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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

I always thought that the great filter would be the "lotus eater" scenario -- that species always eventually discover that the entirety of their happiness lies in their brains, and once physical dangers are eliminated and base physical needs are met reliably, they can spend their entire lives in either an electronic or chemically induced simulation of a world of their choice, thus ending all exploration. But now I wonder whether they discover that all creativity can be emulated through matrix math, and they simply stop trying to do anything, or lose ability to do anything after a generation of delegating to machines.

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The set of possible failure states that can happen before excaping the gravity well is even possible so vast that it seems to me that the only valid "Great Filter" is Murphy's Law.

We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.

Earth was also running out of carbon dioxide, was basically none left when we humans appeared. It used to be so much carbon dioxide in the air making it easy for plants to grow, but when its all buried underground not much complex things can evolve, the earth has almost never been as life poor as when humans appeared.

That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.

Fossil fuels were just a booster that let us skip 2 centuries.

I've always wondered if the Great Filter is a Buddhist scenario: attachment is suffering, and the ultimate attachment is attachment to going on living and reproducing, so perhaps a civilization eventually becomes wise enough to choose extinction. But that is perhaps a subconscious attempt to find an optimistic explanation, unlike a "lotus eater" one!

Buddhists have been trying to master desire for a very long time. Who knew the answer was just to build a better LLM.

I tend to think the nature of desire is that it's never satisfied. The Red Queen says run as fast as you can to stay where you are and twice as fast again to get anywhere.

"Everyone will not just" probably applies to aliens as well so I've never accepted any of the explanations that involve "everyone just wireheading" or "everyone just living in VR" or whatever. There will always be individuals and groups that reject even the majority convictions and proclivities, meek as they are, they will inherit their earths.

Damn, I just made a similar comment before reading this one.

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