>>12118240>>unicellular life to multicellular>>emergence of consciousness / intelligence life>Considering it took three billion years for the first step after life had already existed for eons, I'm still pretty confident that the Great Filter is already behind us. The only realistic options for a Great Filter ahead are some extremely fucked up suicide pact technologies like Hard AI or fundamental physics research that always results in blowing up the solar system the aspiring interstellar species resides in.There are probably lots of filters and no one single Great one. We're surely past a lot of them, but there are very likely more ahead. We might make it through them, or we might not.
Once we disperse very widely past the solar system, then we probably win. There isn't really anything that can be done at that point, barring some crazy universe-wide event propagating at the speed of light (or maybe faster in practice due to space reshaping/contracting), in which case everything's fucked. But I suspect it's unlikely, or at least incredibly far away.
Maybe some crazy murderous galactic empire could also be a threat at that point, but seems pretty unlikely, and if we've really dispersed for long enough then there'd probably still be pockets of holdouts for a very long time, or forever.
So we just need enough of the species to survive maybe the next 500 to 1000 years, and then we're good. Or honestly, if we spawn sentient superintelligent AGI, I say that counts as us, too. If they survive, then we'll have created resilient intelligent life just like having children, so I'd count that as winning. It's about the abstract mind, not the nucleic acids or squishy tissue. If the AGI survives but some of it also unintentionally or intentionally kills all humans, I'd still call it a win, though I guess it'd be a Pyrrhic victory.
