So you know the Great Filter, right?
It’s what happens when you look up at the stars and ask “Where the fuck is everyone”.
There are so many planets out there, yet it’s radio silent. The intelligent life to planet ratio is really, bad. So far we’re the only ones.
You gotta ask, why?
Enter, the Great Filter. Something, at some point in the pipeline, prevents planets from developing and maintaining intelligent life capable of electromagnetic communication.
We don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a quirk of chemistry that makes the chance of multicellular life forming ridiculously low. Maybe it’s a quirk of biology that makes sapience incredibly rare. Maybe it’s a hyper intelligent space worm that eats any civilisation that makes too much noise. Maybe it’s runaway climate change.
The thing is, we really don’t want to be on the wrong side of that filter, because that suggests that an imminent demise is in our civilisation’s future. And with every discovery of non-intelligent life on other planets, it becomes increasingly likely that we’re on the wrong side of that filter.
Enter, the recent discovery of life on Venus. It means that we’re much more likely to be on the wrong side.
But, watching that debate tonight, I began to feel a sense of relief. At least if we’re on the wrong side of the filter, it’s not as though we’re wasting a once-in-a-galaxy chance. We’re just yet another civilisation that failed to get past that filter. I can live with being unexceptionally mediocre.
I mean, I don't see it as that unlikely. A consistent interest in a vision of expansion is in and of itself a feat, especially over millions of years, and more than that it's entirely within the realm, if not outright very likely, that sapient species in the industrialized, space-faring level of existence just aren't common. As you lower the numbers, the likelihood of them going "yeah, fuck taking a million years to accomplish something" as a whole becomes more and more plausible.
The science of nanotech is also looking less amazing than initially thought, what with needing to keep them continuously powered, running into barriers of just how small you can make a computer and have it follow complex commands and so there's that, and uploading also comes into certain barriers already well-tread by anyone who's dipped into existential philosophy and Ship of Theseus and yadda yadda you almost certainly know the arguments and are probably bored of them by now. Rapidly self-improving AI is... Well, I just don't expect the Yudkowskian vision of a singularity sparking superintelligence that will kick us all the way up the Kardashev scale.
Hell, if you want to move away from the problem of no relativity cheating, there's all sorts of other problems. If you want a space-faring species, you have so many hurdles to overcome. Naturally aquatic? Well, water and fluids in general are a lot heavier than gases and also a very disruptive to sensitive equipment. Carnivore or similar tertiary consumer? Good luck forming a sustainable urban society without causing a massive ecological collapse even faster than humans can. Hell, we don't even know if any of our senses are common out there in the cosmos. Sight seems almost mandatory if you're going out to space - optics are basically a necessity to let you know there is shit up there. Then of course when you're outside your ship, sound's not particularly useful since it needs a vector to travel through Maybe some sort of radio wave sensitivity would help. Of course a species would also need to be sturdy enough to stand the force of take-off into space, and also not die from extended time in zero-g (a problem we ourselves face). Could be there are plenty of species we would consider, in some way, intelligent and even sapient that just can't leave their planet for one reason or another and we are an anomaly on that front, being not so much 'suited' to space travel as... more capable of it?
Or maybe there is a lot of spacefaring life but it's all so alien that even their structures and priorities pertaining to those structures are so vastly different from our own that we wouldn't even recognize what they've made as the product of an intelligent species. I've been mulling this over while very tired so my point has probably been muddled severely. Sorry.