hucktard t1_jaclrbn wrote on February 28, 2023 at 1:55 PM

There is no great filter. There is a multitude of smaller filters. The universe is just extremely dangerous and so the likely hood of technological civilizations living long enough to become interstellar is very very low. People like to oversimplify things. There is not one thing that can kill our civilization, there are many. Asteroids and comets, giant solar flares, AI, viruses, nuclear war, gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes etc. these are just the things we know about that could send us back to the Stone Age. The chance of one of these things crippling civilization in the next thousand years is pretty high. Then it might take us 5000 years to rebuild civilization. It is just so unlikely that single celled organisms will evolve to become an interstellar species. It might happen once per galaxy, and probably only in galaxies that are suitable.

TropicalRaine t1_jad103o wrote on February 28, 2023 at 3:43 PM

Ok but eventually you will have an intersection of many filters that cannot occur so often. This can be called a great filter due to both its magnitude and rarity. In order for civilizations to progress we would need to overcome these filters. You can go further with this idea that among these great filters there are even greater filters that occur, until finally you use the time scale of the universe and conclude with a “greatest filter”.