If the filter is ahead of us, then it’s likely to be the sort of thing which civilizations don’t ordinarily protect against. Humans seem to really like the idea of going to space. It’s a common extension of basic drives for civilizations to expand, explore, conquer, discover, etc.
This decreases the promise of guarding against specific obvious scenarios like asteroid/global warming/nuclear war/pandemic.
Civilizations can be predictably bad at responding to such scenarios, which are often coordination problems or other kinds of dilemmas, so I think it’s still very likely that such scenarios are filters.
I have not looked into the less obvious scenarios, but a planetary colony could be useful for some, such as the conversion of regular matter into strange matter as described in this post. (Should the Great Filter caution us against performing innocuous-seeming physics experiments? Perhaps there is a trap in physics that makes up the filter.)
Civilizations seem to have strong drives to explore other planets anyway. So even if these kinds of possibilities are really neglected, I think it’s unlikely that they are filters, unless they only occur to pre-expansion civilizations, in which case our plans for colonizing other planets can’t be implemented soon enough to remove the risk.
If the filter is ahead of us, then it’s likely to be the sort of thing which civilizations don’t ordinarily protect against. Humans seem to really like the idea of going to space. It’s a common extension of basic drives for civilizations to expand, explore, conquer, discover, etc.
Civilizations can be predictably bad at responding to such scenarios, which are often coordination problems or other kinds of dilemmas, so I think it’s still very likely that such scenarios are filters.
Civilizations seem to have strong drives to explore other planets anyway. So even if these kinds of possibilities are really neglected, I think it’s unlikely that they are filters, unless they only occur to pre-expansion civilizations, in which case our plans for colonizing other planets can’t be implemented soon enough to remove the risk.