Judging by the mostly abominable grammar, spelling, and thought construction seen in these comments, I believe that I know the nature of the "Great Filter". That would be ipods, blue/black/rasberries and all those modern and popular handheld devices that so efficiently destroy our language while siphoning off our technology for the sake of communication 'toys'. Simply, if "You cannot say what you mean, then you cannot mean what you say". Quote from Babylon 5. Here, after a thoughtfull and excellently edited article I see a vast lack of comprehension or willingness to consider, and a vast excess of vociferous hyper-opinionation which, if anything, confirms the original thesis. Technology, perhaps, hands us first the means to destroy our language and personal communication, and then might hand our similarly disenfranchised a means of commiting the same violence to our physical planet. Of course, not without first offering bloggs and arguments. Personally, as a Geologist, I see nothing wrong with the author's theories except where it might conflict with my own baggage of hopes and dreams. We have a data set of exactly ONE for the study of sentient beings--ourselves--and that would be an easier study were we to also study a common language!
I see nothing wrong his opinions; everyone is entitled to opinions.
I see something wrong with his presentation of the facts, and the wild, baseless conclusions he draws from them.
Some of the statements he makes consist of nothing more than vague generalizations and assumptions and the supposition that conclusions can be drawn from such meaningless statements.
He makes sweeping assumptions and doesn't qualify them at all.
For example: The evolution of Homo sapiens from our recent hominid ancestors, such as Homo erectus, happened rather quickly on the geological timescale, so these steps would be relatively weak candidates for a Great Filter.
The fact that the evolution of Homo Sapiens occurred quickly with regards to earlier Hominid ancestors doesn't make it a "weak candidate" for such a filter; the author is making a gross error in logic. The rapid evolution in the complexity of Hominids may have very well been a foregone conclusion once a creature like the first Hominid ancestor existed; the point is that in the 4.5 billion year history of Earth, there was NO other creature like the Australopithecines, and no similar creature ever independently evolved on any other continent or any other region in the world beyond the mixed grasslands of Africa.
It seems remarkably ignorant to disregard the evolution of Homo Sapiens the way he does when he's obviously ignoring the fact that in hundreds of millions of years of complex multicellular life in all environments, no similar creature ever evolved and that the Hominid line evolved from one branch in one very specific place in one very specific era.
Throughout the article he uses unrelated and unsupporting facts to qualify conclusions that aren't actually directly supported or necessarily even related to the facts he's just recited.
He concludes that the evolution of Homo Sapiens from Hominids can't be the "Great Filter" because the transition happened fairly quickly, but he blatantly disregards the obvious fact that of the countless examples of animal organisms that have independently evolved on this planet, no organism outside of the Great Apes bears any strong similarity to Australopithecus or Homo themselves.
Indeed, for hundreds of millions of years the Earth was dominated by giant, small-brained Dinosaurs on land and primitive organisms like Jellyfish in the ocean; what exactly makes him so certain that Hominid evolution isn't the "Filter" he claims must exist??
That's my point; he provides no basis to qualify his flimsy conclusion.
This is the biggest problem I have with the article. It seems to conveniently give very short thrift the most likely "filter" that we have direct evidence for: the evolution of intelligence at a human level. Using known elapsed time for various evolutionary changes, this would seem to be by far the most improbable. This is especially true when one looks at how large land masses were isolated from one another for up to 100 million years, and yet we didn't see concurrent evolution towards this type of intelligence on them.
The article was interesting. Unfortunately the author's conclusion regarding hoping against finding evidence of life on other planets seems to be chosen before all the premises were examined.
Why is it that internet grammar and spelling mavens always spell words incorrectly in their dismissal of others?
Thoughtful
Committing
Blog
That said, while the article did have some flaws which have been rightly pointed out, I also found it mostly well reasoned. Yes I think the author was too quick to assume absence of evidence is probable evidence of absence. Yes I suspect he is slightly misinformed on exactly what tools SETI employs (as was I to be honest), but such is nit-picking. The central theme that a number of significant obstacles exist for a species to overcome before it can explore the stars is certainly true. It's also true that if we assume a large number of intelligent species do exist simply because there is an almost infinite number of places where they could, then the relative difficulty in finding them does imply that such species also may meet their doom with depressing frequency before they can communicate on an interstellar level. It's implication only rather than proof of course, and to me at least the time frames involved make species extinction probable regardless of any capitalized "Filter" that would cause me any worry.
Advanced civilisations will be capable of great subtlety, and there's no reason why they couldn't explore the whole galaxy without leaving a trace visible to us. As to why no one has yet chosen to make contact with us, we've only recently become culturally prepared even to grasp the concept of extraterrestrial life. We might easily be a thousand years or more away from being -- in the opinion of the closest non-humans -- mature enough to be contacted without being harmed; we might view such caution as frustratingly excessive, but they would certainly have no reason to be in any great hurry to initiate a dialogue.
On top of these factors, it might simply be that the closest outpost to us is a few hundred light years away, in which case even the news that we've developed rudimentary interplanetary flight and made, umm, lots of mature, perceptive and welcoming movies about alien life, will still be en route.
>The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence
>SETI) has been going for nearly half a century,
>employing increasingly powerful telescopes and
>data-mining techniques; so far, it has consistently
>corroborated the null hypothesis. As best we have
>been able to determine, the night sky is empty and silent.
To Nick Bostrom:
Please read "Three SETI Myths" to understand that you are not right:
One kind of Great Filters is not mentioned here is a chance that we significantly underestimate the probability of cosmic catastrophes, e.g. gamma-bursts. Such burst could clean all Solar System, so life on Mars will not tell us anything about the probability of gamma bursts.
But of course, the absense of extraterestils is a bad sign. But thir existence also will be bad in terms of probability of our survival. So both cases are bad.
I mean that passive SETI is extremaly dangerous activity, because if we find any signal there are great chanses that they be virus-style signals. I mean they will be a suggestion to create a computer programm which will eventually occur AI and use our civilization to send it furher. It is good statistical reason to expect that most of detectable signals will be of this kind and that people will run the prigramm.
See in details here: Is SETI dangerous? http://www.proza.ru/texts/2008/04/12/55.html
If we met ourselves as we were 10,000 years ago what would we do, attempt communication, technically assist, observe, exploit, or what? Given today’s exponential (or at least much faster) rate of knowledge acquisition and technical advances, in 10,000 years time if we met ourselves as we are today what would we do? Perhaps all civilisations ahead of us by a few thousand years are just no longer interested at our level and their forms of communication are not observable or recognisable to us. Those more than 100 years behind us simply do not have the technology. There could be a very narrow time window of overlap for the necessary communication motivation to exist.
Who knows, perhaps the filter ahead is not a doom scenario as the article implies. Perhaps the killer discovery that all civilisations eventually hit, is that they can transcend into say pure n-dimensional intelligent energy and have no common ground with us. Probably pure rubbish I admit... but is it an equally viable theory?
I believe the entire premise of the discussion is that Evolution is true. Where there has been no truthful evidence to support it. So the entire discussion fails to stimulate any reasonable thought since it is based on a faulty and false theory…
Unfortunately, you are making some presuppositions yourself. Specifically, you are assuming that lack of evidence means that something is false. It is entirely plausible that something can be both true and lacking in evidence. Also note that evolution speaks nothing about the origin of life, but simply how it changes over time.
There is in fact some (not much, but some) evidence to support this. The evidence is that mutations do occur, we have observed them in simpler organisms such as bacteria. The second piece of evidence is that it is trivially true that some species are better suited for there environment than others, simply put, some species are just more resilient than others (i've seen fish that survive in water that is pretty much a pool of mud, but not all fish do. Given these 2 facts, it is possible (not 100% likely, but possible) that given enough time, a mutation could occur to improve the survivability of a species. You are correct that this is yet to proven to be true, but it is not beyond reason that it COULD be true.
Also note that ALL theories about the origin of life have yet to be proven (sorry bible and similar text doesn't count since the origin of these is unprovable. They might be the word of god, but they might not be). If any theories were proven to be true, there would be little to no debate on the subject, but as it stands, there is MUCH debate.
Please don't think that I am trying to say "I'm right and you are wrong", more importantly, I am trying to say that noone actually knows with good supporting evidence what the truth is beyond any doubt.
I certainly have an appreciation for faith, in fact, if I read in the newspaper tomorrow that the existance of god has been proven without any shadow of a doubt...I'd be a very happy person, it would bring more meaning to most people's lives and likely make the world a better place.
But at the same time it is important to be open to all of the possibilities out there, if we aren't then we are only limiting the discoveries we can make.
Actually there is plenty of evidence. But even if there wasn't, isn't assuming that something is false becasue there is no proof well... against the radical christian beliefs that all the oppositors to the theory of evolution seem to share?
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
kitk
55
Word Filter
That would be ipods, blue/black/rasberries and all those modern and popular handheld devices that so efficiently destroy our language while siphoning off our technology for the sake of communication 'toys'.
Simply, if "You cannot say what you mean, then you cannot mean what you say". Quote from Babylon 5. Here, after a thoughtfull and excellently edited article I see a vast lack of comprehension or willingness to consider, and a vast excess of vociferous hyper-opinionation which, if anything, confirms the original thesis. Technology, perhaps, hands us first the means to destroy our language and personal communication, and then might hand our similarly disenfranchised a means of commiting the same violence to our physical planet. Of course, not without first offering bloggs and arguments.
Personally, as a Geologist, I see nothing wrong with the author's theories except where it might conflict with my own baggage of hopes and dreams. We have a data set of exactly ONE for the study of sentient beings--ourselves--and that would be an easier study were we to also study a common language!