I feel like this kind of thing can create a “Great Filter” situation. Tech seems to work well and most babies are genetically engineered now, but wait, why is everyone dying off before 30? Nope, it’s not the genetic engineering, and anyone who says that is a tinfoil hat wearer. Just look at all of these studies funded by big corporations and captured government agencies who have financial interests in its success—you’re not one of those anti-science idiots are you? Ok, actually, the data is in and it is the genetic engineering. Humanity is dying off, not reproducing fast enough, and will be extinct soon, but it made a bunch of billionaires even richer, so all good, right?
If that were the case, wouldn’t the ones who didn’t get the genetic engineering be far more likely to reproduce and stride along with natural selection? I have a hard time seeing that event ever happening, short of the human population en mass deciding to engineer every baby on the planet before a single generation of which could have lived life and been studied for its effects.
What I think is more likely as a great filter is humans eventually settling on the idea that organic matter is really terrible medium for life. So, something with much more longevity, strength, efficiency, and brain power gets synthesized and we move in. At a certain point, wouldn’t biological life die off because life tends to yield to its more evolved forms? If us meat bags had to compete, how could we?
and I think there are more interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox than the Great Filter. For example, the expansion of space not being something we can overcome in travel. Or, maybe the way we perceive space is just so anthropic—we’re making poor assumptions about other beings.
I feel like this kind of thing can create a “Great Filter” situation. Tech seems to work well and most babies are genetically engineered now, but wait, why is everyone dying off before 30? Nope, it’s not the genetic engineering, and anyone who says that is a tinfoil hat wearer. Just look at all of these studies funded by big corporations and captured government agencies who have financial interests in its success—you’re not one of those anti-science idiots are you? Ok, actually, the data is in and it is the genetic engineering. Humanity is dying off, not reproducing fast enough, and will be extinct soon, but it made a bunch of billionaires even richer, so all good, right?
If that were the case, wouldn’t the ones who didn’t get the genetic engineering be far more likely to reproduce and stride along with natural selection? I have a hard time seeing that event ever happening, short of the human population en mass deciding to engineer every baby on the planet before a single generation of which could have lived life and been studied for its effects.
What I think is more likely as a great filter is humans eventually settling on the idea that organic matter is really terrible medium for life. So, something with much more longevity, strength, efficiency, and brain power gets synthesized and we move in. At a certain point, wouldn’t biological life die off because life tends to yield to its more evolved forms? If us meat bags had to compete, how could we?
and I think there are more interesting answers to the Fermi Paradox than the Great Filter. For example, the expansion of space not being something we can overcome in travel. Or, maybe the way we perceive space is just so anthropic—we’re making poor assumptions about other beings.