What's on Your Mind

[Chase]

With all due respect, you are misinterpreting what I meant by great filters, and missing many premises to hypothetical advanced alien civilisations that have been proposed.

"Filters" that block civilisations from becoming interstellar are biological, not metaphysical. They are atheistic. They have nothing to do with "greater purposes" whatsoever.

You also greatly underestimate the sheer potential of a civilisations- including humans - that can be possibly, whether breakthroughs in space travel are invented or not.

Without a sci-fi level breakthrough, humans (or any ET civilisations) could still:

Permanently establish an infrastructure in space that could support the entire species that would pay for itself. Break in down to money and economics - before it cost millions of dollars for every one person to get to space, thanks to reusable rockets, it now costs hundreds of thousands. If you understand the economics concept of economy of scales, you would know that mass scale immigration to space would cut this cost down. We can recycle the excess fuel of the rockets to get their with modern technology that is capable of extracting carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into fuel.

Getting out of the gravity well of Earth is the biggest of obstacle, but doable. In space, it will be far more cheaper. For example, it take the same amount of fuel for a rocket to blast out of Earth's gravity well as it does to go from Earth's orbit to Mars.

Don't you dare say anything about radiation. I'm so sick of hearing that argument against space travel. It's become the anti-space equivalent of creationists saying there is still monkeys. We can hollow out asteroids, or beef up a space stations layers. Gravity can be stimulated through centripetal acceleration (spinning space habitats) or linear acceleration.

An Orion class rocket that relies on using small mini nuclear bombs for propulsion can propel a ship to reach nearby stars within a century.

A century is a blink of an eye to the age of the universe. With known science, humans could colonize the entire galaxy in hundreds of thousands of years. A blink of an eye to the universe.

What I meant by how nuclear annihilation may be a great filter that explains why we haven't been visited is that even though the universe is vast, it is still billions of years old, so even if life is incredibly rare, it would explain why Earth hasn't been visited by an alien civilisation millions of years ahead of us from somewhere else in the galaxy or nearby galaxies. Although, my speculation is that the reason is that space colonization in the form of a Dyson Swarm of a species native star would prove more economy as it can support trillions upon trillions of people.

That doesn't factor AI into the equation. Imagine a machine capable of mining asteroids and using the resources to either build something for its owner or a copy of itself. Such a machine is often called a Van Nuemann probe. These machines could turn into galactic scale locusts from their exponential multiplication. We could have them build space habitats the size of planets. We could cover a gas giant in a shell at the 1G level and make an Earth that is hundreds of times bigger than Earth but still have its gravity. All without breaking any known laws of physics (to my speculation, I do not claim to be a physicist or any other kind of scientist).

That is the tragedy of the human race. We could be living in a utopia that is beyond comprehension, but instead we may destroy ourselves.