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0 pointsM_Grey9y ago0 comments

I'm more a fan of The Great Filter hypothesis. We're not finding life for the simple reason that in a thousand years, no one will find us; we'll be banging the rocks together again. It might just be that the stage between where we are now, and where we imagine going, is unlikely to be crossed.

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knz9y ago· 2 in thread

Are the two theories mutually exclusive? A dark forest doesn't imply that we aren't capable of destroying ourselves.

M_GreyOP9y ago

A dark forest implies that lots of species advance without destroying themselves. One interpretation of the Great Filter basically states that self-destruction to be an inevitable feature of sufficiently advanced life.

So yes... for the forest to be populated requires the filter to be altered or discarded.

Cookingboy9y ago

Given the assumption that there are large numbers of intelligent species out there (the universe is vast), unless the Great Filter guarantees that 100% (not 99%, or 99.9%, but 100%) of intelligent species will self-destruct, then these two theories are not mutually exclusive.

Due to the size of the universe (100 billion stars in this galaxy alone), remote possibility has to be treated as absolute certainty, this is why dark forest is such a sound theory.

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