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Aliens: What is ‘The Great Filter’?
When we look into the vastness of space in search of advanced civilisations, we find nothing. We are the only civilisation we can be sure we’ve found and, let’s be honest, it was pretty easy to find ourselves. Other species, however, have proven more elusive.
In my previous post, I discussed why it is likely that we should have seen aliens. Yet, we don’t seem to see anything. Just dead space: planets, stars, galaxies all doing things that we’d expect them to do if left to their own devices. In a universe full of life, we would expect to see alien signals, Dyson swarms dimming nearby stars in peculiar ways, remnants of ancient alien probes from millions of years ago scattered across the Earth, moon and solar system.
But there’s nothing.
The fact we are met with silence when we look up suggests there exists a great filter— a mysterious force that prevents alien life, so far, from reaching us.
As I mentioned last time, a good place to start (although admittedly not if you’re having a bad day) is to remind ourselves that we’re not special. This is sometimes called the principle of mediocrity. Hence, we can argue that everything we have achieved up until now should be a good average of what species in our universe have also achieved.
