Published on June 28, 2025 1:16 AM GMT
I have an Enthusiastic Layperson's Moderate Obsession (yes, it's an ELMO) with what may be the most consequential lunchtime question in scientific history.
In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch with colleagues at Los Alamos when the conversation turned to UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. They were discussing the vast number of stars and the probability that some should harbor intelligent civilizations - the sort of conversation that may have been routine among physicists but is quite dissimilar to my lunchtime conversations of why my socks don't match and whether loaded fries constitute a salad.
And then Fermi posed the question that triggered my ELMO for the better part of my adult life: "Where is everybody?"
The numbers alone feel beyond real human comprehension - I know what the numbers mean but do I genuinely understand the scope and scale? I think probably not. We're looking at 200-400 billion stars in our galaxy, and roughly 70 sextillion stars in the observable universe. Even granting extremely conservative values to the Drake Equation² (not an ELMO, but a Very Interesting Thing), the numbers strongly suggest we should have detected thousands of civilizations by now.
We haven't. Not one.
After seven decades of increasingly sophisticated searches, we've found complete silence. This isn't merely an absence of evidence - it's a systematic void that spans the entire observable cosmos. It's rather like surveying a metropolis that should contain millions of inhabitants and finding it not just quiet, but empty.
So, taking the above into account, over the past ten years I have been germinating some ideas of my own (yes I am as skeptical of this development as you most probably are). I've started to think this puzzle may have a solution - and we may be living through the answer right now. If I'm correct, the implications are both sobering and, perhaps surprisingly, hopeful.
But first, let me explain why every proposed solution to this mystery has struck me as fundamentally inadequate.
The Inadequacy of Standard Explanations
For seventy years, scientists, public intellectuals, economists (good lord! Economists!), philosophers and other worthies have offered various solutions to the Fermi Paradox. But I have felt that every explanation suffers from problems that should trouble anyone committed to rigorous thinking.
Take the Zoo Hypothesis - the notion that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are aware of our existence but maintain deliberate concealment, treating us rather like specimens in some cosmic preserve.
The coordination problem alone should make us skeptical. This scenario requires perfect compliance across countless civilizations over geological timescales. Not a single advanced species develops internal disagreements about this policy? No civilization experiences the sort of political fractures that might lead a dissenting faction to break the cosmic silence? And what about the gaps - in roughly 13.8 billion years of cosmic history (subtract perhaps 3 billion for the earliest possible star-faring civilizations), isn't there a window of 10+ billion years where one group of civilizations maintaining this policy could have died out, transcended, or simply moved on, leaving enormous gaps before the next batch of civilizations emerged with no knowledge of the previous "rules"? The probability of such universal and enduring coordination seems vanishingly small.
This is what philosophers call the conjunction fallacy - assuming that multiple specific conditions are more likely than any single general condition. We should be suspicious of explanations that require many unlikely events to align perfectly.
(There is, I should note, a related hypothesis that strikes me as more plausible - though it rests not on benevolent preservation but on rational threat assessment. I'll return to this later.)
The distance and communication barriers argument initially seems more promising. Space is indeed vast, and the challenges of interstellar communication are formidable (if what we know about the speed of light and relativity is correct).
But think about what we're actually claiming. Across 13.8 billion years of cosmic history³, we're asserting that no technological civilization has produced detectable signals or accidental transmissions that have propagated across the galaxy. Not one stray communication has leaked into space and traveled the cosmos for millions of years. Nothing.
The "intelligence is rare" hypothesis commits what amounts to base rate neglect - it fails to account for the sheer scale of our sample size. When you're dealing with trillions of opportunities across billions of years, even extraordinarily improbable events become virtually certain.
And the "hidden presence" theory is essentially a variant of the zoo hypothesis, with the added implausibility that beings capable of interstellar travel would require elaborate deceptions to avoid detection by our relatively primitive instruments.
Here's what troubles me about these explanations: they might account for random absence - at a stretch and if we squint - but they fail to explain systematic silence.
If technological civilizations failed due to a grab bag of possible catastrophes (a sample of which may be asteroid impacts, stellar events, internal conflicts, resource depletion) we would expect to observe an uneven distribution of outcomes across the galaxy. Some successes, some failures. A patchy cosmos.
Instead, we observe uniform emptiness.
This points to something more systematic - a universal constraint that affects every technological species at a predictable stage of development.
Which brings us to what may be the most elegant and disturbing solution yet proposed: the Great Filter.
Understanding the Filter
In the 1990s, economist Robin Hanson articulated what has become known as the Great Filter hypothesis⁴. Hanson approached the Fermi Paradox with the kind of systematic thinking economists bring to complex problems, and his insight is both simple and profound.
Evolution, Hanson posited, may be understood as a sequence of increasingly improbable transitions. Beginning with basic chemistry and progressing through self-replication, cellular organization, multicellular complexity, intelligence, and technological sophistication.
Hanson's Very Interesting Idea was that somewhere in this sequence lies a transition so improbable that it effectively filters out the vast majority of potential civilizations. Hence: the Great Filter.
This makes sense, even to a layperson such as myself. Many of the early evolutionary transitions appear to have occurred on Earth without excessive difficulty - except perhaps biogenesis, which appears to be rather tricky. Yet we observe no evidence that any civilization has successfully navigated the complete sequence anywhere else in the observable universe. This implies that at least one step in the process is fantastically unlikely.
Hanson identified nine critical transitions on the path to what he termed "colonization explosion" - the expansion of life throughout the cosmos. These include formation of suitable stellar systems, development of reproductive molecules, simple cellular life, complex cellular organization, sexual reproduction, multicellular organisms, tool-using intelligence, technological civilization (our current stage), and interstellar colonization.
A wee thought of mine: I think steps three to eight are something of a given once you've managed step two, and we know step one is out there in potentially vast numbers. So it's either step two or step nine - almost certainly.
The location of the filter within this sequence has profound implications for our future prospects.
If the filter lies behind us - perhaps in the transition to complex cells or the emergence of intelligence itself - then we are extraordinarily fortunate to exist, but our future may be relatively secure.
If the filter lies ahead of us, however, as they say in the village of Lickey End (just outside Birmingham in the United Kingdom), we are on something of a sticky wicket.
Most discussions of potential future filters focus on an extensive range of threats - nuclear war, AI alignment failures, bioweapons, engineered pandemics, nanotech weapons, climate breakdown, resource depletion, biodiversity collapse, antibiotic resistance, cyber warfare, space-based weapons, global governance breakdown, economic inequality, information warfare, democratic institutional failure, and international cooperation collapse.
But when you examine this exhaustive list, they reduce to three fundamental categories: violent self-destruction, environmental collapse, and coordination failure.
For a long time, this list, and the categories they sat under, has felt genuinely overwhelming, and frightening, especially considering our species' history, and especially especially considering our species' recent decision-making performance under pressure. Then I began to suspect they might be expressions of the same underlying phenomenon.
And that's when I started to wonder whether we might be observing the Great Filter in operation - not as scientific speculation, but as reality we are living through, right now.
Recognizing the Filter in Real Time
Since around 2016, I've experienced a deep and growing sense of dread when observing our species' trajectory. This is my personal assessment, and I'm fully aware it may be colored by cognitive biases or selective attention. But the behaviours I observe seem both clear and deeply troubling.
I believe we are on a path toward what systems theorists might call an existential meta-crisis. In searching for explanations - sometimes, I'll admit, rather desperately - one possibility has emerged that I find both compelling and terrifying: we may be experiencing the Great Filter in real time.
The evidence I've been tracking shows we've endured roughly 1% of the civilizational stress that models predict for the period between 2050 and 2075. Our response to this relatively modest pressure has been systematic coordination breakdown precisely when global cooperation becomes essential for survival.
Think about the data from the past decade.
Climate disruption has brought record-breaking heat waves, unprecedented flooding patterns, accelerating arctic ice loss, and the emergence of climate refugee populations. These are not speculative future risks - they're current realities that any rational civilization would treat as urgent coordination challenges.
Political fragmentation shows up everywhere. Brexit, the Trump phenomenon, the global rise of authoritarianism, and the systematic erosion of democratic institutions precisely when we face challenges requiring sophisticated & disciplined international cooperation.
We're seeing economic warfare through trade conflicts, supply chain weaponization, rising inequality, and financial system stress that makes collective action more difficult rather than easier. Information breakdown is rampant - social media platforms have become engines of tribal polarization, information warfare is now a standard political tool, and we're watching the apparent collapse of shared epistemic foundations (common agreement about how we determine what's true) necessary for rational collective decision-making.
The COVID test case was perfect - a shared global threat with obvious cooperative solutions. What did we get? Vaccine nationalism, coordinated misinformation campaigns, and blame escalation instead of the species-level coordination that the situation demanded.
Perhaps most tellingly, we currently spend $2.718 trillion annually on weapons systems while requiring only $287 billion to provide universal access to clean water, eliminate hunger, and ensure basic education⁶. This isn't a failure of resources - it's a failure of coordination.
Now, if 1% civilizational stress produces systematic fragmentation, what happens when we encounter 20% or 50% pressure? We don't need to extrapolate to 100% to see where this trajectory leads.
The pattern appears to be this: we consistently choose tribal identity and competitive responses over collective problem-solving capability when facing existential challenges. It's as if we're running behavioral software designed for small-group survival that becomes actively harmful when applied to planetary-scale problems.
This observation led me to the seeds of my potential solution to the Great Filter mystery: is this specifically a human pathology, or might it represent something more universal?
The Universal Pattern
I might be overreaching to claim this pattern is universal - the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation force us to speculate with enormous uncertainty at every step. But the framework I'm about to describe seems more consistent with available evidence than other explanations I've encountered.
From what we know about how life gets started, biogenesis - the jump from chemistry to biology - probably happens through competitive self-replication⁷. Any system that successfully copies itself must extract energy and materials from its environment while preventing other systems from accessing those same resources. Competition isn't an unfortunate byproduct of life - it appears to be fundamental to how life works.
If I'm right, then competitive dynamics drove evolutionary development everywhere life emerges. On Earth, millions of years of predator-prey relationships created accelerating arms races: faster prey selected for faster predators, which selected for even faster prey. Intelligence evolved as the ultimate competitive advantage - the ability to predict, plan, and coordinate more effectively than competitors.
After millions of years of such selective pressure, competitive behavioral patterns would become deeply embedded in any species' neural architecture. These behaviors would be snuggled away deep in our brainstem and basal ganglia - the ancient neural circuitry we share with reptiles - constantly prompting and prodding. Natural selection doesn't optimize for species-level survival - it optimizes for individual and group advantage over other individuals and groups¹.
This creates what I've come to think of as a timeline compression problem: evolutionary programming requires millions of years to develop, but technological capability can scale within decades. Ancient behavioral software designed for small-group competition suddenly encounters planetary-scale tools.
We can observe this pattern in our own archaeological record. The Schöneck-Kilianstädten site in Germany preserves evidence of a systematic massacre from 7,000 years ago - twenty-six individuals were killed in what researchers describe as "torture and mutilation of victims" over "precious cultivable lands."
What strikes me about this evidence is that it demonstrates the same territorial competitive logic we now apply to nuclear weapons and planetary resources. The systematic elimination of competitors for finite resources, scaled up from valleys to continents to planets.
If this represents typical intelligence development patterns, then similar competitive programming would emerge with whatever technological capabilities any species developed.
This is where those three failure types start looking like expressions of a single phenomenon.
Violent destruction represents competitive territorial programming applied to civilization-ending weapons. Environmental collapse represents competitive extraction programming applied to planetary-scale industrial capability. Coordination failure represents competitive programming preventing the cooperation needed to solve problems that competitive programming creates.
In other words, if intelligence typically evolves through competitive dynamics - as Earth's history shows - then species develop behavioral patterns that create resource overshoot and social collapse when combined with planetary-scale technological capability.
This, I believe, may explain not just our current crisis, but the cosmic silence itself.
Why We Can't See Them
If this framework is correct, it raises an obvious question: what about species that successfully transcend competitive programming? Surely some civilizations manage to evolve beyond these limitations?
Logically, some must have transcended these patterns. First, given the vast numbers of attempts across billions of years and countless worlds, probability alone means some successes. More intriguingly, there likely were evolutionary environments that engineered slightly different competitive dynamics - perhaps worlds where aggressive, consumptive, and tribal drives were somewhat mitigated by unique or novel environments, making passage through the filter easier for those species than it may be for us. But they would be fundamentally different from competitive species - and this difference may explain why we can't detect them.
I've always found the "missing megastructures" argument for the Fermi Paradox somewhat suspect. The assumption that advanced civilizations would build detectable Dyson spheres and massive engineering projects strikes me as deeply anthropocentric - and revealing of our own competitive biases.
These expectations assume that advanced species would maximize energy extraction, signal power through massive construction projects, and expand exponentially across available territory. But these are precisely the behaviors we'd expect from species still operating under competitive programming.
What if post-filter civilizations operate according to entirely different principles? What if their technology is based on efficiency rather than extraction, integration rather than domination, sustainability rather than exponential growth?
Imagine advanced civilizations developing what we might call biointegrated technology - approaches that work with natural systems rather than replacing them. Or quantum-scale engineering that operates below our detection thresholds. Or information-based civilization that requires minimal material infrastructure.
We're rather like medieval armies scanning for stealth aircraft - we're using detection methods optimized for competitive-species signatures. We can't recognize collaborative civilization markers because we haven't developed collaborative approaches ourselves.
But there's another, more sobering possibility to think about.
The Isolation Problem
Even if post-filter civilizations wanted to help pre-filter species, intervention might be counterproductive - or dangerous.
This isn't the benevolent zoo hypothesis I discussed earlier. This is rational threat assessment.
Think about what a species still running competitive programming would do with access to advanced technology. We would weaponize every new capability according to competitive advantage logic. We would exploit cooperative systems without reciprocating. We would export competitive dynamics to previously stable galactic ecosystems.
Looking at it from the perspective of post-filter civilizations, a competitive species with interstellar capability would represent something like a galactic pathogen - spreading destructive behavioral patterns through cooperative systems.
So advanced civilizations must maintain distance from pre-filter species not for sentimental reasons, but as a matter of ecosystem preservation. They cannot help because helping would leave us still running competitive software with advanced technology - precisely the combination that creates galactic-scale problems.
They must wait for proof that we've achieved conscious evolution beyond competitive patterns.
The cosmic silence, in other words, isn't absence. It's necessary quarantine until we demonstrate that we're safe to interact with.
This interpretation means something both humbling and hopeful: we're not alone in the universe, but we are alone in our test. Advanced civilizations exist, but they can't rescue us from the developmental challenge we must pass independently.
What This Means for Us
If this framework is correct, we may be in a position many technological species have found themselves in: recognizing the Great Filter while experiencing it. This recognition itself isn't unique - other intelligent civilizations would likely have made this same realization.
But recognizing the problem and solving it are entirely different challenges.
Previous species likely faced the same choice we do now. I imagine some failed unconsciously - driven by competitive programming they couldn't recognize or analyze, never understanding what was happening to them.
Others probably recognized the problem but couldn't solve it. The attempt to change killed them, with societies fracturing as they tried to evolve. The stress of attempted change triggered exactly the competitive responses they were trying to transcend.
Some species tried but missed the time window - they understood what needed to be done but couldn't implement changes quickly enough before environmental and social pressures made the choice for them.
And some succeeded, developing the wisdom and coordination to consciously evolve beyond competitive patterns while preserving what makes consciousness valuable.
We have the cognitive tools to examine our own behavioral patterns and potentially evolve beyond them. We understand evolutionary psychology, recognize cognitive biases, and have access to forms of intelligence that weren't shaped by the same competitive pressures that created our limitations (our current development of AI).
What makes our situation hopeful - not unique, but genuinely hopeful - is that we still have time. The question is whether we'll use it wisely.
Where This Takes Us
This brings us to what may be the most consequential decision in human history.
Every technological species appears to face the same evolutionary choice.
Continue operating under competitive programming until environmental and social pressures create civilizational collapse. Join the cosmic silence that shows most technological species choose this path.
Or achieve conscious evolution beyond competitive patterns while preserving the creativity, wisdom, and meaning-making that make consciousness valuable. Potentially join post-filter civilizations somewhere in the vast universe.
The timeline for this choice is uncomfortably constrained. We have perhaps fifty years to demonstrate that conscious evolution is possible before environmental pressures make the choice for us.
But think about what's at stake: we're potentially the first generation that gets to choose how our species evolves. We're also likely the last generation with time to make this choice consciously rather than having it imposed by circumstances.
Some species have clearly transcended competitive programming - they must have, or intelligence would never emerge anywhere. The question is whether we'll develop the wisdom to join them.
Final Thoughts
I want to be clear about the limitations of this framework. We're attempting to understand processes that span millions of years across countless worlds based on a sample size of one. The Fermi Paradox forces us to make educated guesses with radically insufficient data about perhaps the most complex question in science.
But given the evidence we have, this seems like the most parsimonious explanation I've encountered for both cosmic silence and our current civilizational trajectory.
If I'm wrong, I'd welcome challenges to any part of this analysis. Where are the logical gaps? What evidence would update us away from this conclusion? How might we recognize successful filter transcendence in our own species?
And if I'm right... well, then we have work to do.
We are capable of extraordinary beauty - love that transcends self-interest, creativity that transforms understanding, courage that faces impossible odds, wisdom that sees beyond immediate gratification. Surely this luminous intelligence doesn't have to end in the banality of competitive extraction and tribal warfare.
So there it is, the Great Filter. The question is whether we'll transcend it with dignity or become another species that couldn't escape the patterns that created them.
The choice, as far as I can tell, is entirely ours.
This analysis emerged from research for "Homo Collaborans & The Great Filter," exploring how conscious co-evolution between human and artificial intelligence might represent the path through what may be a universal evolutionary bottleneck. I'm curious about the LessWrong community's response to these frameworks and whether others have reached similar conclusions about the systematic nature of civilizational breakdown.
References
- Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.Drake, F. (1961). "How can we detect radio transmissions from distant planetary systems?" In Interstellar Communication, ed. A.G.W. Cameron. W.A. Benjamin.Planck Collaboration (2020). "Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters." Astronomy & Astrophysics, 641, A6.Hanson, R. (1998). "The Great Filter - Are We Almost Past It?" Available at: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.htmlMeyer, C., Lohr, C., Gronenborn, D., & Alt, K. W. (2015). "The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(36), 11217-11222.SIPRI (2024). "World military expenditure reaches new record high as European spending surges." Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. / World Bank (2021). "The cost of reaching universal basic water supply and sanitation." / UNESCO (2023). "Global Education Monitoring Report 2023."Joyce, G. F. (2002). "The antiquity of RNA-based evolution." Nature, 418(6894), 214-221.
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