Yes, I just made up the term “Doom Constant”

Remember Nick Bostrom? And remember the Drake Equation?

Well, the two have met, as illustrated in MIT’s Technology Review this month, in Bostrom’s article, Where Are They.

Bostrom suggests, although he doesn’t put it in these terms, that the reason we haven’t met the aliens yet is that Drake’s equation is missing a Doom Constant that models some sort of filter tendency that causes a (probably very high) percentage sufficiently advanced societies to self-immolate.

The more disconcerting hypothesis is that the Great Filter consists in some destructive tendency common to virtually all sufficiently advanced technological civilizations. Throughout history, great civilizations on Earth have imploded–the Roman Empire, the Mayan civilization that once flourished in Central America, and many others. However, the kind of societal collapse that merely delays the eventual emergence of a space-colonizing civilization by a few hundred or a few thousand years would not explain why no such civilization has visited us from another planet. A thousand years may seem a long time to an individual, but in this context it’s a sneeze. There are probably planets that are billions of years older than Earth. Any intelligent species on those planets would have had ample time to recover from repeated social or ecological collapses. Even if they failed a thousand times before they succeeded, they still could have arrived here hundreds of millions of years ago.

At a high level the article is Bostrom hoping we don’t find any evidence of any other life, since the longer it looks like we’re the only one, the more likely it is that we’ve already won the Great Filter lottery, rather than being on the doomed side of it.

As an aside, I find it amusing somehow that Bostrom devotes significant space to dealing with the possibility that the aliens are there, but hidden from us, but he never gets near the possibility that the “Great Filter” might actually be intelligent, outside action, rather than a self-destructive tendency. He neither considers the Heechee hiding in their black hole, or the Assassins and their inimical actions–and it’s too bad, since there’s some fun thinking to be done on those scenarios, even if they are less likely than what Bostrom is playing with.

The piece is worth a read for science fiction fans and those interested in the Fermi Paradox.