Our First Contact With Aliens Might Be With Their Robots
Quote:So why haven’t we heard from other civilizations yet? Sure, time and space are vast, and relatively speaking we just started looking. But there are other limitations to life as well. There’s an idea in SETI circles known as the Fermi Paradox: if there are technologically advanced alien civilizations out there, why haven’t we heard from them? One solution often proposed is the great filter.
The great filter is the idea that technological progress creates as many problems as it solves. As a society advances to a certain point, those threats can outweigh the benefits, resulting in the wholesale destruction of a civilization. It’s possible we’ve already been through one step toward the Great Filter; The first digital computer was built somewhere between 1939 and 1946—the same time period as the development of the first nuclear weapons.
Simply put, some civilizations, whether through global-scale climate change, nuclear war, or famine, may kill themselves before they can become truly advanced. Artificial intelligence has even been added onto the list of potential threats at times—the Skynet solution to the Fermi Paradox.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell