What if the Great Filter is complacency?
Maybe it all really ends with a whimper
Epistemological status: Speculative, approaching science fiction.
Where are all the aliens?
That’s the famous question behind the Fermi Paradox. The Universe is unfathomably vast and mind-bogglingly old. There are billions of stars in the Milky Way. Even if only a tiny fraction of these stars have planets with intelligent life, we should still have a lot of alien civilizations out there.
The only problem is that the aliens are nowhere to be seen.
Multiple hypotheses have been put forward to resolve the paradox. (Wikipedia provides a helpful rundown.) Maybe we haven’t looked hard enough. Maybe aliens don’t want to be found. Maybe there’s some Great Filter that exists along the way from simple molecules to a galaxy-colonizing civilization. Most unsettling of all, maybe the Great Filter is that advanced intelligences tend to destroy themselves.
However, the answer could be much more boring than that. Maybe aliens just don’t care much about this whole “let’s colonize the Universe” business. What if the Great Filter is not destruction but complacency?
Think about the one civilization that we do know. Let’s assume we don’t kill ourselves, either directly (e.g., nuclear war) or indirectly (e.g., rogue AI or climate change). Is it likely that humans will settle the Universe? I think there’s a compelling case for “maybe not.”
Most historical cases of colonization have been driven by economics, ideology, or some mix of the two. However, there are good reasons to believe that these factors will matter less in the future.
Take economics first. The Earth is getting richer. If we take the right actions, we will soon reach an era of abundant sustainable energy. Economic research suggests that, over the last hundred years, commodity prices have been flat or trended only modestly upward. So, the demand for extra-terrestrial resources may be pretty low. (There’s also the annoying problem of getting those resources back home cost-effectively. Yes, Elon’s working on it, but he’s been a bit distracted lately.)
Now add to the equation the fact that there will be fewer humans in the future. The UN expects the total human population to peak by the end of this century; from that point on, the population will start to shrink. As we continue to use resources more efficiently, where will the economic push for space exploration come from?
OK, you may say, there’s still ideology. Maybe we’ll all become longtermists and settle Mars to safeguard humanity’s long-term future. But remember: the Earth will be a place of old people run by old people. Our civilizational priorities will likely be better health care and comfy rocking chairs, not spaceships. In fact, we may stop innovating altogether, something predicted by standard economic models with declining populations.
Now, of course, there are strong counterarguments. Maybe the current population projections are wrong, and we will actually have many more humans. Maybe we will figure out a profitable way to mine asteroids, or perhaps technological advances will make space exploration cheap and safe. Maybe ideological shifts will rekindle our urge to explore new frontiers.
But, also, maybe not. Maybe we’ll just be content to stick around on planet Earth, and the brightest minds will focus on advanced AI for healthcare, not interstellar drives. Maybe the last human doesn’t die in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. Instead, maybe humanity ends with a silver-haired grandmother soothed to sleep by a robot nurse.
Your guess is as good as mine. Alien cultures may differ a lot from ours, and none of what I wrote above may apply. Then again, the crux of my argument is that once you’re a rich advanced civilization, you probably end up on the “exploit” part of the explore-exploit frontier. That doesn’t seem especially human-centric.
So, where are all those aliens? They might just be happily stuck at the Great Filter of complacency. Call it the Great Sofa Hypothesis.
Substacks cited above:
