Mr. LowTek's Psychic learning/healing thread...
- Thread starter LowTek
- Start date
This is a good one. I used this one near the very start of my game and got a response from someone.
Let's talk about this image.
The "Great Filter" for the earth would have been multicellular life, because you have to realize that it took the earth some 3 billion years to create it. If it had taken 2 billion years longer, the earth never would have gotten complex life. Then, things got eyes and mouths and things started getting interesting. Then, the earth and the universe combined to say "fuck that" about 6 times to all the current life on earth and all the subsequent survivors had to get much better at adapting to "AAAAHHHHHHH EVERYTHING WANTS TO KILL ME!!!!!"
People will get that confused with some kind of sentient thought and some kind of realization of the self. They either attribute this to the use of tools/control of fire or the creation of languages/ability to pass down information from one generation to the next (you know, without DNA and instincts getting involved).
If you gave whales or dolphins or even cephalopods some kind of evolutionary pressure to go back onto land in a few million years, these creatures could make the same leap that humans did. All languages have some kind of pattern that distinguish them from absolute gibberish.
So, Type I civilizations - being able to control the Earth. I guess humans will eventually have to break this barrier first. As much as global warming is a direct and present threat, the real threat is that in 20,000 years (more or less) there will be another ice age that will really put pressure on any human civilization still around. Combine that with the natural cycles in the elongation of the earth's orbit around the sun (we are more or less in the most circular orbit now) and those winters are going to be much more difficult than anything humans have experienced in 10,000 years. That means that humans are going to have to control the weather, the ocean cycles, any geothermal events, and provide basic protection from the universe that can instantly kill all life on a bad day.
Type II civilization - Dyson sphere. Type III - basically intergalactic travelers.
So that takes us to Drake equation:
No, not that one. The one that explains why humans haven't been contacted (to our collective understanding). Is it so unlikely that any species that had to go through some multibillion year journey of survival through DNA and evolutionary pressures to be able to "grow up" and stop from destroying itself before there is "technological liftoff"? Or, more cynically, are humans on the intergalactic no fly list because we can't really be trusted not to start fighting with everyone else out there?
