Ask Lemmy

I think it would be nuclear warfare. Nuclear fission is a universal development for any advanced civilization. It would be easy to construct a nuclear bomb in an advanced civilization. Once a few rogue/pariah states start making them, everyone's screwed.

Making nukes is easy, the only reason we don't see more nuclear states on earth is because of the international backlash. With a couple more Iran and North Korea's we'll likely meet the filter ourselves.

It's a society (or the whole humanity) becoming big enough to survive even when ignorant murderers are the elite and the majority of it, and civilized people - a smaller part and almost a property, similar to animals in a zoo.

When such a point is reached, the former will make the transition, and the latter will diminish over time. Then it just has no future.

A bit like with Ottoman empire and Qajar Iran, only on the scale of the whole humanity there won't be someone else to buy weapons and technologies from to keep going. Then some of the previously passable filters will kick in. Like hunger or resource scarcity.

I'm sure simply continuing to live will show me more about possible great filters than most teachers could unfortunately.

I think there are many great filters, but I think one of those filters is fighting over limited resources and wars. Perhaps limited to humans/earth, but I doubt it. Nukes, dropping rocks from orbit, and theoretical (but possible) weapons like black hole bombs are all going to tempt irrational beings to take someone's stuff.

We have to be extremely careful that we don't accidentally trigger a weapon that is going to kill or dramatically cripple our civilization before we become a truly interstellar species. There is so much to learn out there, while so many people are currently focused on the wrong things such as minor conflicts or what children aren't allowed to learn.

For us it's conservatism and its synonyms.

Life finds a way to end itself. There's an ongoing mass extinction event caused by humans. Completely preventable by the way. But we do not prevent it.

Resources often get squandered on trivial vanity and novelty products instead of being channeled into advancing science and medicine. Imagine if we had a cosmic ledger tracking every resource used to develop simple items, like a pencil. It would show countless fires burned and animals consumed just to fuel the human ingenuity required for lumber, materials, and mining. Now, think about how many more resources are required for rockets, heat shields, and life support systems. Extend that to space stations, energy capture, and escaping Earth’s gravity.The resources on a planet are abundant, and nothing is ever truly destroyed. However, we’ve often allocated too much to building flat-screen TVs, leaving little for constructing even a modest space station in orbit, let alone an interstellar spaceship. It's as if the planet offers a finite amount of resources, challenging its inhabitants to focus on space travel. Only a species wise enough to stay on track can unlock the universe's resources. Otherwise, we risk ending up like Australian pines, choking ourselves out in our isolated star systems, having wasted our potential.

Imagine it like interstellar travelling having a single path to achieve it while the path to self destruction is limitless.

I personally find the kardashev scale a pretty terrible way to measure the success of a civilization. Maybe the most successful life forms don't become technologically obsessed materialists determined to colonize everything habitable and drain the resources of everything else, yknow?