I believe there is a fundamental flaw in the way we humans identify "life" and what it takes to make it happen. We identify life as something only contained in what we think of as living organisms. But these machines we identify as organisms are still made up of the same stuff we see all around us. There is nothing unique about it at the atomic level. It's all the same and it's all interconnected because energy and matter are the same. And therefore life can't be spontaneously created in a lab based on the notion of creating something from nothing. That is impossible. The life (or energy to create the organism) is already there, it just has to be manifested into what we identify as an organism. That's the part we don't understand yet. Organisms are manifested by the universal conscience for whatever unknown reason. So it doesn't spontaneously happen in the way science attempts to understand it, i.e. the right conditions, how close we are to the sun, etc.
Even though you perceive your body as separate and independent from everything else it's not because matter=energy and energy permeates everything because it is everything. It is not separate. With that understanding I think it is easy to see how a living organism is created. It is created through the consciousness of the Universe. We are all a part of that consciousness. When an organism dies, this is just the machine that stops functioning. The energy of that organism still exists afterwards. It has always existed, it doesn't just disappear. That is impossible.
So the fact that we haven't found other intelligent life in the Universe doesn't mean it's not there. It's all around us, we just aren't looking for it in the right way. We're only looking for it in the way we know how. This argument that it's better we haven't found other life is nonsense. All that does is keep our mentality at the primitive level is currently is.
I am amazed that none of the comments in here has picked up on a simple factual error. I can only assume that this failure results from the usual uncritical "natural selection does everything" position most people seem to default to these days.
Ask yourself a simple question: what got us from throwing rocks at one another and going "ungh" to supercolliders and space probes? Was it biological evolution?
No. Progress towards deep space travel has not been made via a single iota of genetic evolution, it has been made via massive cultural evolution. We therefore have absolutely no evidence to suggest that biology can be responsible for the kind of sweeping new technologies that are needed for space colonization.
In short, the Great Filter must be something that prevents societies from evolving to a sufficient technological level, not something cataclysmic and environmental.
Could it be that life's inherent tendency to colonize and exploit (noted in the article) is ITSELF the massive barrier that stands in the way of this kind of cultural evolution? Any answer is going to be speculative (and largely rooted in philosophical positions, I think) but the bottom line is that THIS is the sort of Filter we should be looking for, by the author's own logic.
We exist in a thin film on the surface of a rock, burning dead goop, scratching at the back surface of intelligence. The author is less, comparable to a microbe, smeared on the the presupposed "filter" by comments above.
The direction has bee made clear since the dawn of our intelligence, and if that has happened, although some highly contest it, our progress seems to have been stalled in our doom of confusion within ourselves for a long time.
I loved this article - it sure made me think. I guess I am an optimist first - because I can hope that the Great Filter is behind us and still hope that life once existed on Mars. I believe that if life is proven to have existed on Mars, maybe it ended because Mars cooled down too much (I know - the optimist in me). Who cares why it ended, because it existed!! Maybe Earth life began as the baby offshoots from life on Mars - or as the offshoots from somewhere else. Maybe when it is time for the Earth to shut down due to cold (or because of anything else) - we will send off baby shoots to Venus (or another planet in another solar system). I WANT there to be intelligent life somewhere else. With the odds of 100 billion galaxies and 100 billion stars on each, I just can't fathom us being the only ones to ever exist. Even if the odds are that only 1 in 100 billion stars produces the conditions for intelligent life, there are, were or will be 100 billion more intelligent lifeforms out there. I can accept the possibility of never meeting anyone else - but not the possibility that 'they' still aren't out there. Part of being intelligent is excepting the possibility of more beyond our own intelligence. Ants (as far as I know) do not contemplate the nature of their existence. Humans can, humans will - yesterday, today and tomorrow ...
As an optimist I find it comforting, scary, exciting and certain that there is someone or something else out there imagining me just as I imagine them. Filters come and filters go, but intelligence has and will always exist.
I'm really not convinced by the various gloom and doom deductive solutions to the Fermi-Paradox, such as the "Great Filter" discussed here. They rely too much upon debatable assumptions based on what I believe to be our extremely limited understanding of... well, everything.
For example, we assume that as a hypothetical civilization reaches a certain level of technology, they will naturally begin to expand outward into the Universe, methodically colonizing all the physical space of the Universe over galactic timescales. But what if instead of expanding outward, advanced civilizations instead expanded inward, creating new higher level universes? Futurist and System's Theorist John Smart ruminates on this idea with his Developmental Singularity Hypothesis.
I read Mr. Bostrom's article on why he hopes we do not find evidence of life off Earth. It was an amazingly long and convoluted attempt to rationalize and justify what I would term racial cowardice.
He wrote, "If the Great Filter is ahead of us, we must relinquish all hope of ever colonizing the galaxy..."
This statement would make sense if and only if you theorize that attempting to explore space is certain to force us up against what he calls the "Great Filter." It is logical ONLY if he believes that an attempt to move outward into space is certain to trigger some catastrophe that knocks us back into the Stone Age. Yet in the entire article, he provides not one tiny little iota of reason to believe that such is the case. In all that extremely long collection of opinion masquerading as science, he gives absolutely no evidence to support the proposition that attempting to go into space could be the reason of the human race's destruction.
I see no reason to believe such a thing is likely. He is, in effect, saying that we should be ready to abandon our attempts to explore space because of some theoretical concept that exists only in his fears. This is arrant nonsense.
He is also just plain dead wrong in one very important way. consider this passage from his article: "Consider the implications of discovering that life had evolved independently on Mars (or some other planet in our solar system). That discovery would suggest that the emergence of life is not very improbable."
First, there are NO statistics concerning the ratio of life emergences to the numbers of planets where life emergence is possible. In the absence of evidence, all theories are equally likely. Second, Considering the numbers of galaxies, and the numbers of stars in each galaxy, and the possible numbers of planets orbiting each star, even if it were proven that life emerged separately on both Earth and Mars, that would still mean that the ratio of emergences to stars is...what? One to one million googleplexes? That would be a probability of something like - what? 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001? Or lower. To me, that still sounds like something on the VERY close order of zero - something just one molecule's thickness away from totally improbable.
Here's my theory: Life emergence is so utterly improbable - it depends on such a HUGE number of factors each and every one being just exactly right - that the only way it is possible for life to emerge anywhere at all is to have so many possible emergence points that all possible combinations of those factors are provided. The reason there are so many galaxies and so many stars with so many planets is that it takes that many to actually create every possible combination of all the possible values of life-causing factors.
I believe we are very possibly alone in all the universe. But not because of some "Great Filter" that sounds more like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel than something from science. I believe we are alone because the number of factors that are necessary to create life is literally astronomically large.
If Mr. Bostrom wants to assume the role of an overly verbose scientific-sounding Chicken Little, he could at least have had the courtesy to make his skyfall rant shorter and easier to read.
Well crap, I accidentally deleted my post, so here is a short one.
"I believe we are very possibly alone in all the universe. But not because of some "Great Filter" that sounds more like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel than something from science. I believe we are alone because the number of factors that are necessary to create life is literally astronomically large."
That would be one of the filters! It'd be a relief to say that life as a whole is improbable, and our intelligence + drive to colonize space is not improbable, rather than to say life is likely (as finding out it arose twice in the same solar system - once on earth and once on mars would hint) but advanced civilizations are not. This would give us hope that the filter is behind us not ahead of us.
I haven't seen this mentioned here so far, but maybe we're looking right at what we're not seeing. We're searching through hundreds of billions of galaxies, stars, and planets. Their compositions, origins, emissions, and histories are still overwhelmingly unknown to us. And here we are, arguing about why there are no signs of intelligent life anywhere in the universe.
Maybe those galaxies, stars, and planets ARE the intelligent life. Mars may seem like a barren rock from the viewpoint of a little robotic rover, but what if the planet itself is a lifeform that is vastly more advanced than we are? Look at the incredible complexity of our own Earth. We're only beginning to understand how it works and what it's doing underneath us. Isn't it rather narrow to be searching for intelligent life in the form of bugs under rocks on Mars, when these giant mysterious things are populating the universe, and we're even standing on one? They may be talking to us all the time, but we haven't figured out the language yet.
Could it be that, as our lifeform grows and matures, we eventually become the planets, stars and galaxies? We humans, along with all of the other biological stuff around us, could be just part of the growth and formation of the planet itself.
I don't understand why no one has raised the difficulty--even given the evolution of life, of intelligent life, and of sophisticated culture--of developing the delicate balance of entrepreneurial humanism that permits extraterrestrial communication or travel. There have been tens of thousands of sophisticated human cultures on the Earth (defining a "sophisticated human culture" as a group of people who have child-rearing practices allowing survival of the group and perpetuation of their child-rearing practices). But only one capable of traveling to the Moon or bouncing lasers off it. This happened within the Indo-European, Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman cultural thread, but it is only one of many thousands within that narrow thread, and there have been many, many other threads. It seems to me there could be billions upon billions of life-sustaining planets within our observable Universe, many with intelligence as highly evolved as dolphins or apes or parrots--or humans--and yet none which have evolved the delicate balance of emotional, philosophical, economic, and cognitive factors necessary to see, and reach, beyond their planets. It is perhaps easy to see why dolphins and parrots can't do it; it is not so easy to see why Hottentots, Incas, and Apaches couldn't do it. But they couldn't.
It takes a lot more than life--or intelligent life--even more than technologically sophisticated intelligent life. It has happened on Earth only once in tens or hundreds of thousands of tries--and perhaps even that was a very long shot. We don't know.
This is pretty much what I said in a post above. It's not as though science emerged in twenty different cultures on earth. It only emerged once, and it was a long process that could have been derailed anywhere along the line. It started in Greece, but if 300 Spartans hadn't sacrificed themselves at Thermopylae, it wouldn't have happened. If the Romans hadn't admired Greek culture, it wouldn't have happened. If the Church had succeeded in stopping the rise of the Copernican view, it might not have happened. Etc.
It took a long time to figure out exactly how to do science, and in addition there are always anti-science forces in every society, even our own, that will happily crush it, so the rise of science to the level we are at is very unlikely.
The case of the Muslims is interesting in this regard, for they were ahead of us a few centuries ago, but then the anti-science forces took over (led, I believe, by the philosopher al-Ghazali) and Islamic science was crushed. Fortunately for science, the West took up the burden, with amazing results.
When the Muslim world was a free and open society, Baghdad was indeed the center of the learned world. But the Muslims' fall from cultural leadership is not unique at all.
The Greeks went down the same tube, and this fall correlates with the rise of one of the most pernicious religious movements of all, namely Orthodox Christianity. It was good-bye to free speech and free inquiry, and Greece lost its leadership position forever.
The Roman Empire shows the same pattern too - when it was going down, fundamentalist Christianity was on the rise (...scary comparison to the USA, huh?...).
Thanks to MIT and all you contributors for providing such an amusing thread. But then, the MIT types were the ones who gave me the idea for a joke I've used for years when they started researching "artificial intelligence" in Kendall Square. My joke: "I'll believe in artificial intelligence when someone proves to me that natural intelligence exists." As I posted on the first day, this reminds me of religion, or perhaps philosophy: "How many theories on aliens can fit on the head of a pin." Did anyone notice that last summer the NY Times magazine ran cover stories on two successive weeks on why people believe in religion and why scientists believe in the 96% of the mass in the universe they can't detect? Faith-based amusement. Thanks!
monkey2008
1
Fundamental Flaw
Even though you perceive your body as separate and independent from everything else it's not because matter=energy and energy permeates everything because it is everything. It is not separate. With that understanding I think it is easy to see how a living organism is created. It is created through the consciousness of the Universe. We are all a part of that consciousness. When an organism dies, this is just the machine that stops functioning. The energy of that organism still exists afterwards. It has always existed, it doesn't just disappear. That is impossible.
So the fact that we haven't found other intelligent life in the Universe doesn't mean it's not there. It's all around us, we just aren't looking for it in the right way. We're only looking for it in the way we know how. This argument that it's better we haven't found other life is nonsense. All that does is keep our mentality at the primitive level is currently is.