What exactly is the “Great Filter” theory, and how does it work?
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Some people said the universe is so gigantic with so many places, there should be a lot of other intelligent civilizations.
Then some other people critiqued this by saying “ok, if there are so many places, where are all these proposed civilizations, why is nobody here to greet us?”
Then some other people again tried to reconcile this by proposing a “great filter”: Every civilization which has obtained technology to just go into space but hasn’t spread out into it yet, could use this technological might to destroy its home planet.
The great filter is now that maybe overcoming this obstacle – to spread into space before you destroy yourself into oblivion – is universally for all lifeforms quite insurmountable.
Thus you can have many places where apes develop, and as soon as they have nukes and/or climate change sets in, they extinct themselves, so that none of these every visited us as they don’t make it to flying a starship Enterprise.
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