re: #136 First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

The Great Filter

It’s very anthropocentric but I think this has significant merit.

I’ve always thought that the issue was with #9: technologically advanced societies self-destructed before they could develop a means to travel outside their solar system.

Most science fiction stories that adhered to our current knowledge about how slow travel is between star systems overcame that with two alternative approaches: (a) the Passenger mechanism of placing travelers in hibernation or (b) multi-generational ships that provided all the food/oxygen/fuel required to make these long journeys. Either of these should certainly be feasible within a few hundred years, assuming we haven’t suffered the apocalypse. But first we would have to use unmanned craft to determine that there are in fact habitable worlds out there.