Technology is but one small part
of what it will take to gear up for IPF and planetary colonialism. Another
aspect of becoming a space faring species, other than technology, is our
ability to successfully pass through something referred to as “The Great
Filter”.
The concept of the great filter was first proposed in 1996 by Robin Dale Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University.
Robinson argued that the failure
to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies
that something is wrong with one or more of the arguments from various
scientific disciplines that the appearance of intelligent life is probable.
Robinson proposed a series of
“filters” through which a species must pass to attain interplanetary
colonization status. When this is considered in the context of the Fermi Paradox
and the Kardashev scale, it’s easy to see how difficult the challenge has been
to get to where we are now.
This diagram is a representation
of the great filter, the Kardashev scale and the Fermi Paradox, and how one
interlinks with another to produce the conundrum of a lack of intelligent,
space faring neighbors in our galaxy.
The Fermi paradox, named after
Italian-American physicist Enrico Fermi, is the apparent contradiction between
the lack of evidence for extraterrestrial civilizations and various high
estimates for their probability
The Kardashev scale is a method
of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the
amount of energy they are able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet
astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964.
According to Kardashev’s scale,
civilizations are categorized as:
- A Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.
- A Type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization—can use and control energy at the scale of its planetary system.
- A Type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy
Carl Sagan, an American
astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist,
author, and science communicator estimated humanity was at around 0.7 in this
scale back in 1973. Some estimate, like theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, we
might only be anywhere between 100 and 200 years away from graduating to a Type
1
The great filter says how we got
here, the Kardashev scale says where we are in our development and the Fermi
Paradox says we are lucky to have achieved this much.
Now that you have an idea as to
the theoretical challenges a species faces before becoming a space faring people, let’s move forward to actually planning a successful transition to
becoming one.
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