Why Alien Life Would be our Doom – The Great Filter

Finding alien life on a distant planet would be amazing news – or would it? If we are not the only intelligent life in the universe, this probably means our days are numbered and doom is certain.

What if the great filter is simply a technological impossibility? What if, there are plenty of civilizations out there, but all are thousands/millions of light years away, so communication is literally impossible. We have never found anything (to my knowledge) that surpasses the speed of light, and the speed of light is relatively slow on the galactic scale. The “great filter” may just mean that species’ can never and will never travel to other stars, not because they are annihilated but because the technology required to do so would have to be so advanced it may as well be impossible.