Once it starts, it can’t be stopped. It’s a roller coaster and there’s no choice but to ride it through to the end.
For us, the ride started about 44 thousand years ago in the upper paleolithic. Some clever prehistoric twit coated their hands in ochre and started slapping the side of a cave wall. They made hand prints, they drew shapes and they painted what they wanted for lunch.
From that moment onward, information wasn’t just a thing that existed in the abstract, or in a linear little compartment like a person or a photon. It transcended all that and took on a life of its own. It seemed so innocent at the time. But if we don’t sort ourselves out, it will destroy us.
The ‘Fermi Paradox’ (which is neither Fermi’s nor a paradox) describes the supposed contradiction between estimates for an abundance of intelligent life in an infinite universe and the apparent lack of it anywhere we look, which to be fair, is not far. It’s a pretty weak little supposition on the best of days. Yet it has led to a slightly more interesting conversation around challenges that might confront a species whilst progressing from primordial sludge to pan galactic super sentient hypothetical organism.
In this conversation, the ‘Great Filter’ is an appellation given to the big huge moment of truth that any, nay every species must encounter, which would explain why billions of years and trillions of light years haven’t led to more obvious signs of intelligent life. Basically, it’s the answer to why there aren’t space aliens buzzing around everywhere.
There is some debate as to whether this event is behind or in front of us. But the general idea is that at a certain point, all species encounter it and it wipes most of them out, creating a scenario where ‘advancement’, at least up to a certain point, increases the likelihood of catastrophic disaster. If this moment is something we’ve already passed, then we can pat ourselves on the back. But if it is something yet to be encountered, then we should worry.
When considering what in actuality the great filter might be, the tendency is to think in terms of the obvious. Cosmic level natural disaster. Apocalyptic war resulting from nuclear weapons. Stuff we recognize as destructive. An event, the survival of which is statistically improbable, thus causing a dramatic, almost complete reduction in the volume of intelligent life from one end to the other.
More recently, it has become popular to think of climate change as the great filter. Possibly even a viral outbreak resulting from population density. But these hypotheses drift in and out of fashion depending on what people are worrying about at the time. They are also very human concerns, reflecting a narrow imagination and a degree of hubris, assuming that “of course” aliens would have the same biology and make the same mistakes we do. They don’t represent the kind of universal challenge the ‘great filter’ seeks to articulate.
To find that, we might have to go a little wider and wonder what might be right under our noses as something that all intelligence would encounter. Not as a mistake, but as a function of existence. Something innate and fundamental to sentience that would invariably entrap everything it touches, whether silicone based crystalline entity, multi-dimensional monstrosity, ethereal energy ball, or Keanu Reeves controlled nano-swarm.
But we only know a few very basic things about life, generally. And even those rest heavily on supposition. We know that once it emerges, it seems to proliferate, spreading out and finding its way into every nook and environmental cranny. We know that it varies beyond imagination, that as a whole it’s remarkably resilient, and we know that by and large it is rich in information of various kinds.
The way we conceptualise it, life represents another layer in the stratification of abstract paradigms. Physics gets weird and makes chemistry. Chemistry get’s weird and makes biology. Biology get’s weird and makes consciousness.
The lines between each paradigm are a little fuzzy, but given enough time, something new emerges from each layer of mess. We have retrospectively drawn boxes around much of it and given them different names.
Amidst all this, it’s convenient to see survival as proof of survivability. We look around and think ourselves miraculous. Therefor the hard part must be done already. This is the instinct that drives the Fermi Paradox, which is, once again, less of a paradox and more of a feeling. We can estimate vaguely how miraculous we are and draw various extrapolations from that.
Surely making life itself must be harder than living.
Yet with each stage, the universe makes things a little trickier. Think of it like the creation of more and more complex rules. At the beginning, anything is possible. But once something happens, it forms the conditions under which everything else must happen. Each ‘paradigm’, so described, has to live in a universe with all the ones that went before. It has to conform to their rules and they all have to live together in some fashion. There are still infinite possibilities. Just not unlimited possibilities. Kind of like how there’s infinite numbers between 1 and 2, none of which is 3.
The rules limit the scope, narrowing the ‘funnel’. But at the same time, there’s no shortage of variation in the space between. In fact, over time, squeezing things together makes them go a little haywire, adding dimensions and further layers of complexity and creating ever weirder and more wonderful combinations. The layered and ever changing evolution of language makes a half decent and readily understandable analogy.
So where does that leave us? Well, something happened 44 thousand years ago. We took the whole thing a step further and it’s reasonable to assume that any species that exists in the same universe and which reaches the level of complexity required to look out towards the stars, with any degree of serious contemplation, would invariably do the same.
We made another universe. One we’ve since labelled ‘media’.
No, not social media. Or at least not only social media. But all media. All mediums. The existence of mass communication as a paradigm that is external, often material and now digital. From expression through cave paintings, to buildings and blog posts. As soon as that first hand print was left behind, it created something distinct from everything that had gone before. Distinct even from verbal communication in that it was independent of the people or intelligence that actually created it. It transcended us. It even transcended time and space, able to facilitate direct communication between individuals thousands of years and kilometres apart.
The moment that happened it added a layer of non-linear complexity to existence that sent the whole thing spiraling wildly out of control. A universe where matter starts throwing particles, enzymes, viruses, sticks and grunts at each other is hard enough. But that was always just an extension of an earlier breakthrough from an earlier funnel. Life itself.
Under the surface a bigger problem was brewing. Lots of little feedback loops. Universes within universes. Negotiating and then transplanting the product of those feedback loops into the material world as independent things like piles of rocks and radio signals, represented the expression of will into and on the universe in a radically different way. It could be said that numerous other forms of life on Earth are in the early stages of precisely the same kind of behaviour and that would be true. But 44 thousand years ago, we planted our foot on the accelerator. In so doing, we created a new paradigm which we are now condemned to interact with and accommodate.
Let’s call it the ‘metaverse’.
By adding another layer to reality, we have inadvertently made it that much more difficult to establish what it actually is. While media and mediums have made things like modern education, philosophy and the scientific method possible, they have also precipitated an explosion of things and ideas and ideas about things. This means wild clashes between wildly different realities.
Some gain traction at a scale that never would have been possible before. Others get crushed underfoot. We often find ourselves under immense fortresses of knowledge built on shaky foundations, that then collapse around our ears. Smashed to bits by some new disruptive or even invasive element, like a single book, or a whole bunch of swords. Accuracy, for all it’s worth, plays only a partial role. The metaverse is its own thing.
Prior to the advent of the metaverse, reality was a comparatively simple matter. We simply had to get a few mates together and talk it over. Any external reference was something natural like a tree or the sun or just another person and creating a shared reality was a matter of direct and ongoing exchange. If something new happened, it was incorporated into the conversation. Ideas and notions were challenged. There was conflict and danger. But it wasn’t epoch shaking and species threatening, because it was limited by space and time to a small group of people in a finite area. The worst that could happen is that we were wrong and we died.
But as capacity grows, so do consequences. The roller coaster moves faster and faster. Once something is written, it becomes a foundation and even a weapon, but it also becomes a liability. Now if something new happens, we have to consult the book.
Today, there are no limits. Feedback loops are everywhere, not just between the mind and the physical world, in the spirit of classical philosophical dualism, but between the mind and the physical world and the metaverse, which then loops endlessly with itself, creating stories about stories and narratives about narratives. Conversations about tweets about blogs about films about books about stories from three hundred years ago, which then impact peoples lives and how they interact with the material world.
Infinite information, creating infinite layers, infinitely replicated, instantly distributed, to anywhere means that the entire human organism is linked, binding our fates together. The internet is the latest and penultimate step in a long history of manifesting social complexity and, as with most developments, it comes as both cause of and solution to numerous contemporary problems.
What we do next will determine our fate.
One option is that the ‘meta-verse’ gets so disconnected and distinctive it runs away from us and we never catch up. Like galaxies at opposite ends of the universe flying away from each other. The reality of every individual is communicated incompletely. The collective reality is formed inadequately. And the resulting rupture prevents humanity from forming any kind of useful consensus on anything, resulting in chaos, disaster and ultimately self-destruction winning out in a grand tug-o-war.
This, I hesitate to say, is the most likely scenario. It is the ‘great filter’ after all. We can see the tell tale signs of these divergent and parallel universes in the media every day. Disinformation, distrust, ‘fake news’ and conspiracy. The world, as diverse and interesting as it is, churned out and presented to us in the narrow dimensions of narrative is a reality unlike anything that actually exists in a material or individual sense and yet we are increasingly dependent — channeling our political, economic, cultural and social lives through it and expecting something sensical to come out the other side.
It’s not unusual. Or particularly new. History is replete with breakdowns in communication. Most of our contemporary problems and even institutions, from capitalism to democracy, are either direct results or attempted resolutions of them. And most of that developed under a comparative slow burn scenario where we were being introduced to one another bit by bit.
Problem is, we’ve never really understood each other properly. We just stumbled forward. But as we approach what seems to be the end of the funnel, it’s all coming to a head. We are being challenged to reconcile our own little universes with that of billions of others through an ever expanding monstrosity of garbled information, that says almost everything all at once.
It’s easy to see how this process would crush even the most enlightened of alien civilizations, so it’s certainly no shock it threatens to destroy us. Realities need reconciling. Humanity won’t survive just because one clever person has a brilliant idea. The ability to produce knowledge, or anything else for that matter, means nothing if it can’t be shared.
Thankfully, this illuminates the narrow route to survival. Communication creates and solves problems in tandem. The only way to break through the great funnel and not get spit out or smashed into the sides is to learn how to share better. To somehow adjust ourselves not just to the corporeal universe we inhabit, but the non-corporeal one we’ve created.
In order to achieve that, we have to make the metaverse a markedly better, healthier place. We can’t eliminate it. We’re stuck in it, long past the event horizon. But we can find ways to more closely align it with reality. Not just in the scientific sense by fact checking obvious nonsense, although certainly that, but by portraying people and places as they really are and communicating individual realities more effectively. To this end, we have to feed more into the monster, in far greater detail and with far greater nuance, essentially democratizing it’s creation. Greater equity and symmetry in both access and input to the metaverse, improves the aggregate output.
The trade off is that we also have to be willing to feed from it and share in the reality that it then depicts. To almost become one with it. That idea might sound abhorrent at the moment, because the present media universe is such a bizarre monstrosity. But that is precisely why everything hinges on bringing it into greater alignment with the world we actually inhabit and experience day to day. It is a process that is already underway. The symptoms might be scary and chaotic, but only because we are preposterously maladjusted.
While this process might seem like a uniquely human challenge on the surface, there is an argument to be made that it would be a universal constant for intelligent life.
For starters, media is the means by which we conduct and have thus far defined our search for extra-terrestrials, via radio satellite. So at the very least it’s built into a conventional understanding.
As for the unconventional. In some form or another, organisms have to communicate with one another in order to cooperate. The fuzzy line between a singular and collective might even be indicated by the effectiveness of that communication. Theoretical non-carbon based life would likely fall into the same trap, as basic chemistry is, in essence, the exchange of information.
So we can say with an almost complete lack of absurdity that should life of the non carbon-based variety arise, it too would have something analogous to communication which, like our own, would increase in complexity the further down the funnel things went.
At a certain point, likely before it arrived at pan-galactic omnipresence, it would have to develop a means of understanding and reflecting upon itself. A collective memory and consciousness, of sorts. It’s very own ‘metaverse’. It is theoretically possible that this might take the form of some innate biological property rather than scratching things on walls, but the result would be the same. A shared and distinctive universe that had to at first evolve and then be reconciled in order to function effectively.
It might be the case that achieving this requires a level of technology and sophistication not yet available to us. The written or spoken word has always been a path to creating new worlds, rather than describing existing ones, so we can’t simply lean on more of that. What may be required is the ability to share thoughts and sentiments, ideas and imaginings with better clarity. A point of almost telepathic synergy in human consciousness. Not necessarily a hive mind in the borg-like sense. But a hive-of-minds nonetheless. A collection of individuals capable of high definition exchange, record keeping and understanding could become a genuinely self aware organism for which destructive conflict becomes practically non existent.
One, becoming many, becoming one.
However perfect self awareness is something we are incapable of, even as individuals. The chances of achieving this level of harmony and communication species-wide is practically nil. In terms of raw survivability though, escaping the other end of the funnel is just a matter of ‘good enough’. We don’t have to be perfect. Perfect isn’t even a thing.
We just have to be a lot better.
It might be nice to think of the ‘great filter’ as a singular challenge. One barrier and moment in time that we break through to find relative safety on the other side. But increasingly it seems like it’s an almost never ending battle. One we started when we first put pen to paper (or hand print to cave wall as it were) and will only finish when we can learn to live with each other — creating a metaverse that genuinely reflects and aggregates our shared reality.
This would mean that overcoming the ‘great filter’ or ‘great funnel’ is a task far more immense and excruciating that previously supposed. One deserving of the moniker. It would also take on a dual meaning as media is the great filter of life and ‘life’. The lens through which we see and survive the world.
Perhaps, it is absurd to ever imagine that such a thing might ever be achieved by anyone, accounting for a vast and seemingly empty cosmos. Perhaps the funnel is more akin to a black hole and we are doomed to be annihilated by it. Or perhaps it will go on getting harder and more complicated ad infinitum with no end in sight.
And what if we do make it through? If the evolution of intelligent life is one great slog and this is the next. What comes after? What great challenges befall a unified species?
It might be impossible to tell. Some things only emerge in hindsight. But for now, if there is a greatest-of-all challenge to navigating existence in the universe as a sentient species, then ‘the great funnel’ must surely be it.