Has The Universe Been Sterilized By The Great Filter?
Why can’t we seem to find any aliens?
Where are all of the aliens? That question has been asked over and over again for generations. The idea that there are no aliens is so confounding that many people believe that there really are aliens among us hiding in plain view. Two-thirds of Americans (65%) believe in intelligent life on other planets despite having no evidence. The reason so many people believe that there must be aliens out there is that the universe is so unbelievably large it feels incomprehensible that there might not be any other living things out there.
In 1996, an economist by the name of Robin Hanson set out to try and answer this question. Where are all of the aliens? He postulated that there must be a common overarching reason that humans had yet to encounter advanced extraterrestrial life (or any extraterrestrial life at all.) He dubbed the thing keeping life in the universe at a minimum as the Great Filter. Something in our existence is filtering out life before it can advance into the stars and make contact with other life forms.
In his paper, Hanson lays out a series of conditions that must be true in order for life to evolve to the point of taking to the stars.
