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The Great Filter, or The Death of Science
Nov. 22nd, 2009 03:53 pmI've written from time to time of Fermi's Paradox. One of the concepts used to "answer" the paradox is the Great Filter, which is the idea that there is some event that allows few if any civilizations to arise. I'd said before that I don't think peak oil is such an event. But now I'd like to add an event to the possible list of Great Filters. Call it "the Death of Science."
Modern science is so complicated that it is difficult for any one individual to evaluate all of it scientifically. One person just can't know everything. This leads to people evaluating scientific principles based not on the underlying science but on who they trust, or find most believable.
The problem is that sometimes the anti-science folks are seen as more believable. Thus, the anti-vaccination crowd listens to Jenny McCarthy, an intelligent person to be sure but no scientist. Or the anti-global-warming crowd reads a bunch of stolen emails and crows that they prove climatologists are betraying science.
So, in my theory, these anti-science types gain a critical mass in society and wreck their civilization. Perhaps more perniciously, once the civilization is wrecked, one could see that the anti-science types use the collapse of civilization to argue that they were right, thus preventing redevelopment of technology.
It's a variation on the idea that "civilization ends not with a bang but with a whimper."
And I do hope I'm wrong, at least about one particular civilization.
Modern science is so complicated that it is difficult for any one individual to evaluate all of it scientifically. One person just can't know everything. This leads to people evaluating scientific principles based not on the underlying science but on who they trust, or find most believable.
The problem is that sometimes the anti-science folks are seen as more believable. Thus, the anti-vaccination crowd listens to Jenny McCarthy, an intelligent person to be sure but no scientist. Or the anti-global-warming crowd reads a bunch of stolen emails and crows that they prove climatologists are betraying science.
So, in my theory, these anti-science types gain a critical mass in society and wreck their civilization. Perhaps more perniciously, once the civilization is wrecked, one could see that the anti-science types use the collapse of civilization to argue that they were right, thus preventing redevelopment of technology.
It's a variation on the idea that "civilization ends not with a bang but with a whimper."
And I do hope I'm wrong, at least about one particular civilization.
