Yes, someone has to be first and this is what they would see. Or actually, this is what the first dozens or hundreds or thousands would see as without great filters you’d probably have many hundreds of species reaching an information age at around the same time but there would be a good while before they produce enough evidence to detect each other with any likelihood.
This era of galactic development though before the first civilizations become detectable to each other - on the order of a few thousands of years—is unimaginably short in terms of the time-span of the cosmos, unimaginably short even in terms of the lifetime of our own sun. It seems like tens of millions of civilizations would develop in the life-span of our Sun and its peers and yet we have to be among this very small sample at the beginning. That would be surprising.
A great filter is I suppose, equally surprising even though the mechanisms of it would maybe not be surprising.
Yes, someone has to be first and this is what they would see. Or actually, this is what the first dozens or hundreds or thousands would see as without great filters you’d probably have many hundreds of species reaching an information age at around the same time but there would be a good while before they produce enough evidence to detect each other with any likelihood.
This era of galactic development though before the first civilizations become detectable to each other - on the order of a few thousands of years—is unimaginably short in terms of the time-span of the cosmos, unimaginably short even in terms of the lifetime of our own sun. It seems like tens of millions of civilizations would develop in the life-span of our Sun and its peers and yet we have to be among this very small sample at the beginning. That would be surprising.
A great filter is I suppose, equally surprising even though the mechanisms of it would maybe not be surprising.