Scary indeed. I really don't like the Great Filter argument. The idea that we are somehow special and the singular survivors of some great event is preposterous to me when you consider the sheer amount of space that is unexplored, unprobed, or untouchable by current human standards. The idea that a filter event may be forthcoming is certainly unsettling. I'd like to think that probabilisticly speaking we are an average civilization just beginning to reach outside our home sphere. I didn't know it had a name, but I like that title, The Mediocrity Principle.Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI “deeply unwise and immature,” and recommended that “the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.” Scary.
We just have not been advanced long enough to hit "The Great Filter." Either we will blow each other up with nukes, unleash extinction level climate change, screw up the oceans to the point the whole ecosystem collapses, we all get super-ebola and cannot recover, or we stop exploring space and get wiped out by something the size of Mt. Everest hitting us at 45,000 miles an hour. Or, we pull our shit together and stumble upon the physics that the other intelligent people use to communicate, figure out fast space travel or any of the other ways to not kill ourselves off and eventually meet up with whatever is out there. Honestly? Either outcome will be exciting to watch.
"...so for every star in the colossal Milky Way, there’s a whole galaxy out there. All together, that comes out to the typically quoted range of between 1022 and 1024 total stars, which means that for every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, there are 10,000 stars out there." Absolutely mind boggling. Always nice to get a fresh dose of reality in relation to one's infinitesimal existence.
There's a note on the "Future of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe" section of the Timeline of the far future wikipedia page that always makes me feel totally insignificant:Although listed in years for convenience, the numbers beyond this point are so vast that their digits would remain unchanged regardless of which conventional units they were listed in, be they nanoseconds or star lifespans.
I can't think of any less arbitrary scale for comparing civilization advancement than power harnessed. We have the core technologies for interstellar travel now; if we found out our Sun would be dead in 50 years, we'd build it. I don't see any reason to assume that doing so would fail a billion times out of a billion.