Great Filter

Rare card · No. 62014

The Great Filter is economist Robin Hanson's name for a staple of Cold War table talk: if humans seem close to being able to send packages of bacteria across the galaxy or engineer their solar system, why don't we see that other species have already done this? Like astronomer Frank Drake, Hanson laid out the chain of steps which would be required for these futurist scenarios to come true, and asked which were the most implausible. The Great Filter is the process or processes which interrupts the sequence from abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, allowing few or no species through. One implication of this argument is that the more probable it is that other life could evolve to the present stage in which humanity is, the bleaker the future chances of humanity probably are.

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