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PhilGoetz comments on Astronomy, space exploration and the Great Filter - Less Wrong Discussion
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Actually there is. It just hasn't been thought about AFAIK. The naive belief is that there's safety in numbers, or that catastrophes have local impact. But filters, after all, are disruptions that don't stop locally. World wars. The Black Death. AI. The Earth is already big enough to stop most things that can be stopped locally, except astronomical ones like giant asteroids.
There is a probability distribution of catastrophies of different sizes. If that's a power-law distribution, as it very likely is, and if the big catastrophes are mostly human-caused, as they probably are, it means that the more we spread out, the more likely someone somewhere in our colonized space will trigger a catastrophe that will wipe us all out.
I don't think that follows. Whether people are spread out or clustered won't impact whether they engage in catrastrophic activities as long as the same number of people.
For many of the one's you've mentioned they do stop fairly locally as long as there's a big separation. Diseases jumping from continent to continent is much easier than jumping from planet to planet. Similarly, a grey goo scenario or a nantotech diamonding scenario isn't going to go impact Mars.