Barriers to becoming an advanced technologically capable and culturally prosperous civilisation that lasts for millions of years

[Vastness]

EDIT: This thread was previously entitled "Great Filters of the Fermi Paradox - what are they?" but I have renamed it because I think I have kind of over-complicated what I was actually hoping to discuss.

I've posted this is Philosophy & Spirituality because, as I see it, one the technology stuff is out of the way, the primary issues affecting the stability of a civilisation on cosmological timescales - millenia to millions (or even billions) of years - are, after a point, going to be cultural - and these cultural issues will probably be unrecognisable to use, mere denizens of this single-planet baby civilisation that we are a part of. So the primary interesting philosophical meat of this topic would be discussing the culture and the mindset that persists within such a culture of beings who without losing their individuality entirely, have been able to establish a stable society that remains stable over inconcievably vast timescales and inconceivably vast distances.

I'll leave everything I wrote below too as it gives a kind of primer to my own thought processes here...




This is a topic I find very interesting and it's been discussed a few times in this forum although maybe not in the most appropriate threads.

I feel like there is a fairly widespread misinterpretation of what the Fermi Paradox actually is which causes people to dismiss it offhand, so before we get started with the actual discussion I'd just like to clear that up. The Fermi Paradox is nothing more than a conceptual basis for further discussion about how common or uncommon life is in the universe, and of that life, the likelihood of any given species evolving and developing technology to the point that they can be considered a truly spacefaring civilisation. It says, in summary "If the universe is so big and old, where are all the alien civilisations?"

Obviously, the paradox is an illusion - evidently, we are here, life evolves sometimes (at least once, anyway). We do not, however, see emissions from broadcasting civilisations or any evidence of megascale engineering from high energy expenditure civilisations - as we would expect to see had a species evolved , say, a couple million years before us (not entirely implausible), developed space travel, and elected to start colonising nearby stars. Either this has not happened (a species evolved in our past that had the capability to do this, or it did happen, but prior to us developing the technology to detect them, they decided for whatever reason to hide themselves - or, possibly, destroy themselves - ie, they failed to surpass a Great Filter to become a truly spacefaring civilization.

So obviously, there are filters - life does appear to be rare, and the galaxy is not swarming with aliens, or at least, waste heat signatures, possible leaky signals, or whatever might conceivably indicate the presence of incredibly advanced alien races, have not reached us in the relatively short blip of time that we would have been able to detect them.

Ergo, there are filters preventing alien civilisations from being so numerous that we couldn't have helped but spot a ship, or just a signal with an unmistakably inhuman and unmistakably artificial design by now. I'm just trying to stress this point so we don't get too bogged down in the "what ifs" that, IMO, aren't really relevant necessarily and just kill any further discussion (like if all aliens quickly develop tech which makes them entirely invisible to us - I would say that even if this were a likely practice, it's not likely that every species would do this).

So can we accept that there are filters? Good. But what are the filters?

As I see it, the most obvious filters are roughly as follows:

1. emergence of life in the first place from abiotic matter, requires a certain unique and rare type of planet, moon, or asteroid with sufficient energy input and chemical content...
   
   
2. development of life from self-replicating molecules, single cells, into macroscopic organisms
   
   
3. development of high intelligence, and possession of adequate maniple appendages for fine manipulation of the environment
   
   
4. development of technology, and living on a planet which allows this phase of development to thrive - for example, water worlds, gas giants if anything could live there, planets extremely metal-poor, would all have major and possibly insurmountable challenges to harnessing electricity, fire, and thus progressing to computers and the technological leap that allows
   
   
5. development of the technology to leave their homeworld - again, planets with gravity just a little higher than the Earths, poor in the kind of volatiles that make good propellants, or even in a very crowded system like a moon that passed through the debris of it's parent's ring system, would make this very difficult - possibly prohibitively so - even in the presence of a highly advanced culture it would be possible for a species to be essentially trapped on their homeworld even while developing a highly advanced understanding of the universe beyond
   
   
6. overcoming tribalism - tribalism, or something like it, ie, the drive to survive, compete, and wage war on our competitors - can be argued to be something intrinsic to almost any species that has competed it's way to the apex of it's home planet's ecosystem - as, for better or worse, we humans have - but this same tribalism, once the homeworld is known, fairly culturally homogenous or moving towards it, and there's no one left to fight with who is truly "other", may not be something that can be just switched off, or overcome, as we manufacture reasons to create new divisions that divide us. This same tribal instinct that has given us so much and is no doubt a significant contributor to the might of human ingenuity, could well be the undoing of many a technologically capable, almost next level civilisation... I would actually argue that this is the Great Filter which we are facing right now... The first 5 are handled - but there is a lot of uncertainty in the world - we have the knowledge, resources, and technology to make it better and create a bright future for all of us. But we may well destroy ourselves before this can happen... Maybe this is our inescapable fate and the solution to the Fermi Paradox - intelligent species always destroy themselves. But I hope we overcome it.
   
   
7. development of technologies to facilitate reliable interstellar travel and extrasolar settlement - maybe this is just not possible, despite what all our science fiction and scientific optimists would have us believe... it seems to me this is surely a filter of some kind, but whether it is a "Great Filter", with almost insurmountable odds of being achieved before succumbing to #6, for example - is up for debate...

What other filters could there be, either in the past or in the distant future assuming we get past number 6?

Would be very interested to hear all of your inputs!

 

[Xorkoth]

I know it doesn't directly address your question, but as the most common reason I see people cite for stating that we obviously are alone in the universe is the Fermi Paradox (and Fermi himself decided, after only ~30 years of the existence of SETI, that it must mean we are alone, which I find almost beyond belief that a great mind like his would come to that conclusion). Here's the reason why it's virtually impossible that we even COULD FEASIBLY have detected other life. It's because transmissions are limited by the speed of light. SETI has been up since the 60s, so let's say we've been searching the sky for specific sorts of radio wave transmissions for about 80 years now. That means we would have only had time to detect anything within 80 light years. Given our galaxy is several hundreds of thousands of light years across, 80 light years is like looking at our next door neighbors. At the time that Fermi gave up on the existence of other life, we had only seen a mere 30 light years away. Why anyone would come to the conclusion that "since we haven't seen it yet, it must not exist" is beyond my comprehension. Not to mention that if a planet has life, that is not evolved enough at this point in this, but i a million years it would be, or a million years ago it was. Or maybe they use some other means of communication and not radio waves. Or maybe they saw our signal and they're 60 light years away and they're sending one back but it won't reach us for another 40 years? Or maybe right now, 100,000 light years away on the other edge of the galaxy, some advanced civilization is producing radio waves, but it will be 100,000 years until we get them if we even exist anymore then. The incomprehensibly vast distances between things in space is an incredibly limiting factor in even ever knowing for sure whether other life is out there. Also, the timing... we have been giving off radio waves for ~100 years, give or take. We're already worried about how much longer we'll be around before we destroy ourselves. AImagine a planet equivalent to ours, maybe not even far away. But it formed 1 million years earlier. So in 1 million years, it will have advanced life. Various galaxies and solar systems formed at vastly different times, there are still new ones forming, there are some that formed vast amounts of time before ours did. There could have been countless advanced life forms who have evolved and gone extinct already that we could never know about.

But given that recently we have discovered that, in fact, not only do other stars almost all have planets, but quite a high percentage of them have rocky worlds within their stars' habitable zones. When the Fermi Paradox was developed, this knowledge was not known. Furthermore, even if advanced life is extremely rare, the sheer unfathomable number of potential sites for it to form means that statistically it's almost impossible that we are the only one. Each galaxy has hundreds of millions to billions of stars, and our best estimate at this point is that there may be as many as 200 BILLION galaxies, that is, if the universe is finite and we're not just limited by the time it takes light to travel and our position in space. And each star has planets, or most. That is an absurd number of potential chances for life. Even if it's extremely rare, one per galaxy, that would mean there are perhaps 200 billion advanced civilizations in existence.

Sorry vastness I'll answer your actual questions later. I just get annoyed at the Fermi paradox because of how it gets used, and because of how Fermi himself came to the short-sighted conclusion that we must be alone after only peering 30 light years away.

 

[Vastness]

Thanks for responding and no problem, I am happy to respond to just a few of your points although I would like to avoid (if possible ) getting too bogged down in anything that Fermi himself thought. I haven't looked into that specifically or I just can't remember either way but I don't think it's directly relevant. I would however very much like to be able to show everyone why I personally think this is such a fascinating topic, and make sure that everyone understands the key points of what I am getting at!

The Fermi Paradox, to be clear is not itself a reason for anything, because it's not an explanation, or an answer - it's a question. I'll simplify the question a little to include just our own galaxy, purely for expediency and simplicity - the question says:

• "if intelligent life has arisen in our galaxy more than once, and..."
• "if intelligent life eventually results in a species capable of interstellar travel, and..."
• "if species capable of individual travel would generally try to spread themselves as far as they are able..."
• "if it's feasible that they would be able to colonise the entire galaxy, and...."
• "if we are not ourselves the first such civilisation to arise within our light cone*..."
• "then where are all the alien civilisations?"

Obviously there are a good few "ifs" there, and within each of these "if" clauses is a potential solution to the paradox - if any of the above "ifs" are not true, then there is no paradox! But if they all are true - then there is a paradox.

*I tried to address your comments about the speed of light in the post above by use of the term "light cone" rather than the objective present, which is typically used in relativity to demonstrate why faster than light travel would permit time travel effects.

For anyone not familiar with what a light cone is, this probably requires a little more explanation...



I think the diagram above indicates it fairly well, but just to clarify.... a light cone is a "cone" that exists not in space, but in time, and can be thought of as the "relative present" of a given observer. We can only ever see what is within our light cone. When we look at galaxies hundreds of thousands of light years away, they are all within our light cone, but of course the outer regions of this cone are hundreds of thousands of years in the past. The region labelled "HYPERSURFACE OF THE PRESENT" above, can be considered to be the objective present. A species that evolves concurrently to us but say, a couple thousand light years away, would not be within our light cone yet, so of course while they may be highly advanced and emitting all kinds of obviously artificial radio frequencies, we would not be able to see them. However for the purposes of discussion of what we can observe, to avoid getting too bogged down in speed of light considerations, it's more helpful to think not of the "objective present" but of things that exist within our light cone.

If a species that evolved on the other side of our galaxy, say roughly 100000 light years away, IIRC, developed advanced, radio frequency emitting technology roughly 100000 years ago, then we would, presumably, have been able to see them as soon as we switched our own deep space radio receivers on. Of course we would be looking at ancient history at that point, and there would be no way to tell if this species had survived to the present day, and no way to actually communicate with them. But 100000 years is a fairly small chunk of time, cosmologically speaking, so we would expect, potentially, other species to have arisen even earlier - the fact that we do not see the ancient emission of emitting civilisations means, without inferring anything else from this fact, that civilisations which emit large amounts of detectable radio frequencies such as we would expect based on our own current knowledge of what a high tech civilisation should look like, do not arise often enough for us to have detected them yet.

This is a self evident truth of course - so I have bolded it for emphasis - but as I see it there's a lot of room within this truth for fascinating discussion (or at least, I find it so ).

Possibly such civilisations that arise just do not emit for very long - either because they go extinct (why? how? which Great Filters that we have yet to encounter are involved?) or because they move on to a different kind of low-emission technology with far more targeted communications and far less energy leak via infra-red. The former kind of low emission technology of course is plausible - but the latter, from what we know of physics today, seems less so, since if aliens would continue to use high energy propulsive drive technologies to get around or engage in any kind of mega-engineering projects, then we should still see the signature of their waste heat in the infra-red - which we do not. This could of course be an indicator more of our incomplete understanding of physics and the possibilities of truly advanced science, rather than an indicator that such high tech civilisations just do not exist - and if so, this is yet another solution to the paradox.

Besides just emissions however, there is also the issue of the expected colonisation of the galaxy, which, again, within our light cone, rather than the objective present, does not seem to have transpired. Aliens have not begun to terraform Mars, for example, and we do not see any evidence of a Dyson Sphere being assembled around Alpha Centauri - unless they are taking extreme efforts to hide themselves - or, perhaps, we exist in a galactic backwater of sorts that these hypothetical low-emission but still highly expansionist aliens are just not interested in. If this is the case however, again, it's unclear why. I could propose a few possible solutions - perhaps we exist too far out in the rim, and resources are considered too sparse, compared to the energy and matter dense regions closer to the core where energy hungry spacefaring civilisations tend to migrate. But this, IMO, is another point highly worthy of discussion!

To clarify, again, of course the discussion at hand assumes that intelligent, spacefaring aliens resilient to extinction are highly expansionist with a drive and desire to colonise the galaxy as well as still requiring technology which leaks detectable signals. This may be an unjust imposition of what we know about ourselves on the wider universe. Aliens may not typically be expansionist (although I would argue that to become a dominant and technologically capable species probably requires a certain expansionist drive, even if just in intellect and knowledge - which would, probably, translate to a physically expansionist wish to spread out and explore the unknown... but maybe it doesn't always). High emission tech may also be a relatively brief blip in the evolution of a technological species, which is usually unexpectedly overcome by, perhaps, the fortuitous discovery of high temperature superconductors or some kind of non-propulsive, or rather "reactionless" drive technology, after which such species become much harder to detect at distance. But if either of these things are the case, it's not clear at all why they should be the case based on what we know now - hence my proposed discussion!

I will note at this point, that even if life is very, very common in the universe but mostly undetectable for one of the reasons I mentioned, or another reason entirely, and the Fermi Paradox itself is thus invalid - this does not make this entire proposed discussion of "Great Filters" moot, since presumably there are still challenges and filters in play - they just have less overall impact, or are less "Great" than we might currently imagine.

But I would argue that considering where these filters might be is of prime importance for the future of our own species, since no matter the likelihood of them wiping us out, or any of our as yet unseen cosmic neighbours, we still need to be ready to deal with them.

I hope that I have been clear here and that I have cleared up any uncertainty anyone might have about the topic at hand, and made clear why I think it's such fertile ground for interesting debate.

 

[Vastness]

LOL, it occurs to me that in my efforts to make this topic "simpler" I might have in fact done the opposite and overcomplicated it a little...

The Fermi Paradox itself is probably not actually important to the topic, since it's really just about barriers to becoming a technologically capable, spacefaring species capable of establishing a stable civilisation that last on cosmological timescales, so for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. This can probably be talked about without reference to Fermi or his ideas directly, it's just the case that terms like "Great Filters" typically follow from discussion about the supposed paradox... maybe this thread could do with a renaming...

 

[Cheshire_Kat]

Naw, the other civilizations are not acknowledging us because to them we are like we're mud wasps or ants.

Now where did I put my "Black Flag" spray, those pesky humans are back, LOL !

 

[Vastness]

LOL, that may well be the case... but, if that is the case... how did they get to that point from their own alien mud wasp evolutionary starting point? And how many such civilisations have failed along the way?

Obviously, I guess, many unknowable methods, and many unknowable reasons... starting to think maybe this thread was a bit ambitious...

 

[Xorkoth]

Besides just emissions however, there is also the issue of the expected colonisation of the galaxy, which, again, within our light cone, rather than the objective present, does not seem to have transpired. Aliens have not begun to terraform Mars, for example, and we do not see any evidence of a Dyson Sphere being assembled around Alpha Centauri - unless they are taking extreme efforts to hide themselves - or, perhaps, we exist in a galactic backwater of sorts that these hypothetical low-emission but still highly expansionist aliens are just not interested in. If this is the case however, again, it's unclear why. I could propose a few possible solutions - perhaps we exist too far out in the rim, and resources are considered too sparse, compared to the energy and matter dense regions closer to the core where energy hungry spacefaring civilisations tend to migrate. But this, IMO, is another point highly worthy of discussion!

Of course, at the same time, aliens not terraforming Mars hardly says anything, really, when there are hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy. We could be immensely desirable, but just explored. Even with instant travel, it would take a very, very long time to try out all the different places one could look.

And of course, faster than light travel could easily be impossible, in which case, the likelihood of ever being visited is very slim. It would require a commitment of many, many, many years to get anywhere beyond our nearest neighbors, even at the speed of light (and it would be slower to some extent). Hundreds or thousands of years.

High emission tech may also be a relatively brief blip in the evolution of a technological species, which is usually unexpectedly overcome by, perhaps, the fortuitous discovery of high temperature superconductors or some kind of non-propulsive, or rather "reactionless" drive technology, after which such species become much harder to detect at distance.

Right, we don't really even know what to look for. We don't even close to have the technology to be able to detect much of anything about exoplanets right now, other than that they exist, and the relative makeup of their atmospheres. We could be staring at inhabited planets and have no idea. When the way you detect planets is by the amount of minute dimming of the light from a star, you have to accept you are very nearly blind.

Also, all of this totally disregards other galaxies, which are so impossibly far away (even the nearest) that we have no hope, as things stand, of any sort of perception that is even remotely as detailed as our own galaxy to us. The chances of life traveling between galaxies or even being able to tell if there is life in other galaxies seems a much less likely proposition.

 

[Vastness]

Of course, at the same time, aliens not terraforming Mars hardly says anything, really, when there are hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy. We could be immensely desirable, but just explored. Even with instant travel, it would take a very, very long time to try out all the different places one could look.

And of course, faster than light travel could easily be impossible, in which case, the likelihood of ever being visited is very slim. It would require a commitment of many, many, many years to get anywhere beyond our nearest neighbors, even at the speed of light (and it would be slower to some extent). Hundreds or thousands of years.

True, it would take a very long time to colonise the entire galaxy - but then, the universe has been for a while! That said, as I mentioned in another thread I think the universe in many ways is actually a lot younger than it seems and it's quite possible that interstellar colonisation is just a far slower process than some of us assume...

We can make rough guesses at the speed of an "expansion front" so to speak, like if a species is capable of building ships that can travel at 0.2c (not too out there), and spend about half as much time settling, multiplying and building as they do travelling, then they would presumably spread out through the galaxy at a rate of about 0.1c, and should therefore have some presence across the entire galactic disk in just over a million years. But maybe this is too simplistic and the process of settlement, negative impact of cultural drift or unexpected disasters, slows them down.

But yeah, I generally assume for the purposes of this discussion that faster than light travel is likely to remain impossible - if it is possible, everything changes - but this should not be an absolute necessity to establish a space-faring civilisation.

I would generally agree also that intergalactic travel is probably not possible, or at least, so impractical as to be effectively impossible... although, in the entire mindbogglingly vast volume of the observable universe and the trillions of galaxies within it, perhaps there is some small corner, where the light won't reach us for tens of billions of years, where some enterprising aliens who've just won the cosmic lottery in terms of favourable conditions and luck being on their side, have reached the point where the first few intergalactic colony ships are setting sail, so to speak...

To be clear, I absolutely think that alien life in the entire volume of the universe is highly likely, it would be really strange if we were absolutely alone. Obviously also the aforementioned paradox is not a real paradox, there are many quite sensible reasons why alien civilisations should exist but just not come into contact with us yet, and maybe never will. But I think this stuff is interesting to speculate about and directly affects our own future. Another interesting question, perhaps, would be "what will the galaxy (or the universe) look like in 50 trillion years?" :D This is the halfway point of the "Stelliferous Era" before new stars stop forming. The universe would be heavy-element rich, possibly facilitating the far easier emergence of far more complex chemistry like that that might give rise to biological life - and this would be a trend that had continued for eons. Almost every planet would be metal rich, so life that did arise would have a far better shot at developing technology. Those technological civilisations that had arisen already, even if it would take a billion years to colonise a single galaxy, would have had enough time to colonise thousands of galaxies, were they so inclined. By this point however, in fact far earlier, there would be no hope of ever reaching another galaxy because they would all be accelerating away at several times the speed of light from the expansion of the universe. I'm not sure if they would even be visible at this point.

That's assuming current open cosmological models are at least somewhat correct and the expansion of the universe will continue, it's not out of the question that our understanding of the cosmos could be fatally flawed and we'd be looking at a "Big Crunch" scenario in a far shorter time.

I think I've kind of diverged from my own topic just to talk about stuff I find interesting now, I guess it was always gonna be a bit vague though.

 

[Foreigner]

Paranormal research answers a lot of these questions for me.

If material based life is rare and non-material based consciousness is the norm, then the universe is teeming with life that we can't see.

Things like astral projection... in that state, there are no time-space limitations. You can be anywhere you want to be, instantaneously.

I know it may sound farfetched to those who haven't experienced any of this, but for the sake of argument, what if it's true? We are looking at the universe through a very limited lens, thinking about traveling the stars through physical, mechanical means. Meanwhile there may be other more efficient faculties of our own consciousness that would be better for these explorations.

 

[Vastness]

Wouldn't rule that out - although, IMO, the question remains relevant because assuming we aren't the ONLY materially incarnate and somewhat developed world of conscious beings, there must be others with the same "problem", so to speak - and the same potential for establishing the type of civilisations under discussion, provided their own circumstances allow for it.

I believe I asked you this before in another thread - is astral projection something you yourself have experience with? For purposes of discussion, if so, have you ever tried to set up an experiment to test how closely your perceived "astral" reality matches the apparent physical one? Would be very interested to hear.

 

[Foreigner]

Speaking to the conversation already happening, I think humanity's main limitations are all 100% social. We have deprioritized spirit in favour of technology, and so we have forgotten our true nature. Without insight and a held awareness of true nature, we will constantly look to the external for guidance, and the external can mislead us. Without the core referent I'm talking about, faith in technology will prove folly.

I'm really hoping fusion becomes viable in the next 40-50 years, along with sufficient automation to render the need for employment obsolete. The problem is that the ruling class hate the lower classes, truly. They don't want us to have what they have, and this is the crux of the problem. If we don't enter a space age together as a unified species, then I just don't see it happening. It will be a house of cards. How can we sustain a space faring civilization if there are rebellions on Earth?

Also, there is little evidence that humans can survive long-term in space. We are (imperfectly) adapted to Earthly living. Our technology is clunky and fragile, suited to very high specificity without much room for altered parameters. The strides that we'd have to make in advancements would really require us to quell all social inequities on Earth, because then we could divert all our energy and resources to our elevation. Hard to do that when you're also spending resources on war (the root of which is mostly about resources), rebellions, poor people who can't provide for themselves, and you're constantly fighting the machinations and agendas of other humans.

There has to be a unified front. There has to be. Maybe in 200 years or so.

Wouldn't rule that out - although, IMO, the question remains relevant because assuming we aren't the ONLY materially incarnate and somewhat developed world of conscious beings, there must be others with the same "problem", so to speak - and the same potential for establishing the type of civilisations under discussion, provided their own circumstances allow for it.

I believe I asked you this before in another thread - is astral projection something you yourself have experience with? For purposes of discussion, if so, have you ever tried to set up an experiment to test how closely your perceived "astral" reality matches the apparent physical one? Would be very interested to hear.

I don't really want to hijack this thread with a lot of esoteric discussion because what people are talking about is already so good. But basically... yes, I have experienced the astral many times, directly. It has many permutations. If your astral form remains close to the physical plane - which is higher density, and where a lot of people start out because they can't quite cope with being separate from a body - then you will just be looking at the room and surroundings that your body is in. If you elevate your energy state, you can enter various exotic planes inhabited by various life forms. The energy state gets elevated through unconscious control of the body, i.e. doing kundalini type work.

I would love to see the day when humanity is spiritually awakened, such that people are taught how to do this and we explore "space" through so-called spiritual means, just as we use technology to do.

 

[Xorkoth]

China doesn't need the one child policy anymore because they are implementing the social credit system. If you get a low social credit score, then you won't be able to function in society, and raising a family would be impossible. Their social credit system will ensure an even higher level of conformity and less resistance. To me, this is far more frightening than the one child policy ever was. They really are about to become 1984 over there.

Yeah, it's terrifying, there is a really good Black Mirror episode about a possible future where there is a social credit system attached to whatever Facebook-like entity has managed to control their lives. Very dystopian.

Hard to do that when you're also spending resources on war (the root of which is mostly about resources), rebellions, poor people who can't provide for themselves, and you're constantly fighting the machinations and agendas of other humans.

By an overwhelming margin, the vast majority of the entire GDP is spent on defense spending. Even a modest decrease in percentage would provide the money necessary for these basic social services that we should have. And we'd still have the strongest military by a large margin over everyone else.

I would love to see the day when humanity is spiritually awakened, such that people are taught how to do this and we explore "space" through so-called spiritual means, just as we use technology to do.

Back in 2006 when I was substantially more starry-eyed, I believed with my whole heart that on December 21st, 2012, humanity would ascend into this ideal state that you describe.