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What do you think the Great Filter is? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Personally I think it's photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.

I have no data to back that up, just a guess.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Earth also has an interesting curiosity. Our moon is extremely large, compared to earth. It also acts as a gyroscopic stabiliser. This keeps the earth from wobbling on its axis. Such a wobble would be devastating for a civilisation making the jump to technological. Even on earth, we are in a period of abnormal stability.

There seem to be so many coincidences that make our solar system unique that it's really upsetting lol It's like we are so perfect for stability because of things like Jupiter keeping the inner system "clean" of large impactors, our part of the galaxy being more "quiet" than typical as far as supernovae, stuff like that which makes it seem even less likely for life to exist anywhere else. :(

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Life will almost certainly be fairly common, given the right conditions. On earth, it seems to have appeared not long after conditions made it possible. We either won the lottery on the first week, or the odds aren't actually that bad.

The problem is, we can't detect life right now. We can only see potential communicating civilisations. These are a lot rarer. We currently know of 1, humanity. That will change in the next few years. We have telescopes being designed/built capable of detecting the gasses in the atmosphere of an earth sized planet. While we won't recognise all life types this way, a lot will show up in abnormal gasses, e.g. free oxygen. This should help bound the possibilities a lot.