Apathy : The Real Great Filter
Perhaps it’s not a technological challenge that will ultimately end us all, perhaps it’s a societal one we’re all too familiar with.
I’m a little obsessed the the idea of a Great Filter, to be completely honest, and spend increasing amounts of time pondering what may be coming along in our future which would have the capability to render us extinct as a species.
For one reason, our universe is so vast that statistically there must be other life somewhere. Additionally, I have great faith in science first finding it, allowing us to communicate with it, and more fancifully one day even meet it too.
Therefore, it’s one of my worries, right in there with the rest that we haven’t found any of it yet. Sure, perhaps we’re just about to with our ever increasingly sensitive scientific instruments, but it still sometimes keeps me awake with a kind of cosmic angst.
Oftentimes a Great Filter is presented in the media as some cataclysmic natural event such as a giant meteor, supervolcano eruption, or pandemic.
Indeed, we’ve already had some close calls with regard to many of the already considered scenarios and, thankfully, understand more about each one as the years pass.
More rarely the Great Filter is presented as some societal issue, similar to one idea I’ve written about…
