Hello, I was doing some research about The Great Filter theory because it interests me. But there is something I can’t find answer to. So I hope you will help me clear my head with this. What would mean if some inteligent form of life visited us? Like bilion or more years old civilization from the other end of the galaxy. Would that mean that filter is in front of us or behind us? I can’t get my head around it..
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It would mean there is no filter.
Back in the early days of rockets, a bunch of scientists sat around talking about the possibility of alien life. Being nerds, they wanted aliens to be real. They shared their own predictions for how many alien civilizations there might be in the galaxy. Most of the people agreed that there were so many stars out there, and the universe was so old, that there basically *had to be* advanced civilizations out there.
This led to a question by physicist Enrico Fermi, who said “well then where is everybody?” This is known as the Fermi Paradox. It looks like there should be a bunch of life out there, and we should probably be able to detect some of it, but we don’t see anything.
One of the proposed solutions to this paradox is called the Great Filter, the idea that there’s some kind of barrier that prevents interstellar civilizations from arising. Maybe the filter is early (the creation of life is so rare it almost never happens, or maybe life is common but intelligence never develops), or maybe the filter is late (intelligence is common but people nuke each other to extinction as soon as they get nukes). Nobody knows which, if any, of these filters are correct.
If aliens show up tomorrow, it answers the Fermi Paradox. “Well then where is everybody?” The answer is “over there. The aliens are right over there.”
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