I suspect you are correct that the great filter does not lie between urbilatiran and dophin intelligence, but I did think of one possible hole in the argument (that I don’t think is likely to end up mattering). It is possible that instead of it being easy in general for something like an urbilatiran to evolve significant intelligence, it might only be easy on places like Earth. That is, while there exist environmental conditions under which you would expect an urbilatiran-level organism to easily evolve to dolphin level in several independent instances, such conditions are very rare, and on most planets where urbilatiran-level organisms evolve, they don’t advance much further.
A few astronomical studies have come out this year giving evidence that Earth is actually more common than we thought, in terms of geology among planets within this galaxy.
I suspect you are correct that the great filter does not lie between urbilatiran and dophin intelligence, but I did think of one possible hole in the argument (that I don’t think is likely to end up mattering). It is possible that instead of it being easy in general for something like an urbilatiran to evolve significant intelligence, it might only be easy on places like Earth. That is, while there exist environmental conditions under which you would expect an urbilatiran-level organism to easily evolve to dolphin level in several independent instances, such conditions are very rare, and on most planets where urbilatiran-level organisms evolve, they don’t advance much further.
So far we haven’t seen any evidence the Earth is particularly rare, I think.
A few astronomical studies have come out this year giving evidence that Earth is actually more common than we thought, in terms of geology among planets within this galaxy.
Can you elaborate/point us in their direction?