What if the great filter of humanity is to overcome it's own nature that made it the dominant species of the planet and what if that is the universal great filter that makes the cosmos silent

whaleross@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 161 points –
65

Maybe the great filter is the misuse of apostrophes?

Maybe the great filter is crabs dragging others down to their level.

Even at loss of limb, those who escape are the 144000, sent to show others the way?

The the DNA brick wall we've been climbing is exactly that.

You've reminded me of some of my favorite hip hop lyrics of all time. If you never heard Eyedea before he died (27 club, I think?), Eyedea had Eminem level potential. Fucking incredible lyricist. If this tickles your fancy, go peep the album First Born.

Eyedea & Abilities - Man vs Ape

Move!

There's no telling what I'ma do

I'm eighty-thousand years of natural selection comin through

You ain't got as much aggression, possessions, weapons

I'll be damned if I get outdone by the next man

If you're beliefs are different than mine, then we gonna fight

Who needs peace when you can profit from being right?

I hold picket signs outside abortion clinic doors

Take what I want with force

And my God could kill yours

.

Involved with a species evolving so slowly

Genetically infantile, violent and holy

We think we're so smart but there's not much to know

Caveman is still alive behind those robot eyes

Fully controlled by ten thousand year old instincts

Hands on the war button, flinch and your world's extinct

This is technology for the barbarian

I see the future: the past, we'll be there again

.

Remember, the atom bomb came from the same place as poetry

.

Die dirty hippy commie scum, Christian, Muslim Buddhist, Jew

Democrat, factory-workin, college student you...

My nervous system don't take no bullshit

Been dominating since the day I touched the monolith

I only breed with sex-symbol worthy women

They stay at home and cook while I go out a make a living

Don't challenge my ego, don't step on my shoe

Otherwise the next wake that you attend might be for you

.

Grindin' my teeth as I'm battling uphill

The fight against ape-hood is fate versus free will

We think we're advanced but there's nowhere to go

Mammals stay captive to animal actions

So slowly we climb up this DNA brick wall

Addicted to emptiness, anger and pitfalls

Desire for space, territory, or lust

We'll eventually turn this whole planet to dust

.

There can be no peace when man is still a part of it

.

Purpose, perseverance, wordless amoeba surface

To lead the first coherent paleolithic circus

Specific neuro-circuits link man and Neanderthal

However, recent bio-chemical imprints

conflict with primitive urges

It's full blown ontological warfare

Murdering memories in the future two million years

Peace is a word we often say,

But it can't exist as long as the ape is here to stay

Do you have other song recommendations with larger than life topics like this ?

I don't listen to hip-hop but I like the theme of this one.

I think the evolution of multicellular life is most likely to be the great filter, since it took the longest to develop on earth.

We tend to focus on distance from it's star and size to determine a planet's habitability, but one of the most distinctive things about Earth is that it is essentially a two-planet system with the moon. The ratio of planet size to orbital object is pretty unique. The moon has all kinds of benefits, like tides and deflecting objects from Earth.

Then there's the magnetosphere, which Mars doesn't have and look what happened to it. And Jupiter’s massive size and gravitational influence play a crucial role in protecting Earth from extraterrestrial objects, including comets and asteroids.

Even with all that the Earth might never have developed intelligent life.

I don't think that's an "if" at all. I firmly believe that that's exactly it.

The same behaviours that we needed to evolve are harmful now that we've reached a potential "post-scarcity" stage.

To put it more bluntly, the drive to compete for resources in order to survive is what made us the dominant species. Now that post-scarcity is essentially upon us, our nature is to create artificial scarcity in order to satiate that drive for competition. And it will be the ultimate end of us.

I like the idea that the Great Filter is really just civilizations turning inward. Like they all get to a point where they realize that space travel is just really not viable and so they stop looking to explore the universe or find other life. Instead they turn to virtual worlds to prolong their existence with what resources they have available in their own star systems. Not even Dyson spheres or anything, they just go into digital hibernation and live out the rest of their lifetimes in a fabricated paradise for however long they can. Maybe they're able to use drugs/genetics/whatever to slow time down to a crawl where it feels like they live thousands of years within a normal lifespan.

For Outer Wilds fans, basically: ::: spoiler spoiler Owlks :::

Then we would start 'behavorial sink' and slowly decline in population. Someone else mentioned Calhoun and his rat utopia the other day and I looked it up. It seems like we are going through our version of behavioral sink.

Like uploads? If so, couldn't they have all this fun while slowly traveling the universe?

"We're sorry to interrupt everyone's simulation, but we're happy to remind you that you're a person on a spaceship and we just found something interesting!"

Then we better hurry the fuck up before we make it impossible to live on the planet.

In the grand scale of the universe we aren't even a blip, any "permanent" damage we cause will be reversed over hundreds of thousands or millions of years after we've wiped ourselves out.

And even if there was some kind of damage that couldn't be reversed, the next cycle of life would just adapt to whatever the issue is

I mean the earth has already survived having the first moon crash into it, as well as a giant meteor that caused an ice age. We have t quite gotten to that level, yet.

It's something people don't realize. We may be a scourge on the Earth, but we're still nowhere even near the top of the list of worst things to happen to this planet.

As the other reply brought up, Theia crashing into Earth. Flood basalt events. The Chicxulub impact.

We may be able to cause some real awful shit, but we still are nothing compared to what the forces of nature can produce. And just to clarify, I'm not saying this to in any way downplay the seriousness of climate change, or that we should do nothing about it.

Been seeing a lot of "mass extinctions are fine, earth will recover" bullshit lately, it's making me suspicious that this is the next big oil psyop.

Oh yeah it's all good, I just talked about millions of years of recovery and the extinction of humans, but yeah I'm a shill for big oil.

What are you smoking? I want some

Yeah "earth will recover once all humans die" doesn't make me any less worried for humanity.

Humanity aside, exterminating thousands of species of animals is just bad, not for any practical effect it has on humanity or "nature" but just because it, in itself, is morally bad.

The argument I've heard is that new species will evolve to fill new niches and one day earth will host the same biodiversity again.

I can't say I find that one anymore convincing. I'm with you on this, it's pretty gross how blasé some people are about dragging countless other species into extinction along with us.

I've seen it a lot recently.

Person 1: nature will recover, but humanity will go extinct.

Person 2: actually, humanity won't go extinct [list of information about humanity's resiliency]

Person 1 (or 3rd party reading): oh cool, not that big a deal then

Lost in this discussion: mass extinctions bad

I don't know if this theory has a proper name but I have seen it multiple times.

If a species has the ability to push their technology to the point they could become a space faring species, that technology will destroy the civilization before it can get there

It may depend on the rate they get to that point. Add in a dense energy source that's suddenly available and the rise of tech may be lethal. Perhaps the lucky ones don't have something like petroleum so their species matures long before they ruin their world.

Back up...dude with a 10th grade level understanding of biology and chemistry coming through with a question...

So carbon-based life forms can, under the right circumstances, decompose into long chains of hydrocarbons like Petroleum.

Does that mean silicon-based life forms under the right circumstances would break down into hydrosilicates like caulk?

I don't know about the end result under the same extremes. I do know that silicon life, while not impossible, it's probably unlikely. Silicon does parallel carbon in some ways including a similar location on the periodic chart (which is why it got attention from scifi writers), but the issue is simply silicon is nowhere near as "greedy" as carbon bonds.

But it is a big universe.

So we all just happily go back to living in forest?

The thing is we could largely retain all our advances and live in a more fecund environment. A large portion of our pollution is unnecessary and tied to whatever you call this global economic system / social paradigm we've backed ourselves into. It's only either or between forest and urban blight because we've made it so

Reminds me of my thoughts after reading "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright. If you haven't read it before I highly recommend it.

So like, we all just give up as a species? Sounds unlikely.

Think of Star Trek as an analogy.

  • The Archers, Pikes, Kirks succeeded by being bold and daring, confronting dangers, fighting to survive. The Siskos and Burnhams instigated war on a galactic scale. They were violent, reactive, risk takers
  • a couple centuries later, the Picards confronted greater obstacles but with reason, compassion, self-sacrifice. If Kirk had faced Q, that would have been the great filter, but Picard succeeded as a human evolved past his violent reactions

I've never watched Star Trek.

I know, heresy for lemmy.

I also use windows and not linux (though I plan on switching when I get time to learn linux)

Wow, it’s like talking to an Alien ….. while I do occasionally use Windows, my main laptop is OSX, my home servers are Raspian and Suse and at work I use Red Hat, Debian and whatever Amazon Linux is, and my media consumption is Linux or iOS

I didn't understand the question. What is a "great filter"?

No BS, seriously don't know and want to.

I mean there are multiple proposed filters.

Suppose yours is correct. What is this humanity's nature you speak of?

Bravery? Foolishness? Wisdom? Violence? Greed?

What what of those attributes haven't we already overcome time and again?

It's much more probable that everyone out there is attentively listening to signals instead of radically changing their own mental processes. Or not

Wtf kinda world are you living in where humanity has overcome foolishness, violence, and greed?

I think they meant for five minutes because if you won, you won right?

Exactly. Everyone thought nuclear war might be one of the great filters but we survived the Cold War. Nuclear weapons are no longer a concern, right? Right?

I mean I don't see people practice nuclear drills anymore so yeah

I mean same as yours I hope? People do that daily, hope you grow to notice it. It's nice when you do