The Great Filter is an astronomical rabbit hole that stems from atheists asking why we’ve not seen any other life in the universe. It starts with the Drake Equation, which tries to quantify all the hurdles an extraterrestrial organism might face on its way to communicating with humans - the resulting number is still quite large, but we haven’t met any aliens, and this curiosity is called Fermi’s Paradox. That in itself is a rich topic for debate, but the issue is that while our world is teeming with life, indeed life on this world is powerful enough to end all life on our world, there is barely a blip of anything else even at pre-conscious levels of life out there in space. When there is a blip, scientists go nuts about it and declare it’s the end of religion and we all need to get together under a global government so we can become Star Trek.
Of course, those blips have never gone anywhere. The image above shows the “Wow” signal, an anomaly found decades ago by a telescope listening for radio waves, and although some maintain it was a “Hello” signal sent out from someone, it has been largely put to rest. It is a dark, silent universe so far. Many reasons have been put forward to explain this. Two of my favourites are the Dark Forest and the Great Filter. The Dark Forest implies that any civilisation powerful enough to span the stars knows that any other civilisation capable of this could wipe them out, so nobody takes the risk of trying to contact other species; an interesting and very roundabout pro-xenophobia argument that feels like something out of Dune or Warhammer 40,000. The Great Filter is no less ominous, but focuses more on the home-planet conditions rather than interstellar relations. In this scenario, it is proposed that some sequence of innovations along the way to spaceborne civilisation often results in the civilisation neutralising itself. Leaving one’s planet has hard scientific requirements which also grant the ability to destroy all life on the planet, and it is thought that this level of technology combined with survival pressure is an insurmountable obstacle, and most civilisations that come close will destroy themselves.
All of this theorising deals with enormous timespans. This is what Oswald Spengler would consider typical of Western man’s tendency toward the infinite - we casually deal with quantities that are in no way connected to our experience of reality. This leads to what anthropologists call Deep Time, where our sciences uncover a history so unfathomably old that it is disturbing to think about. Modern humans were walking around Europe when Britain was still connected to the continent before the ice age, which is pretty old, but the Appalachian mountains were around when dinosaurs roamed.
Deep Time, properly understood, is dizzying. It causes severe vertigo to think about how incomprehensibly old everything around us could be. One constant in these depths of human history has been the stars. The zodiac is so old that nobody really knows where it came from, but it is at least as old as Gobekli Tepe, and Graham Hancock (who is nearing Alex Jones levels of vindication) believes it could be as old as the oldest caveman art. Likewise, we don’t really know how old the swastika is, whether it depicts a sunwheel or the passage of the seasons shown by Ursa Major through the year. Nearly all cultures have stories of a catastrophic worldwide flood that reset civilisation. These cultural phenomena may have begun tens of thousands of years ago, well before any evidence of writing that we’ve found. These depths of time, according to orthodoxy, are supposed to be marked only by a slow progression. Humans slowly get smarter and move forward technologically, and nothing interesting happens until we start writing it down (what a coincidence). But there is also evidence of enormous structures all over the world that we are not supposed to think too deeply about. The Yonaguni Monument is supposedly naturally occurring, but you just know what would happen if it was found on another planet.
I say this with no irony, “they” want you to believe that structure is natural. It is but one of many discoveries which beggar belief, and suggest a human past very different from the slow-progression idea we’re taught. The first redpill for many people is the collapse of the Roman empire - a mighty and advanced society brought to its knees. Some then go on to find out about the Bronze Age collapse, to their horror. As of today, you are one of the few to have ever considered the pre-flood collapse at approximately the end of the last major ice age, and this is to say nothing of the possibility of human civilisation during the Late Pleistocene, which would be impossible to find evidence of due to glaciation. In plain language, we have no way of knowing if there was advanced human civilisation before ~12,000 years ago, because climate and geology have wiped that part of history clean. However, every culture has stories of how humans in the past had great spiritual powers that were given from on high but squandered due to our pride and hubris. Imagine for a moment that all air travel stopped. Your children and grandchildren would never go on or see an aeroplane, and you had to describe it to them. Maybe they would get it. But then they’d have to describe it to their grandchildren one day, and within only a few generations aeroplanes become a fantastical myth where ancient people used great unknown powers to fly above the clouds. There are some stories that are simply too fantastic and too widespread to be made up. Maybe all this has happened before. Perhaps we have hit the Great Filter at some time in the past. Does it still await us in the near future?
With all this in mind, the vastness of space and the deep reaches of time, our world seems tiny, and our modern life is naive, dull, and unbelievably self-important. We like to think that we are nearing the Great Filter, or are at the very beginning stages of uniting as a planet to push towards the stars and it will be a hard road forward. But look at the greedy, pompous lunatics running the world today, trying to Build Back Better and give the world a Great Reset, trying to sustain the air of serious 20th century politics while having the practical experience of comedians and drama teachers. This is the Great Filter, in my opinion. We’ve already hit it, and we’re backsliding rapidly. Look at how people who were freaking out about a certain suspicious variant of the common cold have now pivoted to gloating about brinkmanship with nuclear powers. They would put the armies of our nations on the borders of foreign sovereign states, as far from our perforated borders as possible, while our governments fill the vacuum with hostile outsiders. There is no way in hell this goes on to become Star Trek. The Great Reset is the flailing offerings of human sacrifice by Mayan priests as the Spanish conquered South America, it’s the countless bodies found in bogs across Europe, offered up to appease whatever was causing the catastrophic climate changes of history. The best case scenario is non-Western countries maintaining a late 20th century level of technology while the West goes quiet. Our obsession with the infinite is drawing to a close, and Faustian man’s deal must soon be paid. We have hit the Great Filter, and I can only hope that this time we are not committed to the depths of Deep Time and forgotten.