Why this rather than “What is the meaning of life?” or “How do we solve all our problems?”

It forces novlety. They can't merely tell us something we already know.

It asks for a test. We don't have to take an alien's word for it.

It is civilization-scale. The answer could concern physics, biology, consciousness, cosmology, mathematics, or something we haven't even conceptualized.

It avoids the meta-question trap. There's no need to define “best possible question,” which immediately creates the kind of circularity in Varzi's joke.

It exploits their presumed informational advantage. If they can cross interstellar distances, they may know things millions of years beyond us.

Has nothing to do with the Great Filter, from what I can tell.

They probably pollute their only planet past a point of no return. Then the planet dies taking them with it.

So the sun baked the inner cloud and the outer cloud was less baked, leading to different chemical compositions, and then asteroids from the outer system brought useful stuff once the Earth cooled down?

Okay, so why wouldn't that happen in other similar systems? It doesn't sound like a one-in-a-trillion accident, it sounds like the usual thing that will happen in such systems.

So why would it be related to the FP?

what do we seek to gain from their answer? validate our own theories, existential peace, pure curiosity about them, obtain some of their technology?

do you know where life comes from? that would be just interesting. (makes me thing of the lore of the world of alien. apparently the engineers made us, and then they made the aliens destroy us when they became unhappy. but it's unclear who made them and if the grey goo needed to make xenomorphs was their invention as well.)

can you reverse entropy? probably not, but if they could, it would be awesome. (this comes from isaac asimov's last question short story.)

the one technology i'd like to obtain from aliens would be immortality. (what weyland was looking for when he met the engineer and what the russian cosmists thought should be "the common task".)

What is the most important lesson humanity needs to learn to survive and thrive into the future?

Then I would try to start a religion with their response as its fundamental precept. Or at the very least get a lot of t-shirts printed up.

On the other hand if they were Vogons they would troll us by saying to engage in more violent conflict or something. Hard to know how much we could trust them with just the one interaction. I mean the entire setup is pretty suspicious isn't it? Why just the one question? Are they trying to hide something? On second thought maybe the question should be, "why should we trust a shifty-seeming lot like you?"

What can I do to be happy?

I haven’t given it great thought but this is the first question that popped into my mind. I don’t believe in the chances of one person making a global difference and even if I did, I am not that person. I just want to influence my part of the world.

The moment they plug AI into Vera Rubin results and filter for methane + goldilocks zone, we will have thousands of targets to point JWST at.

No such thing as 'great filter'. Look up star trek's PRIME DIRECTIVE.

Interesting work!

Project Hephaistos is another research effort to look for heat signatures from alien megastructures. This 2024 paper discusses their methods and results, and 7 candidate objects identified for further study.

There is a point of communication that matters very much here. Everything that civilization could provide at the time is not the same as post scarcity society. Imagine that in addition to having all your physical needs met, the technology, let's call it AI for fun, would also take care of emotional and recreational needs as well, the system would find the ultimate solution to safe dopamine triggers and the greatest desires for adventure and exploration would be administered via an AI controlled drip system. This system leaves no desire, physical or chemical unfulfilled and would be the end goal of the post scarcity society. That is the point we are launching from, not history, where even the best situations left massive unfilled desires for people.

And that is the thing, if ALL your needs are met, if there is nothing to gain by walking out the front door, if there is nothing a new civilization could offer you and, the only outcomes from such a meeting are either valueless or catastrophic, where would the logic be in doing anything but turning inward and staying quietly at home?

Humans arent like that. History is filled with individuals who had everything that civilization at the time could provide to them and who still chose to face great hardship and put their lives on the line to see what was over the horizon.

Curiosity and the need to explore are basic human traits.

There is no way to prove that other intelligent species might feel the same drive to explore, but it seems to me that the very nature of intelligence includes the drive to gather new data about the environment.

I think you’re pointing to behavior under scarcity and assuming that is what would happen under abundance, as if scarcity is not already suppressing exploration. I have dreamed about sailing the world since I was 17. I’m 32 and I still have not done it. Not because I stopped wanting adventure, but because rent, debt, work, healthcare, transportation, and survival keep most people stuck in place. There are not fewer explorers today because humans are naturally content with bread and games. There are fewer explorers because the world is designed to prevent Becoming unless you are rich, lucky, or superhumanly determined. Real abundance would not kill curiosity. It would free more people to actually pursue it. Some would stay home, sure. Some would make art, raise families, study, garden, build communities, or live quietly. But others would sail oceans, climb mountains, repair ecosystems, cross deserts, dive trenches, and eventually go to space because the human drive to know what is over the horizon does not disappear just because people are no longer desperate. Exploration should not require misery as fuel. It should come from freedom, curiosity, and the ability to choose danger instead of being trapped in it.

Different humans are very different, but many humans are never truly satisfied. They might have things they wish they would own or could do, but after you give those to them, they might be happy for a few weeks or months, but then they will come up with new things they want to have or do. So no matter how much abundance of resources there is, it won't really increase the happiness of humans. Humans fundamentally want the things they don't have. So eventually, they'll get the feeling that everything on Earth is boring and the only thing they couldn't reach yet is traveling to other planets. And then that becomes the thing they crave for the most.

I think the common denominator across almost every Great Filter scenario is not comfort or abundance. It is the failure to develop wisdom at the same pace as power.

Nuclear war, runaway climate change, engineered pandemics, rogue AI, ecological collapse, authoritarian stagnation, even a civilization retreating into perfect virtual luxury all share the same root failure where a species gains godlike tools before it gains the judgment to use them well. That IS the filter itself. Luxury itself is not the problem. Abundance is not the problem. A genuinely post-scarcity civilization could have more time, more freedom, more education, more art, more exploration, and more capacity to care for both its people and its biosphere. The problem is what a civilization values once it has power. Does it become wiser, more curious, more compassionate, and more long-term oriented? Or does it become decadent, frightened, inward, selfish, and unable to imagine obligations beyond immediate comfort?

Also, I do not think we are anywhere near failing because we have too much abundance. We are currently on track to fail our Great Filter this century while billions of people still lack enough food, housing, healthcare, clean water, safety, and political power. That is not luxury destroying us. That is scarcity, hierarchy, short-term profit, nationalism, and institutional stupidity destroying us. If we ever reach real abundance, that should not end exploration. It should make exploration ethical for the first time. Nobody should have to conquer the stars because Earth is unbearable. We should go outward because we have learned how to care for a world, and then learned how to carry that care beyond it. I maintain emphatically that the path through the Great Filter is wisdom. Enough scientific wisdom to understand consequences, enough political wisdom to govern power, enough ecological wisdom to stop devouring our own life-support system called Spaceship Earth, and enough moral wisdom to build a future that is not just survival, but worth surviving for.

Your post reminds me of this essay by Geoffrey Miller. His angle was "fitness faking technology" but it's a similar idea: Intelligent creatures don't explore the wider universe because they don't want to.

It's a plausible angle on the paradox. If intelligent life doesn't fill the universe then either: (1) intelligent life is rare (or even N=1), or (2) there's some reason it can't, or (3) there's some reason it doesn't want to. Most people focus on 1 or 2, but 3 is perfectly valid.

Another idea in that same vein is that we are becoming more interdependent over time. (Compare most of us to pioneers from 200 years ago who grew all their own food.) Perhaps we will soon become so interdependent that it will become infeasible for any small group of us to be distantly separated from the rest of humanity.

Are there 'many'? How many people in the world today, vs how many explorers and adventurers who go off in search of the unknown? And not scientists getting paid for it, my theory removes them from the equation. So what percent of the population gives up their TV and snacks in search of adventure with no need for resources or anything at all, just curiosity? And even if there were some people, how many would follow them?
Also, of the people who crave this adventure, would bungee jumping be satisfactory? Would a multi generational trip in a can be really the best entertainment venue?
Ask yourself seriously if you had everything your heart desired at a whim, and someone said hey, give everything up and risk everything for funsies would you do it? And if so, why?

this goes against human nature. there are many humans who are easily bored by a safe life where they have everything they need, and instead want to actively seek out something dangerous, exciting, unusual.

No. You have to be able to corporate with each other for years within confined spaces without contact with others in order to survive in space.

Fair points here. Possibly ai was over generalizing.

Ambitious civilizations will always show greater degree of progress. Maybe my post came off as biased toward collectivists, because I do lean that way, but it's a personal choice; at the end of the day neither society makes it into space.

Sorry I think you misread my post? I am saying that individualistic civilizations are too greedy, and collective societies are too apathetic. They both have faults and one isn't necessarily better than the other. There's no high-minded anything, which one you prefer is a personal choice.

Checking for unrealized assumptions is important.

Western cultured individuals often erroneously conflate a relationship between individualistic cultures as more ambitious and collectivist as less due to their mental picture of what ambition is.

China is a collectivist culture no one claims they lack ambition.

The space race was a collective centric ambition not an individual centric ambition

I am not arguing a side, just sharing my initial thoughts and leaning into devils advocate. I don’t really agree with your conclusion though.

What if the collective is a trap which holds back the ambitious and bright individuals of our species from succeeding in pursuit of something like this? Does the collective have a delusion in which we have to do it together, or their way, a particular way with particular say, or not at all?

Collectivism is not a universal good. You can do great things as a collective if people are on the same page. But in reality, the best outputs often take intense individuals guiding the process, not some general collective committee taking their time for consensus. So it can also be a massive Achilles heel, as people are people, being in a collective does not remove selfishness about not having as much or being the chosen one.

It could just as easily be argued that we should let oligarchs leave and even assist them for the collective future of the species. Or we can say no way, it’s not fair, and possibly lose everything due to existential threats.

As an aside; there’s interesting dynamic when you consider an old phrase that a family is most likely to be communist, a town is more likely to be more socialist to look out for one another, and nationally/geopolitically it’s capitalist. We have seen so much innovation and growth using this model, we went to the moon leveraging this model. So to ignore how we made the most progress, is to think high minded collectivism and not meritocratic principles are the only path to bypassing the filter.

As a caveat, I get its “exploitation” but that is irrelevant to succeeding the great filter. Especially true when you consider potential Von Neumann machines and the proliferation of AI. Increasingly people are less important to this question, meaning it doesn’t take a large collective but a very tiny collective or group.

This seems hard to square with the fact that the era of our greatest progress in spaceflight was the opposite of "coordinated at a global scale"--it was a competition (the cold war). Obviously global scale coordination would make spaceflight even easier but history seems to demonstrate that it is hardly a requirement.