this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. As a 2015 article put it, "If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Personally I think it's photosynthesis. Life itself developed and spread but photosynthesis started an inevitable chain of ever-greater and more-efficient life. I think a random chain of mutations that turns carbon-based proto-life into something that can harvest light energy is wildly unlikely, even after the wildly unlikely event of life beginning in the first place.

I have no data to back that up, just a guess.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (11 children)

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 star system, but if the mitochondria-like symbiotic capture never happens for those extraterrestrial organisms, then complex life is probably unlikely to develop.

[โ€“] ChewTiger 2 points 5 months ago

Good answer. This seemed relevant enough to share, it's certainly interesting. https://newatlas.com/biology/life-merger-evolution-symbiosis-organelle/

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