On the Verge of the Great Filter

In the summer of 2019 I had the fortune to hear a Neil deGrasse Tyson podcast that was discussing Great Filter Theory in light of the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox is the postulation by the physicist and father of the first nuclear reactor and the Hydrogen Bomb, Enrico Fermi, that came up during a lunchtime discussion with colleagues. Essentially, any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an amount of imperial (or survival) incentive could rapidly colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy within ten million years. Since the Milky Way galaxy is roughly ten…