What if the real filter is a greed filter - those civilizations that keep playing "Darwinian" games of arm races and egotistic resource exploitation do not get a chance to venture and explore the space beyond their native star system; at best they get stuck on their own planet, without resources to get off and spread.
Actual space colonization might turn out to be far from our "Star Wars" fantasies. By the time we would be able to contact an extraterrestrial civilization, we (and they) would value any germ of life and energy preciously, would be desperate to join forces for continued existence, and would do anything to prevent destroying anything of each other, let alone to turn the "inferior" organization into dust. What the universe is certainly not lacking is dust...
So it's likely that most eco-systems which rely on competition will crash. Every so often you'll get a planet that makes it through, but it won't be a common happening.
Human intelligence must be facing Malthusian predicaments headlong for the first time. Local over-exploitation dramas must have happened many times before, with various outcomes: migration to (or concurring) other region was probably most frequent solution. But for the first time really, we won't have the option to migrate, so it's gonna be "interesting". We should not rely on the empirical intuition that laisse faire nature runs no real risk of catastrophic collapse.
For quite a few centuries, around the Roman invasion, between 10th-14th century and from the 16th onward, France's population remained near the Malthusian maximum. And it wasn't wars that kept the population in check, but rather regular famines - due to lack of food. Hardly more Malthusian. Famines didn't cut the population in half like the Black Death, but rather killed a few percentages here and there, the poorest and weakest... And were a regular occurence. Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
European populations have been alternating between increasing (short term) carrying capacity and hitting the limits of existing capacity, with the usual round of death and famine that happens around that point.
The challenge this time seems to be to manage the death and famine intelligently, rather than have them just happen.
That's no proof at all. You still read about the Zeno's paradoxs, yet they are no paradox whatsoever. "The womb that spawned that thing is fertile yet"
Egoistic resource exploitation could be as easily positive as negative, because less resources are wasted on everyday living of many people. Arms races can help technological development. Slave labour can help to do things which people don't see as important enough to engage themselves. More effective than competing nations could be of course a plutocracy, which eliminates most old, useless or disabled people, sucks all resources normal people don't need to survive into their pet projects, and has no scruples to send people on deadly risky missions for their entertainment. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahrg
Egoistic resource exploitation could be as easily positive as negative,
Ah, the positive sides of blind selfishness... for some!
because less resources are wasted on everyday living of many people
Right, the "rational" selfishness is nothing but dumb altruism objectively. So many people are working their asses out, for real benefit of few.
Arms races can help technological development.
Perpetum mobile still can't be invented...
What do we need efficiency for, after all? So that we would meet a technological and social collapse sooner?!
Slave labour can help to do things which people don't see as important enough to engage themselves.
Too bad only few will have time to do something "unimportant".
By the way, what did Romans do with their free time?
More effective than competing nations could be of course a plutocracy, which eliminates most old, useless or disabled people, sucks all resources normal people don't need to survive into their pet projects, and has no scruples to send people on deadly risky missions for their entertainment.
We are back to the subject of elites. As they like to marginalize all opinions except of their own, we will be lucky if they get some right ideas just in time :-]
or because there's a quarantine on emerging civilizations.
Isn't that the Star Trek philosophy?
On a rational level, I'd find it supremely arrogant (or a cosmic comedy) to have humanity as the first species at least pondering on interstellar travel...
Yet on interstellar travel, I always get stuck in the quandary of transportation and time. Rumsfeldian "we don't know what we don't know" may offer a pinch of hope, but for a while now I've been leaning to the idea that intelligent life, even if has flowered copiously through the galaxy, is hopelessly stuck, each on their own gyrating piece of rock, each and every one feeling miserably alone. And in space, as the saying goes, no one hears you scream.
And that's what I'd call tragedy.
you are the media you consume.
The former are obviously unlikely, in any form we would recognize.
The latter assume they still use radio as a means of communication, using inefficient, simple codes. Again, if they are using radio at all, the search for information efficiency has already lead them to formats that sound to outsiders like noise. Guess what: The universe is full of radio noise.
Assuming they use radio at all. But would they? Not if they had something better. What would THAT be? Well, perforce we would have no clue--as should be obvious.
The biggest problem, though, is that we imagine them to be like us. But if they are, they have already crashed and burned, leaving no interstellar trace but a century of rapidly fading radio modulations--which no one (being either too primitive or having already crashed) has the sensitivity to catch.
