Humanity May Join Extinct Alien Civilizations in Oblivion, Scientists Warn

The potential causes of mankind’s hypothetical Great Filter extinction that were mentioned in the new study include nuclear war, pandemics, meteorites and climate change.

While mankind’s efforts to find intelligent life in space are yet to bear fruit, a team of scientists led by Jonathan H. Jiang from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab has come up with a theory that might explain the predicament.

In their paper published on the preprint online repository arXiv.org, the researchers noded toward an idea known as the Great Filter. The theory was first formulated in the 1990s and essentially suggests that alien civilizations might have been wiped out before reaching the stage in their development that would’ve made them detectable from Earth. And humanity may face the same threat!

“We postulate that an existential disaster may lay in wait as our society advances exponentially towards space exploration, acting as the Great Filter: a phenomenon that wipes out civilizations before they can encounter each other, which may explain the cosmic silence,” the team declared.

Having identified several likely candidates that may cause such wipeout – namely, “nuclear warfare, pathogens and pandemics, artificial intelligence, meteorite impacts, and climate change” – the researchers advocated for a “period of introspection, followed by appropriate refinements to properly approach our predicament, and addressing the challenges and methods in which we may be able to mitigate risk to mankind.”

Some researchers, however, criticize the Great Filter theory and argue that alien civilizations are actually out there and that we simply haven’t found them yet.