The Great Filter Comes For Us All

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?

(Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additiona…

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With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now? (Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of Your Life novella it was based on for so much additional nuance.) This is called the Fermi paradox: To me, this is a compelling argument, in the same way that the lack of evidence of any time travellers is: It seems, to me at least, clear evidence that time travel is not possible, given the enormous amount of time behind us. Something, somewhere, would certainly have invented it by now… right? So if not, what happened? The Great Filter maybe? I liked Wait But Why’s take on this a lot, which covers three main filter possibilities: Those are three Great Filter possibilities, but the question remains: why are we so alone in the observable universe? I grant you that what we can observe is appallingly tiny given the unimaginable scale of the universe, so “what we can observe” may not be enough by many orders of magnitude. I encourage you to read the entire article, it’s full of great ideas explained well, including many other Great Filter possibilites. Mostly I wanted to share my personal theory of why we haven’t encountered alien life by now. Like computers themselves, things don’t get larger. They get smaller. And faster. And so does intelligent life. Large is inefficient and unnecessary. Look at the history of computers: from giant to tiny and tinier. From slow to fast and faster. Personally, I have a feeling really advanced life eventually does away with all physical stuff that slows you down as soon as they can, and enters the infinite spaces between: Seth delivers an excellent TED talk on this topic as well: If we can barely see far in the universe as is, there’s no way we could possibly see into the infinite space and time between. That is of course just my opinion, but we’ll see.. eventually. Indoor enthusiast. Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Disclaimer: I have no idea what I’m talking about. Find me here: https://infosec.exchange/@codinghorror Coding Horror has been continuously published since 2004

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