So I can reply to articles on firehose? Good. FP. And with that out of the way... here the grand idea, maybe _one_ life _has_ already spread throughout the observable universe and beyond and because they're paranoid jerks they left behind devices that eradicate any other followup life from prospering to the degree it can compete with the guys who had "First Post!" to the universe. However they screwed up and their death dealing all powerful self-replicating robots turned on them and took them out too... That idea h
You're trying too hard to find limits. There is a Great Barrier, the vast distances needed to be traversed to reach other star systems. The Great Filter which blocks a life form from taking over the galaxy is stellar radiation. A supernova or gamma ray burst sterilizes many solar systems. A life form not only has to reach other star systems, it has to spread across huge areas in order for some of its members to survive after part of the galaxy gets sterilized. We're still sitting in our nest, even thou
seriously though, well, the great filter is obviously to not either starve yourself by consuming all your resources and/or poison yourself with your accumulated waste products, in the process of becoming the dominant species on your planet so that you have access to enough resources to venture into space. witness the boom and bust cycles of pretty much every life form; boom inevitably leads to bust, malthus style. if a species can't figure that out and head it off, they're not going to amount to more than a
First Post to the Universe! (Score:1)
And with that out of the way... here the grand idea, maybe _one_ life
_has_ already spread throughout the observable universe and beyond
and because they're paranoid jerks they left behind devices that
eradicate any other followup life from prospering to the degree it
can compete with the guys who had "First Post!" to the universe.
However they screwed up and their death dealing all powerful
self-replicating robots turned on them and took them out too...
That idea h
Space is big. Really big. (Score:1)
the filter is AGW skeptics (Score:1)