{"id":3029,"date":"2008-06-24T19:22:22","date_gmt":"2008-06-25T00:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3029"},"modified":"2008-06-24T19:22:59","modified_gmt":"2008-06-25T00:22:59","slug":"the-great-filter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3029","title":{"rendered":"The Great Filter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Want to know why Nick Bostrom is “hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look”? Well then, read on<\/a>.<\/font><\/p>\n

It’s an interesting idea, this Great Filter (or what Chris McLaren, who posted about this way back in May<\/a>, calls the “Doom Constant”), and it’s one full of scary implications for the survival of the human species. Bostrom suggests that if the emergence of intelligent life in the universe is not itself a rare event, then we surely have to wonder why none of it has been in contact with us. Is there a cataclysmic event waiting to kill off all advanced species, or have we already crossed that threshold and beaten the odds?<\/font><\/p>\n

As McLaren notes, Bostrom “never gets near the possibility that the ‘Great Filter’ might actually be intelligent, outside action, rather than a self-destructive tendency.” (Having recently read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space<\/em>, I can totally get behind that idea.) But he also doesn’t get too close to the possibility that maybe advanced alien cultures have<\/em> been in contact — not through alien abduction or even radio waves, but in exactly what Bostrom calls the likeliest method of space colonization.<\/font><\/p>\n

“Even if [the aliens] failed a thousand times before they succeeded,” he writes, “they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.”<\/font><\/p>\n

My question is this: how do we know they didn’t? If “so-called von Neumann probes<\/a>” indeed are the most likely means of colonizing other planets, how do we know they didn’t already colonize Earth? Maybe some species here — maybe humans, maybe even all life — is a direct descendant of that first probe. <\/font><\/p>\n

Granted, this kind of exogenesis might not factor into Bostrom’s thinking at all, even if there was anything like credible evidence to support it. Regardless of where life on this planet began, the probability, one way or another of it, ending is of definite concern. But as a fan of science fiction, as someone who can’t help but wonder the “what if,” it’s an interesting thought.<\/font><\/p>\n

And when you add in this<\/a> (via Warren Ellis<\/a>)…
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

Molecular “robots” have been developed by chemists to explore the unmapped chemical environments of living cells and transmit back the results.<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…well, it just opens up all sorts of interesting scenarios…<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Want to know why Nick Bostrom is “hoping that our space probes will discover dead rocks and lifeless sands on Mars, on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and everywhere else our astronomers look”? Well then, read on. It’s an interesting idea, this Great Filter (or what Chris McLaren, who posted about this way back in May, calls … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-3029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}