Is the Great Filter Part of an Evolutionary Process?
One day we may transmit a message to nearby constellations and star systems where exoplanets are plentiful. The purpose of the message could be to let the emerging downfall of our species serve as a warning for other civilizations. At this point we may also have come to the conclusion that the Great Filter is universally true and that it is an inevitable part of the later stages of every evolutionary process.
Some scientists predict a very dark future for humanity. The reasons for this may vary but the human species is always at the epicenter of each and every scenario: overpopulation, war, pandemics and super resistant bacteria, debt saturation and financial crises, disinformation and cyber attacks, nuclear weapons and unpredictable dictators, the mass extinction of species, the increased energy consumption, climate change and global heating, ozone depletion, desertification, flooding, overfishing, sea and soil acidification, eutrophication, ocean pollution and poor air quality in big cities, the lack of food and fresh water as well as good old greed, religious fundamentalism and corruption. The list is seemingly endless.
An allegorical cross-section of these predictions could perhaps read something like this:
The short reign of the human species might very well appear as a clusterfuck of epic proportions in the rearview mirror of history, at least if history is allowed to continue and someone is there to reflect upon it. Gradually we seem to dig ourselves into a hole in the ground, surrounded by scorched desert sand slowly running back into the hole. As it becomes more and more obvious that we are actually excavating the bottom of the hole, aiming south towards the crust and with a primed hand grenade in our mouth, the process to stop digging, climb back up again, throw away the hand grenade, refill the hole and clean the desert becomes more challenging for every day that passes.
Some people will say that this description is too dramatized. That one cannot extract everything from the alarming and populistic news and simply add them together. That people are more exposed to doomsday news and disinformation today. That humans will adapt and that new technology will help us along the way. I ought to know because I have been one of them. One part of me still want to filter out the emerging reality, while another part of me want to do something about it. But there is something more, a growing awareness that what is happening is inevitable. Not in an apocalyptic religious way, more like a Darwinistic way in which the processes of life are self-regulative.
There is an old Cree Indian prophecy that goes like this:
Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize that money cannot be eaten.
The message his heavy as lead but easy to grasp. A thoughtful implication of this old Indian prophecy is that when people are faced with a severe situation, they will be forced to adapt or die. In other words, the process can be self regulative and not necessarily an end-station.
Each crisis, whether it is about the financial system, climate, politics, health or environment, will cause distress on global scale, but it can also trigger another issue. When Russia started war in central Europe this triggered a political crisis and concern throughout the world. This in turn triggered the stock market to plunge and economy to drop. Oil prices went skyrocket and the transport market was hit really hard.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine the whole world was slowly recovering from the Corona pandemic, which is estimated to have harvested 18 million worldwide. The pandemic put even more pressure on the financial system. Today’s financial system is saturated with debt and thus run at the bottom. Global debt rose to a new record high of nearly $300 trillion during the end of the pandemic, but this was mostly overshadowed by the fear of Corona.
Before the pandemic all focus was on the climate crisis. The world’s leading climate scientists had just released their latest massive assessment of the effects of climate change. They concluded that the risks and effects of climate change will come faster and will be worse earlier than expected, that we are not prepared, even for the effects we are already seeing, and it costs lives, that we must restore nature and protect at least 30% of the earth’s ecosystems to protect ourselves from the climate crisis and that we are in a critical decade to ensure a viable, fair and sustainable future.
We always seems to be in a “critical decade” and each crisis replaces another one and generates new crises at an ever increasing rate. Considering the collective sum of man-caused issues – not even including natural phenomenon’s such as rouge asteroids, gamma-ray bursts, solar eruptions and similar things – are we approaching such a point of system instability that could be referred to as the Great Filter?
Many scientists, such as Carl Brusse from the Australian National University, has speculated that the Great Filter theory could explain why intelligent lifeforms have not managed to let each other know about their existence.
We get to this point — we get past all the multicellularity, we get complex societies, we get technology, but there’s something lurking in our future which will wipe us out.
If so, what could be the outcome of that scenario? I personally think that annihilation is not a realistic scenario. I believe that it would require something such as a giant asteroid or cometh. An all-out nuclear war could leave us paralyzed for decades but not wipe us out. I don’t even think that all of the man-caused issues all working together would have the power to do anything more than slowing us down. From a cosmological perspective a setback of a few decades, or even centuries, would be an insignificant event in the history of cosmos, a blink of an eye.
If this reasoning is somewhat realistic, this would mean that we are indeed approaching a new Era, but will no go with a Bang, it is merely a self-adjusting or regulative process that is part of evolution. If so, it would be fair to say that we are living at the End of Days but also that we can look forward to a New Beginning.
