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Lumifer comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Your Malthusian collapse seems to be conditional on some particulars of aliens' biology, but the Great Filter has to be very very general and almost universal.
Agreed. But the Great Filter could consist of multiple Moderately Great Filters, of which the Malthusian trap could be one. Or perhaps there could be, say, only n Quite Porous Filters which each eliminate only 1/n of civilizations, but that happen to be MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive), so that together they eliminate all civilizations.
That seems correct to me, but it is quite different from your original proposal.
Can you think of other filters that are MECE with the Malthusian trap? I don't see obvious ones. Maybe a good way out of the Malthusian trap would be mechanisms that limit procreation, and those make interplanetary colonization - which is procreation of biospheres - seem immoral? I don't think that sounds very convincing.
Filters don't have to be mutually exclusive, and as for collectively exhaustive part, take all plausible Great Filter candidates.
I don't quite understand that Great Filter hype, by the way; having a single cause for civilization failure seems very implausible (<1%).