The Great Filter or where do we go from here?

[Karapace]

(From Wikipedia) 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…

Robin Hanson argued that there was a "Great Filter" which acted to reduce the number of advanced civilizations actually observed in the universe (currently just one: human). This probability threshold might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.

In the past I have seen war as being instrumental in this potential destruction (growing up in the Cold War era) but recently another thought occurred. We have a finite planet with finite resources. The population currently stands at around 8 billion give or take and anyone can see that on our current trajectory and current technology we will eventually run out of space, food, water, land and bugger up the climate in the process. Even if you turn rocks into food and re-cycle sea water you will eventually have no more room to grow.

However growth is all we know and people are already saying that in having less children we are jeopardising the economy and future civilisation.

It seems to me then that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Grow and die or shrink and die. Obviously this is way too simplistic but it does underline the difficulties we face. Most solutions suggested (living on other planets, creating food from minerals) are little more than magical thinking and not likely to be practical for a century or more if at all. Going vegan is one food solution that some suggest but I don’t see people willing to restrict themselves in the ways that will become necessary. Jeff Bezos predicted a Trillion people but that involves us spreading out across the solar system and such things may be harder than we imagine.

So what do people think? How can we reconcile infinite grow with a green planet? Will we make it to the stars or peter out in our rush to consume?

 

[Harpo]

 

[Swank]

I think the trap in thinking about it the way the OP suggests is assuming there are a number of well-trod paths from where we are now to some kind of recognizable future, and we just have to find one of the ways through the maze. As if the galactic empires and ages of exploration from our SF stories have anything to do with the real history of intelligence in the universe.


It is more likely to me that how people continue to exist might be extremely unpredictable and diverse - especially if certain technologies like nanotech or direct brain/computer interfaces come to fruition. Suddenly the range of choices people might make to survive take on so many possibilities that seeing humanity as having a particular culture will no longer be true. At that point it won't really be a "we" problem as much as a branching of the family tree with very odd interactions between those groups or individuals.


One major factor is that people might simply become much harder to kill, with automated security and environmental systems that make war and pestilence outliers. There could be an incredible drop in reproduction at about the same time as scarcity economies are replaced, causing the world to be distinctly underpopulated in as little as a century.

And I'm not trying to make it sound like the future is golden - a lot of these possibilities are going to take away some of the fundamental motivations people have, and leave people with our mindset out in the cold, or unable to participate and succeed in social economies with values that we can't recognize.

 

[Toby Frost]

I think a combination of pandemics, neglect, corruption, incompetence and downright genocide will render the question unimportant.

 

[Karapace]

I think the trap in thinking about it the way the OP suggests is assuming there are a number of well-trod paths from where we are now to some kind of recognizable future, and we just have to find one of the ways through the maze. As if the galactic empires and ages of exploration from our SF stories have anything to do with the real history of intelligence in the universe.

A good point. We are always I think bound by the times we live in. I was saying to someone earlier how when I was a child growing up in the 60’s that I envisioned by now that we would be living on Mars, using clean nuclear energy and living a life of leisure and learning, having given all our grafting jobs to robots. I am still waiting for those but the way some have manifested is quite unexpected. AI seems to be taking our jobs but not giving us the freedom, although to be honest it is still early days and how it eventually pans out will be different. I never foresaw the internet and all its ramifications and nuclear power didn’t turn into the panacea I thought it would.

I think though that the way we do economics will have to be re-thought. May be the future won’t be like Star Trek (classic series) but it would be nice if it were close and some of those childhood dreams came true

 

[Karapace]

That's a pretty good summary.
Part of the reason I am wondering is my current series of novels has a lone survivor of one great filter, helping up coming species to avoid another

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

(From Wikipedia) 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…

Robin Hanson argued that there was a "Great Filter" which acted to reduce the number of advanced civilizations actually observed in the universe (currently just one: human). This probability threshold might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction.

In the past I have seen war as being instrumental in this potential destruction (growing up in the Cold War era) but recently another thought occurred. We have a finite planet with finite resources. The population currently stands at around 8 billion give or take and anyone can see that on our current trajectory and current technology we will eventually run out of space, food, water, land and bugger up the climate in the process. Even if you turn rocks into food and re-cycle sea water you will eventually have no more room to grow.

However growth is all we know and people are already saying that in having less children we are jeopardising the economy and future civilisation.

It seems to me then that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Grow and die or shrink and die. Obviously this is way too simplistic but it does underline the difficulties we face. Most solutions suggested (living on other planets, creating food from minerals) are little more than magical thinking and not likely to be practical for a century or more if at all. Going vegan is one food solution that some suggest but I don’t see people willing to restrict themselves in the ways that will become necessary. Jeff Bezos predicted a Trillion people but that involves us spreading out across the solar system and such things may be harder than we imagine.

So what do people think? How can we reconcile infinite grow with a green planet? Will we make it to the stars or peter out in our rush to consume?

Thomas Robert Malthus would be very, very proud.

As we sit here today the planet Earth, and the people on it, collectively produce far more than the 8 Billion people on planet Earth require to live wonderful happy lives.
Example 1: The United States has a homelessness crisis with about 771,000 homeless people. The US also has 15 million unoccupied residential units.
Example 2: The Earth produces enough food to feed 10 Billion people right now, but there are 773 million people suffering from malnutrition and 2.8 Billion people cannot afford a healthy diet.

This list could include all human needs. The issue is that the political and economic systems of Earth distribute resources in a manner that creates the existing problems for humans on Earth.

The human population does not NEED to grow. There is no crisis of resources. There is no intrinsic Earth-Capacity crisis at all.
Yet there is no reason to expect current economic and political systems that control resources on planet Earth to distribute resources differently even if there is a change in population, technology, resource extraction, etc. So the crisis associated with human beings living on planet Earth will continue as long as the current systems that manage resources continue to distribute resources in the manner that is done today.

There is no Earth capacity problem. Only a distribution problem.
The proposed "solutions" push into the existing economic and political systems rather push towards solving the distribution problem.

 

[Toby Frost]

There is no Earth capacity problem. Only a distribution problem.

As ever, the problem seems to be that the wrong people are in charge. So many of the world's problems would be solved if there was a way of keeping psychopaths out of power. But it's clear that a lot of humans are irresistibly drawn towards sociopaths. It's incredibly depressing, like watching a friend date one wife-beater after another. "Yes, he's a bad boy. But he'd never hurt me."

 

[Karapace]

As ever, the problem seems to be that the wrong people are in charge. So many of the world's problems would be solved if there was a way of keeping psychopaths out of power. But it's clear that a lot of humans are irresistibly drawn towards sociopaths. It's incredibly depressing, like watching a friend date one wife-beater after another. "Yes, he's a bad boy. But he'd never hurt me."

This seems to be the issue. Not that we can't do anything but that we seem to persistantly ignore the lessons of history. Another is the enshitification of things, whereby a good idea (let's say FBook, where a way of keeping in touch with people becomes virtually unusable due to adverts and allogrithms).
Perhaps it is just a phase we are going through, becoming more insular and suspicious. When Yuval Noah Harari wrote "Sapiens" in 2011 he believed that Political and economic interdependance would eliminate world conflict and that Capital globalisation would produce a global empire. Russia soon scuppered that idea, as did Brexit and numerous other events since. Yet humanity is flexible and we may yet achieve great things through co-operation.