📺️ Brian Cox: The terrifying possibility of the Great Filter
So I don’t see any reason in principle why we couldn’t become an interplanetary, interstellar species other than potentially our own stupidity. And I think that probably, it could be one of the reasons why we don’t see any other civilizations around. It could be that our knowledge, our scientific prowess exceeds our wisdom, exceeds our political skill. It could be that once a civilization develops the means to destroy itself in the form–for example, of nuclear weapons or biological weapons or maybe some kind of a lack of control of AI, who knows–it may be that once a civilization acquires that technical know-how, then it goes ahead and destroys itself essentially inexorably because it’s just too difficult politically to run a civilization that has the power to destroy itself. If you look back through our recent history, there’ve been several occasions that we know about, that I know about and you know about, where we came very close to destroying ourselves, or at least setting us back to the Stone Age, basically. The Cuban Missile Crisis, well-documented events in the 1980s, for example, where there could have been nuclear launches and weren’t, and I’m sure there are many others that we don’t know about. There’s the challenge of climate change.
We’re completely incapable of coming together at the moment as a global civilization to address that challenge. That could set our civilization back. Biological weapons, the threat of AI, we seem to be completely incapable of regulating those threats.
So it might just be almost a law of nature. Things like us [chuckles], things that can build an industrial civilization, are just inherently too stupid to get out there to the stars. And I wouldn’t put that past us.
The video title references one of the different hypothesis presented, not the one discussed in the above quote. I just liked the comically nihilistic turns of phrase in that bit. The entire video is well worth the time.