In this model, we first and foremost see that humankind has ascended at an accelerating rate. It took us ~190,000 years to go from Tier 1 to Tier 2, yet only 12,000 years to go from Tier 2 to Tier 6 – the tier we remain in presently. And while this is an impressive reflection of our capabilities, we’ve only come far enough to be forced to take another leap, for a critical attribute of our tier is that it’s inherently precarious.
Due to exponential population growth and the environmental changes and resource scarcities that come with it, a civilization can only stay in this tier for a limited time. It either ascends, or it falls to resource conflict and/or ecological collapse, which in the nuclear age carries extinction-level consequences.
It’s a reality that pays homage to “The Great Filter,” which is a derivative consideration of “The Fermi Paradox” – an essential philosophical question when discussing our seemingly isolated existence within the vast cosmos our planet calls home.
Postulated by the great physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950’s, the question can be succinctly paraphrased as the following:
How can our universe, in all its unimaginable vastness, present such an immense likelihood for sentient life, yet at the same time we can’t seem to find it?
I’ll frame this another way to help clarify:
Our planet, Earth, orbits our Sun along with seven other planets, comprising our solar system. It is only one out of roughly 100 billion solar systems in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Our galaxy, itself, is only one out of some two trillion galaxies in our observable universe by the last known estimate.[6]
In another way of saying, if we were to take every person alive today and send them each to a unique galaxy, we’d only be able to visit about 0.37% of them. As each galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and there are trillions of galaxies, it makes the odds of Earth being the only planet to support life in the cosmos to be nigh impossibly low.
Presently, astronomers estimate that our universe contains at least a septillion stars (that’s 24 zeros).[7] At this scale, if even only one out of one million stars had orbiting planets that sustained life, it would still leave ten quintillion planets that did (10,000,000,000,000,000,000). That’s ten million individual groups of one trillion planets. Think about that for a second.
It’s so impossibly unlikely that we’re alone, yet at the same time, we haven’t heard from another lifeform beyond our planet that we know of.
“The Great Filter” is a proposed answer to this paradox, theorizing that all intelligent life faces a threshold it must cross for it to ascend beyond its planet and survive for the long term. That in order to truly advance as a species, it must overcome a series of obstacles which would otherwise stop its ascent – or be the harbinger of its destruction.
Consider it another way, if you will:
If all of Earth’s history were reduced to the scale of one year, humanity did not emerge until 11:55PM on New Year’s Eve. We only reached the modern era at about 10 seconds to midnight. By 7 seconds to midnight, we had invented the means to cause our own extinction. By 5 seconds to midnight, we will have run out of the resources that sustains our rapidly expanding population. And if our dynamic remains unchanged, it will destroy us before the clock strikes twelve.
That is “The Great Filter.” It is something that we are facing right now, today. And it is our generation, our time, that is tasked with passing this gauntlet of unforgiving truth.
Yet it’s a reality that makes us brethren against the forces, natural as they may well be, which would otherwise erase what we have built and accomplished. That would extinguish the stories of who we are and who we could become, casting the ashes and echoes of the aggregate into a void where the culmination of our memory is to be forgotten. For this reason, this writing has conveyed a sense of touch in language that appeals to the power you bring to bear as a person, in hopes that it would inspire your choice of action towards building a better world and a brighter future.
I believe there is an ether in this world that embraces our sense of soul and what it means to be human. An ether that connects us on a core wavelength, where we all wish the best for ourselves and for others, and ascribe value to our sense of collective meaning and shared purpose. We find it, in moments, at high points in our lives and seek it still maybe through churches and community organizations, as acolytes of sports teams, countercultures or ideological tribes; striving for warmth and affirmation through what strings of connection we can grasp and hold close. Yet another torch in our hearts, perhaps, one that keeps the cold and loneliness at bay.
This ether is not esoteric. It’s not something that can be made, bought or bartered for – it’s been within us all along, an aspect of the human condition that we can engage in ourselves and others should we be willing; that like love, friendship, respect and honor is a conduit for connection, for inspiration, for belonging. It does not come from acquisition. It comes from choice.
The best parts of ourselves are made possible because we choose them. We choose to be better, to give, build, create and forgive, just as we choose to hate, steal, forsake and destroy. While perhaps inclined towards one aspect or another by our natural dispositions, we are ultimately manifestations of our choices – defined one way or another by the actions we take, the ethers we embrace, and the natures we feed.
The world that we live in, therefore, is a collective reflection of those choices – even if we didn’t realize that we made them, or that those who came before us made them, or those who came before them still. The world we wake up in tomorrow, accordingly, will reflect the same. But uniquely in our context is an unprecedented capability to expand the impact of our choices and the scope of options we have available. And of them, the most vital is the neutralization of the concept of need.