Eonatrika. View frow above

The main bottleneck, therefore, may turn out not to be technological or astrophysical, but ethical and psychological.

Every microbe we discover in the Universe, while delighting biologists, will be an indirect pointer toward this hypothesis: if life arises easily, then the Great Filter is likely to be an inner crisis of the species rather than an external stroke of bad luck.

The Great Filter as a Test of Wisdom

From this perspective, the parameter L in the Drake equation – the average lifetime of a technological civilization – becomes not an integral over our engineering achievements, but over our ability to recognize and reconfigure our own deepest programs [5; 23].

If the Filter really lies ahead of us, it does not look like a single cataclysm, but like a systemic crisis born of the mismatch between the power of our tools and the archaic nature of our social instincts. Problems accumulate faster than we can resolve them because our collective mind and our institutions still largely operate according to templates designed for life on the savanna, not for managing a nuclear arsenal or a global ecosystem.

The key question, then, becomes: “Can we become a civilization that not only solves problems, but also becomes aware of, rewrites, and harmonizes its own basic survival algorithms”?

This is no longer about physics or statistics. It is about a species’ ability to become a Continuous Witness – a function that keeps long-term consequences and the interests of the whole within its field of view.

Interim Conclusion: Possibility and Responsibility

The Great Filter is a concept that says: somewhere along the chain from “atoms” to a “galactic civilization” there are steps that almost no one manages to pass. The very fact that we have already reached the level of a global technosphere and are able to reflect on this is, in itself, an extraordinary stroke of luck.

The silence of the surrounding cosmos means that either we have already passed most of the Filter, or we are entering its densest region – the region where what is being tested is not our intelligence, but our wisdom and integrity.

Both possibilities offer not only fear, but also meaning:

1. If the Filter lies behind us, we are a rare miracle, and our task is not to squander this chance and not to become the authors of our own filter.

2. If the Filter lies ahead of us, we are one of the few species that has the opportunity to understand its nature and attempt to pass through it.

In both cases, the basic formula is the same: the statistics may not be on our side. But the choice – whether we can rise above the “pack logic” and act as a civilization worthy of its Aeon – remains ours.

In the next chapter, this abstraction will come down to the level of concrete reality: to our current position at a bifurcation point where our ancient psychology meets planetary-scale risks.

Chapter 6. Where Do We Sit in the Statistics?

Metaphorically speaking: “Humanity today is a teenager with the keys to a nuclear reactor. Our brain is tuned for tribal squabbling, yet in our hands lies the fate of a planet. This condition can be described as an acute mismatch of scales.”

This chapter is a direct continuation of the conclusion reached through the concept of the Great Filter in the previous chapter. If the Filter really lies ahead of us, then our current era is not just a historical moment, but a point of systemic tension where ancient psychology collides with planetary responsibility.

Three Trends Shaping the Contemporary Crisis

Modern civilization combines unprecedented technologies with institutions and cognitive patterns that were formed under entirely different conditions. This is not a flaw, but an evolutionary imbalance – a gap between the accelerating pace of technological progress and the much slower rates of social and ethical adaptation. Three interrelated trends illustrate this tension with particular clarity.

1. Powerful technologies, weak control mechanisms

Nuclear weapons emerged in the hands of a species whose brain evolved to assess danger in terms of a neighboring tribe, not in terms of mutual assured destruction. Research in evolutionary psychology and social neuroscience suggests that our core mechanisms for assessing risk and conflict remain largely calibrated to life in small, face-to-face groups [15] [38].

Digital networks now connect billions of people, yet social media often amplifies ancient mechanisms of gossip and the moral expulsion of the “outsider,” turning them into global waves of information and outrage [39].

AI and biotechnology are advancing faster than society can establish stable institutions of oversight and coherent ethical frameworks, which leaves a persistent risk that they will simply be integrated into familiar competitive and hierarchical patterns of power [40] [15].

2. Short planning horizons versus long-term cycles

A growing body of research indicates that, on average, people tend to overweight immediate rewards and underweight long-term consequences – a phenomenon known as time discounting or present bias [41] [30].

This tendency shows up not only in individual choices, but also in our collective institutions: political and economic cycles in many countries rarely extend beyond a few years, reinforcing a focus on short-term outcomes [41].

As a result, this evolutionarily understandable collective “shortsightedness” collides with climate change and technological risks that unfold over timescales of decades and even centuries [42]. As scholars of global governance point out, this kind of institutional myopia makes it much harder to act against slow-moving but potentially catastrophic threats [43].

3. Fragmentation in the face of planetary risks

Many major global risks – from climate collapse to pandemics and AI catastrophes – are transboundary and indivisible by their very nature: their consequences do not respect national borders. Yet the key tools for managing them are distributed across nearly two hundred sovereign states locked in a mix of competition and only limited cooperation [44].

Such a situation is often described as a fragmented system of global governance [43].

Within this book, this is interpreted as one possible effect of “scaling up” group-level logic to the level of nation-states, while the mechanisms of genuinely global cooperation – for which we lack direct evolutionary analogues – remain relatively weak and under-institutionalized [15].

Our Chances: A Perspective on Risks and Potential

According to leading researchers on global catastrophic risk, the probability of severe upheavals in this century does not appear to be negligibly small [45] [46].

Current developments are therefore increasingly described not as a stable plateau, but as a crossroads at which decisions taken over the coming decades will largely determine the shape of humanity’s future trajectory [47].

There are also significant strengths, the most important of which is our unprecedented capacity for reflection:

1. Capacity to recognize the Great Filter and our own nature. For the first time in history, we are not only acting on our internal “programs,” but can also read their source code – in myths, in neuroscience, and in genetics. This allows us to ask: which of our reactions are an obsolete bug, and which are a feature we may need for the future?

2. The age of accelerated technologies as tool and test. Technologies can help us identify emerging risks early and, crucially, design new environments – institutions, digital platforms, urban spaces. These environments must not merely amplify old patterns, but function as a kind of “training ground” that broadens our circle of empathy and cultivates long-term thinking.

3. We are living relatively early. If intelligent species in the cosmos are only beginning to emerge, our situation can be seen as one of the first tests of whether a civilization can navigate a particularly dangerous stretch of its trajectory. In this book, humanity is thus treated – metaphorically – as an experiment in overcoming an internal Filter, rather than as a case already closed with a final verdict.

An Exam in Maturity: Three Questions