Curious to know thoughts on the so called Great Filter. Are there any technologies that are contraindicated to a species’ survival? Are there correlates of a Great Filter when it comes to persistence of an earthly cultures as well?
Yeah, it’s an important question. People commonly mention nuclear energy, radiowaves, and the release of greenhouse gases as possible Great Filters. But I don’t find myself compelled by the idea that those technologies universally, or even often, lead civilizations to destroy themselves. For that to be true, the Filter would need to be so overwhelming that pretty much any civilization in the Milky Way — after reaching that technological point — would self-destruct so rapidly and completely that they wouldn’t release any detectable signals. Otherwise, we would’ve heard from them. And that clearly doesn’t always happen: we’ve had nuclear weapons (the most commonly proposed filter) for 80 years, haven’t destroyed ourselves, and in the meantime have released tons of signals that could eventually be detected by other civs.
Maybe we’re an exception, but the default assumption has to be that we represent a pretty median case of a technologically advanced civilization. If we made it past the Filter long enough to produce a signal, then it presumably shouldn’t be that hard for a decent number of other civs to do the same. So it seems unlikely that a Great Filter is the reason we haven’t heard from anyone yet.
Putting aside Fermi Paradox stuff, though — I find it hard to picture that at least some technologies aren’t semi-regular harbingers of a species’ end. Aside from those mentioned above, one that comes to mind is the ability to easily make synthetic organisms. Perhaps it quickly becomes trivial for anyone to design a virus that is 100% lethal and hyper-contagious.
In terms of earthly cultures: no technologies per se come to mind, but I think certain beliefs are generally pretty bad for a group’s long-term survival. There are a number of cases where cultures almost self-destructed after witchcraft accusations. The Xhosa, for example — in the mid-19th century, some random prophet declared that an ongoing drought could only be fixed by slaughtering all the cattle in the kingdom and refraining from farming. Much of the population (including the king) went along with it, and the majority of the Xhosa starved to death as a result. In the other direction, Joe Henrich has argued that certain cultural institutions, like monogamy and the banning of cousin marriage, contributed heavily to the economic and technological rise of the West.
Interested in those cases of near-self-destruction through random cultural "deleterious mutations", if you have references! From searching a bit, the Xhosa case would be Nongqawuse?
Yep, that’s right! I read about it originally in Sick Societies by Rob Edgerton — outstanding book all about the subject of how cultural traits are often very maladaptive.
Curious to know thoughts on the so called Great Filter. Are there any technologies that are contraindicated to a species’ survival? Are there correlates of a Great Filter when it comes to persistence of an earthly cultures as well?
Yeah, it’s an important question. People commonly mention nuclear energy, radiowaves, and the release of greenhouse gases as possible Great Filters. But I don’t find myself compelled by the idea that those technologies universally, or even often, lead civilizations to destroy themselves. For that to be true, the Filter would need to be so overwhelming that pretty much any civilization in the Milky Way — after reaching that technological point — would self-destruct so rapidly and completely that they wouldn’t release any detectable signals. Otherwise, we would’ve heard from them. And that clearly doesn’t always happen: we’ve had nuclear weapons (the most commonly proposed filter) for 80 years, haven’t destroyed ourselves, and in the meantime have released tons of signals that could eventually be detected by other civs.
Maybe we’re an exception, but the default assumption has to be that we represent a pretty median case of a technologically advanced civilization. If we made it past the Filter long enough to produce a signal, then it presumably shouldn’t be that hard for a decent number of other civs to do the same. So it seems unlikely that a Great Filter is the reason we haven’t heard from anyone yet.
Putting aside Fermi Paradox stuff, though — I find it hard to picture that at least some technologies aren’t semi-regular harbingers of a species’ end. Aside from those mentioned above, one that comes to mind is the ability to easily make synthetic organisms. Perhaps it quickly becomes trivial for anyone to design a virus that is 100% lethal and hyper-contagious.
In terms of earthly cultures: no technologies per se come to mind, but I think certain beliefs are generally pretty bad for a group’s long-term survival. There are a number of cases where cultures almost self-destructed after witchcraft accusations. The Xhosa, for example — in the mid-19th century, some random prophet declared that an ongoing drought could only be fixed by slaughtering all the cattle in the kingdom and refraining from farming. Much of the population (including the king) went along with it, and the majority of the Xhosa starved to death as a result. In the other direction, Joe Henrich has argued that certain cultural institutions, like monogamy and the banning of cousin marriage, contributed heavily to the economic and technological rise of the West.
Interested in those cases of near-self-destruction through random cultural "deleterious mutations", if you have references! From searching a bit, the Xhosa case would be Nongqawuse?
Yep, that’s right! I read about it originally in Sick Societies by Rob Edgerton — outstanding book all about the subject of how cultural traits are often very maladaptive.