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.

  • smb
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    5 months ago

    and the ones finding apes on a planet just short ahead or into the beginning of those 10000 years might think “well lets teach them how to stack stones and let them call us gods for just showing some of our million years old and cheap replicated tech gadgets pewpew, how amusing! but now lets go on, this planet has water but way too much oxygen and also there is axial precession that would change weather over only few hundrets of thousands of years if not less, not the planet of choice for eternals like us, duh!”