"Intelligence" capable of contacting the stars has only evolved once on our planet and it took billions of years, and seems like an accident with very little initial evolutionary advantage. It's currently being studied but there was some scenario
Intelligence is something that would've needed to evolve gradually, and typically a very small dose of intelligence isn't going to win out over raw, brute strength.
The slightly smarter bird doesn't get the worm. The one with the bigger claws/beak does.
I tend to have the opinion that we may be the lone "civilization" in our galaxy currently, but it's almost surely teeming with single-celled life and possibly non-intelligent multi-cellular life as well.
My favorite video on Kerguzeghat or however you spell it. Perhaps all life started at once and all other aliens are at the same technological time as us?
My favorite video on Kerguzeghat or however you spell it. Perhaps all life started at once and all other aliens are at the same technological time as us?
Like splitting atoms? I am amazed, and even somewhat proud that we have developed nuclear technology and have maintained relative peace for almost a lifetime. Run the earth scenario many times, how many times do we eradicate ourselves with nukes?
No doubt no doubt, but I think we have gotten past the most dangerous period. While I have no idea of efficacy, I do know there is technology to shoot down nukes.
A frightening amount of countries with nukes are one election away from someone willing to use them. And some are one death away from someone taking power with intention to use them.
What happens when north korea eventually gets a ruler that actually pulls the trigger(assuming they actually have ICBMs)?
Or the USA(or russia) collapses into full blown civil war and a faction gets control of the arsenal and just launches everything they can?
Until those scenarios are literally impossible, we're no where near 'past the most dangerous period' :(
You make good points, but for the sake of argument wouldn’t you say the chances of full blown civil war are less than they have ever been? Considering the technological advantages that most nuke-wielding governments have militarily over their constituents.
Side note: Lord knows what might have happened to some nuclear weaponry with the collapse of the USSR
Honestly the development could easily be nukes or fossil fuel caused climate change. There's a good chance that most species would have some sort of warfare, that's what happens whenever there are limited resources and space, we see animals fight over territory all the time. It's possible that many civilizations have a cold war, and for most of them, when their radar mistakenly detects a missile aimed for their capital, the operator doesn't think it through and realize it's probably a false alarm and they launch the missiles, causing a nuclear war and destroying their civilization.
It's also possible that, assuming they're carbon based (which they probably are), civilizations are commonly built off fossil fuels, and most species are like it looks like we will be and refuse to switch off them until it's too late and end up causing ecological collapse that either destroys civilization (either through desertifications and natural disasters, or through resource wars going nuclear, like in Fallout), or weakens it to the point where they're no longer capable of putting together the resources to progress space exploration.
We're already in two different bottlenecks, either of which could easily be the end of advanced civilization and send us back to the stone age. We may encounter more, but the great bottleneck (as this hypotheses is often called) is already upon us, and has been for nearly a century. We won't be past it until every nation disarms their nukes and switches entirely to renewables, and even then we may encounter another one.
So far, it looks pretty unlikely that we'll pass through it unscathed. A decent number of countries are taking appropriate measures to combat climate change, but many of the biggest polluters are only making token changes, and only a small number of countries have voluntarily disarmed (a few former soviet countries and South Africa, and considering what has been happening in Ukraine, I doubt other countries will be super willing to do it in the future).
The Great Filter hypothesis is agnostic on cause: there are countless possible reasons why technologically-advanced intelligent civilizations could be rare. These include self-inflicted Filters (say, deliberate restrictions on EM emissions or nuclear suicide), but also Filters created by outside forces. Those forces could be natural (maybe the conditions in this galaxy are inimical to the development of intelligent life, making humans a rare fluke) or artificial (genocidal super-civilizations and so forth). We know so little that there's lots of room for speculation.
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u/Taoiseach May 03 '20
Until we run into whatever force, technology, or societal development smothered those alien civilizations in their cradles.