Our Likely Future Filter: World Govt
The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away. Given that we see a vast universe of simple dead matter (~10^24 planets) not so evolved, this filter must be enormous. A few years ago I helped worked out a better math model of it.
A key question is: how much of this filter remains ahead of us. And my best guess is: a substantial amount. It is not a try-try type step like many prior hard steps, as that would take hundreds of millions of years. It is more of a try-once step, that we either pass or fail within a cosmically short time. And that filter is mainly: the risk of a stable restrictive world govt.
For a long time, the world has seen increasing talk, travel, and trade, and as a result world culture has been merging, changing fast, becoming less adaptive, and more focused on moral outrage. State governance has increased in capacity, scope, scale, and centralization. The obvious long-term prediction to make here is that such trends will continue, moving us toward a relatively-“totalitarian” world-scale government, which intervenes more strongly and morally in more areas of life, and is more competent at achieving its ends, including repressing dissent that might end it.
Yes, our civilization may fall, due to cultural drift and govt rot, with a new world civilization taking its place. But these trends seem likely to continue across subsequent civilizations. They also seem likely to continue if human level AIs come to dominate society.
Over the longer run, I see four key end points. The first is where relatively-free interstellar expeditions successfully leave Earth (really the Solar System) to colonize other stars, soon resulting in a galaxy of sufficient range and cultural variety to restart a healthy process of cultural evolution. However, this leaves Earth civilization vulnerable to having to soon after contest control of Earth with arbitrarily-strange and powerful descendants of those colonists.
The second endpoint is a catastrophe so severe that Earth doesn’t revive a new civilization in the half billion years it has left to support advanced life. This is actually quite hard to achieve, as life should evolve again after even quite large disasters. A full scale nuclear war today would not be sufficient.
A third endpoint is where interstellar expeditions head out, but so heavily and permanently constrained by Earth govt as to prevent them from contesting for control of Earth, or begetting a galaxy of healthy cultural evolution. I find this scenario pretty unlikely, as it seems crazy hard, but I include it for completeness.
The fourth and final endpoint is of an increasingly stable and entrenched, and thus immortal, Earth world govt that successfully prevents colonization expeditions from leaving. After technological innovation runs out and is no longer a thing, this govt wouldn’t need to be particular flexible or innovative; it would just need to maintain its capacities and control of Earth.
The future part of our great filter is all of the processes that lead to these last three endpoints, instead of the first. And the last of these four endpoints seems to me the biggest contribution to this future filter. So if you’d like us to spread out to the stars, a stable restrictive world govt seems the biggest obstacle to worry about in the long run.
For example, as I discussed in may last post, creating better governance mechanisms might help us to fix cultural drift and speed us to the first endpoint of robust interstellar colonization. If such better governance was directed by relatively adaptive values. But directed by other values, it might instead speed us to that last endpoint of an entrenched Earth govt that blocks such expansion. The fate that likely befell the aliens behind UFOs, if some UFOs have actually been aliens.