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Cake day: September 18th, 2023

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  • A Great Filter is way, way bigger than that. Something that prevents a civilization from being able to expand into space. This includes things like “you can’t make fire on this planet and therefore are never able to learn to work metal” and “supernovas sterilize regions of space before species can leave them”.

    Even the worst ecological disaster - one that kills billions - will not prevent humanity from eventually recovering, rebuilding, and expanding.

    Under no circumstances (even Cold War mutually assured destruction) can human politics be a Great Filter. Thinking that it can be is small-minded and petty.






  • Boy, Lemmy sucks donkey dick. For every one legitimate answer there are two or three edgelord answers like “capitalism” and “the internet”.

    Here’s an answer that hasn’t come up yet: cooperation among mono cellular organisms. I don’t mean the development of polyp analogues or colonies of single celled organisms; I mean getting down to mitochondria. Brace for wild oversimplification.

    Before mitochondria, life had a hard time creating enough energy to do much more than barely stay alive. The current line of thinking is that one organism ate another and didn’t digest it. The two organisms worked symbiotically, one handled energy production and the other handled getting food and staying alive.

    Just about every living thing utilizes mitochondria and if the current idea that mitochondria were actually symbiotic organisms is true, that means that what was likely a chance “sparing” of prey is the underpinning of all complex life.

    The odds of that happening are ridiculously low. There could be simple life in tons of places even within our own tar system, but if the mitochondria-like symbiotic capture never happens for those extraterrestrial organisms, then complex life is probably unlikely to develop.