31–40 of 90 posts
I wonder if the great filter is not one, but multiple coincidences brought upon by "intelligent" life and the natural lifetime of a planet and/or solar system. If Mars had intelligent life and now it doesn't how does that bode for Earthlings? Can life really adapt given the lack of evidence anywhere? I wonder how will space travel to the next possible habitable planets work. Shoot in all directions and hope that life…
We humans will be able to control everything on earth's climate if we survive even a couple thousand years from now assuming technological advances.
Kind of makes it a tautology.
Interesting. Life emerged 4 billion years ago and the window of habitability for complex lifeforms will end in one more billion years. So terrestrial natural selection required 80% of the window of opprtunity to produce human intelligence. That's a tighter margin than I would have guessed.
If that hypothesis holds, then conditional on all the steps having completed on a given planet, they will have done so roughly equally spaced in the time allotted, regardless of their relative difficulty.
So, for example, if the window on Earth is 5 billion years, and there are four hard steps to complete, then, conditional on all four steps finishing, we expect each step to have taken about 1 billion years, give or take, with about 1 billion years left to go.
(See the Technical Appendix to Robin Hanson's Great Filter essay: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html#appendix, or his more detailed discussion of this particular point: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/HARDSTEP.PS)
I wonder if the great filter is not one, but multiple coincidences brought upon by "intelligent" life and the natural lifetime of a planet and/or solar system. If Mars had intelligent life and now it doesn't how does that bode for Earthlings? Can life really adapt given the lack of evidence anywhere? I wonder how will space travel to the next possible habitable planets work. Shoot in all directions and hope that life…
Venus, however, is sheathed in clouds. So we only have low resolution radar images of most of the planet, and we’ve only sent a few very short-lived landers with low resolution cameras to the surface. They could have landed in areas that were once oceans or otherwise uninhabited. And secondly, Venus has been basically completely resurfaced with lava over time. Venus may once have had large oceans before runaway greenhouse effect. (And keep in mind that the Sun has gotten significantly brighter over billions of years, besides the increased greenhouse effect on Venus.) And so we can’t even rule out a planet-spanning civilization like our own. It’d take a lot more exploration and drilling to rule that out.
We humans will be able to control everything on earth's climate if we survive even a couple thousand years from now assuming technological advances.
Edit: Another alternative is technology progresses but political and cultural institutions do not, so the requisite level of global cooperation never materializes.
I wonder if the great filter is not one, but multiple coincidences brought upon by "intelligent" life and the natural lifetime of a planet and/or solar system. If Mars had intelligent life and now it doesn't how does that bode for Earthlings? Can life really adapt given the lack of evidence anywhere? I wonder how will space travel to the next possible habitable planets work. Shoot in all directions and hope that life…
Red Tape as the real Great Filter...
That article really doesn't give a very good explanation at all, it doesn't make sense. When CO2 breaks down it produces oxygen and carbon, so if oxygen gets burned to produce CO2 it's just gonna get converted back into oxygen when the CO2 breaks down. If the oxygen reacts with the atmospheric nitrogen then surely this will also get broken down since AFAIK less energy is needed to break down NO2 than CO2. Currently t…
That article really doesn't give a very good explanation at all, it doesn't make sense. When CO2 breaks down it produces oxygen and carbon, so if oxygen gets burned to produce CO2 it's just gonna get converted back into oxygen when the CO2 breaks down. If the oxygen reacts with the atmospheric nitrogen then surely this will also get broken down since AFAIK less energy is needed to break down NO2 than CO2. Currently t…
There’s an immense amount of buried carbon. If you include all burnable carbon sources underground (including under the oceans), there’s approximately enough to burn up all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Plus there are lots of minerals that can be oxidized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s an immense amount of buried carbon. If you include all burnable carbon sources underground (including under the oceans), there’s approximately enough to burn up all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Plus there are lots of minerals that can be oxidized.
burning carbon creates CO2, which would then get broken down back into oxygen (either by plants or directly by sunlight according to the article).