This article originally appeared in Bitcoin Magazine’s “Moon Issue.” To get a copy, visit our store.
Energy money is the catalyst and tip of the spear for an intelligent sentient species’ transition from a Type 0 into a Type 1 civilization on the “Kardashev scale,” which measures the energy and technological mastery of a society.
ALL intelligent sentient species are on this path, whether consciously or unconsciously, and must reach this point before they are eliminated by:
- one or a series of megalomaniacs pushing the “red button”;
- some artificial abomination of intelligence that interprets our poor behavior and thus biological life as inferior;
- an asteroid; or
- the fiat-funded, sterile authoritarian gulags they build on their quest for centralized, efficient utopias.
This is known as the Great Filter. Energy money initiates a step change in how organic intelligence can operate and forms a critical step on the journey beyond the Great Filter.
WHAT IS THE GREAT FILTER?
Enrico Fermi was a mid-20th century physicist and Nobel laureate who, upon reflecting on the vastness of the cosmos, famously asked, “Where are they?”
With the practically infinite number of stars and planets in the universe, it seemed like there should be other intelligent species or civilizations capable of developing radio astronomy or interstellar travel, yet to this day, no evidence actually exists.
The Fermi paradox is the term used to describe this lack of evidence for extraterrestrial life in the face of a universe that should be, by the numbers, bursting with it.
While many have proposed solutions as to why this paradox exists, in the 1990s, Robin Hanson postulated a theory that has become known as the Great Filter.
The Great Filter theory suggests that intelligent sentient lifeforms must realize a series of critical steps on their way to becoming an interstellar race and at least one of them must be highly improbable, or their interrelated, path-dependent nature means that they…
