Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Where is everybody?

If you’re an ET contact faithful take into account a new paper led by Jonathan Jiang of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“The silence of the universe beyond Earth reveals a pattern of both human limitation and steadfast curiosity,” Jiang and colleagues write.

What they postulate is that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society here on Earth advances exponentially towards space exploration.

That disaster doubles as a “Great Filter” – a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other.

Perhaps a reason for the cosmic cold shoulder?

Allen Telescope Array dedicated to astronomical observations and a simultaneous search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
Image credit: Seth Shostak/SETI Institute

Possible scenarios

In the research paper, Jiang and co-authors propose several possible scenarios, including anthropogenic and natural hazards, both of which can be prevented with reforms in individual, institutional and intrinsic behaviors.

They also take into account multiple calamity candidates: nuclear warfare, pathogens and pandemics, artificial intelligence, meteorite impacts, and climate change.

“If extraterrestrial intelligence does exist,” they write, “humanity must self-improve on nearly all accounts to meet and even surpass such others.”

On the other hand, if intelligent life does not appear and perhaps never was “out there” in the first place, “we have some other more philosophical difficulties to juggle – but no less daunting. Our lives are not expendable. We have been treating casualties as casual, nukes as necessary, and large-scale death as inevitable events.”

To read the full paper – “Avoiding the “Great Filter”: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe” – go to:

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2210/2210.10582.pdf

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