I voted “see results only”. Based on the wide, unconcentrated distribution of evidence and beliefs about the so-called Great Filter, I think an option has been excluded: there is no Great Filter, and we are only one among many intelligent species in the universe (or even in this one galaxy) on one among many planets to develop such. Other intelligent life may well be totally unlike us, or, very rarely, parallel evolutionary pressures might have operated and produce something whose mentality we could almost understand. We don’t know.
We do know that our world hasn’t been strip-mined by a long-since-transhuman intergalactic supercivilization… but that’s not really good evidence that no other intelligence has evolved in our light-cone at all.
This whole thing has too much an air of mystery for me to believe we really understand it.
I think calling it a “filter” implicitly primes people for the impression that the options are supergalactic civilization or death, and to exclude possibilities where things keep going but don’t become astronomically visible.
I voted “see results only”. Based on the wide, unconcentrated distribution of evidence and beliefs about the so-called Great Filter, I think an option has been excluded: there is no Great Filter, and we are only one among many intelligent species in the universe (or even in this one galaxy) on one among many planets to develop such. Other intelligent life may well be totally unlike us, or, very rarely, parallel evolutionary pressures might have operated and produce something whose mentality we could almost understand. We don’t know.
We do know that our world hasn’t been strip-mined by a long-since-transhuman intergalactic supercivilization… but that’s not really good evidence that no other intelligence has evolved in our light-cone at all.
This whole thing has too much an air of mystery for me to believe we really understand it.
That would be a late Filter (between intelligence and intergalactic supercivilization).
I think calling it a “filter” implicitly primes people for the impression that the options are supergalactic civilization or death, and to exclude possibilities where things keep going but don’t become astronomically visible.