(02-01-2020, 08:05 AM)The Real Marty Wrote: I look at all the threats to our way of life and I wonder if we are at the high point of our civilization and it's all downhill from here. Nuclear proliferation, terrorism, climate change, US government bankruptcy, oceans filling up with plastic, political polarization... What does the future hold? An economic crash and depression caused by exploding federal debt? Rising seas flooding major coastal areas around the world? Some rogue state or terrorist organization setting off a nuclear weapon in a major city? Liberals and conservatives literally shooting at each other, in a civil war with no front lines or boundaries? A pandemic racing through and eliminating a billion or so people and causing a severe economic decline?
Are we the lucky ones who are living at peak civilization on earth? And in 10 or 20 years it all rolls over and either declines or crashes and we enter a new dark age, with disease, depression, pollution, and chaos?
People like to look up at the sky and wonder if anyone else is out there. But isn't it possible, or even probable, that if the beings on another planet are smart enough, they will eventually destroy themselves, by raping their environment, by borrowing themselves into bankruptcy, by allowing their arguments to get out of control, just like we are doing?
Maybe we should just enjoy it while it lasts. We're the lucky ones who live at the peak of history. We have everything.
What you're referring to here is a scientific theory referred to as the Great Filter. According to the theory, the reason we haven't found any advanced life out there is because all other civilizations have reached a certain point and then vanished, died off, ceased to exist, whatever. The ones left aren't advanced enough to be found. The question is what the event that triggers the filter is. Is it the weaponization of the atom? A meteor impact? Environmental damage to the planet from industrialization? Or is it something we haven't encountered yet, like an effort to combine matter and anti-matter, or to create some kind of "stargate" style method of space travel?
Under this logic, the best case scenario for us would be future expeditions finding remnants of primitive civilizations on other planets, as that would suggest that we have already passed and survived the Great Filter event. A bad scenario would be finding evidence of a civilization more advanced than ours, as that would indicate that we haven't reached the Great Filter event yet. The worst case scenario would be finding the remnants of a civilization roughly as advanced as ours, because it would mean that we are very close to finding out what's going to kill us all.
