It also feels like there's one pretty damn critical building block of modern society and space travel that would be galactically rare: hydrocarbon fuel.
If we didn't have oil, coal, etc in the insane quantities we have it in, we'd be nothing. It singularly enables global transportation, which has enabled global information sharing, which enables everything else. Its critical in the production of plastic, which is the most important material humanity has developed, period. Its the only way we know how to get into space. Its unlikely that planet-scale deployments of renewable tech like wind & solar would be possible without oil; to enable the manufacturing, mining, deployment, and tertiary required systems like batteries.
If we had evolved in the first hundred-million-year phase of life on the planet, there would have been no significant life before us to rot underground for a few hundred million years to make the hydrocarbons we use today. Or, there would have been so little that the reservoirs of it would be used up after a few decades or a century of burning it in lamps (every planet gets dark!), before the intelligent life realizes its true value (propulsion and plastic).
Another totally unrelated aspect of the problem I think about: Take the IQ spectrum, split in half at 100, and kill all the humans on the >100 side. The humans that are left (<100) would be very unlikely to leave the planet's surface in their lifetimes, and because genetics are a big factor in inherent intelligence, their ability to get to space has been delayed possibly indefinitely.
Put this another way: Space travel is on the razor's edge of our intelligence capacity. And its not enough to have a three standard deviation genius come along every couple generations; that's just a Galileo being born in the 1500s, they'll discover and document things for sure. But it takes many highly intelligent, motivated, and enabled (see: Oil) people to unlock space flight, computing, nuclear power, etc. Its easy to imagine even a human civilization that sits with a median IQ of what we'd say is 60-70, and they literally never pursue these kinds of high technology. But you can get really far with 60-70 IQ. You get nearly all of the evolutionary advantages a 100+ IQ person would have, you can make hunting traps, outsmart prey, you can farm, even smith and mine minerals; but you probably aren't sending rockets into orbit.
My take is: The universe and even our galaxy is probably surprisingly full of bronze-age era civilizations; and they've probably been that way for centuries. The Great Filter is most probably a combination of Ultra-High Quantities of Hydrocarbon Fuel, plus widespread median Academic-level Intelligence.
If we didn't have oil, coal, etc in the insane quantities we have it in, we'd be nothing. It singularly enables global transportation, which has enabled global information sharing, which enables everything else. Its critical in the production of plastic, which is the most important material humanity has developed, period. Its the only way we know how to get into space. Its unlikely that planet-scale deployments of renewable tech like wind & solar would be possible without oil; to enable the manufacturing, mining, deployment, and tertiary required systems like batteries.
If we had evolved in the first hundred-million-year phase of life on the planet, there would have been no significant life before us to rot underground for a few hundred million years to make the hydrocarbons we use today. Or, there would have been so little that the reservoirs of it would be used up after a few decades or a century of burning it in lamps (every planet gets dark!), before the intelligent life realizes its true value (propulsion and plastic).
Another totally unrelated aspect of the problem I think about: Take the IQ spectrum, split in half at 100, and kill all the humans on the >100 side. The humans that are left (<100) would be very unlikely to leave the planet's surface in their lifetimes, and because genetics are a big factor in inherent intelligence, their ability to get to space has been delayed possibly indefinitely.
Put this another way: Space travel is on the razor's edge of our intelligence capacity. And its not enough to have a three standard deviation genius come along every couple generations; that's just a Galileo being born in the 1500s, they'll discover and document things for sure. But it takes many highly intelligent, motivated, and enabled (see: Oil) people to unlock space flight, computing, nuclear power, etc. Its easy to imagine even a human civilization that sits with a median IQ of what we'd say is 60-70, and they literally never pursue these kinds of high technology. But you can get really far with 60-70 IQ. You get nearly all of the evolutionary advantages a 100+ IQ person would have, you can make hunting traps, outsmart prey, you can farm, even smith and mine minerals; but you probably aren't sending rockets into orbit.
My take is: The universe and even our galaxy is probably surprisingly full of bronze-age era civilizations; and they've probably been that way for centuries. The Great Filter is most probably a combination of Ultra-High Quantities of Hydrocarbon Fuel, plus widespread median Academic-level Intelligence.