The Great Silence: Unpacking the 12 Reasons Why Aliens Aren't Looking For Us
Furthermore, the "Great Filter" hypothesis proposes a barrier so difficult to cross that it acts as an evolutionary bottleneck for life. This filter is an event or series of events that drastically reduces the probability of a species evolving to become an interstellar civilization. The crucial question is whether this filter lies behind us, meaning that the emergence of complex, multicellular, or even intelligent life like our own is an incredibly rare fluke, thus explaining the galactic silence. If we have already passed the Great Filter, then perhaps we are one of the very few civilizations to reach our current stage, and others either never arose or were extinguished long ago.
