Victory Day

Street action and the future of the Russian opposition

In June of last year, the Russia that I had quickly and unexpectedly departed three months prior, as universities shut down and United States citizens were told to come home, was coming back to life like the exhausted cliché of the bear emerging from hibernation. Russia’s Covid cases, official and real, were on the decline, and its population of 144 million wasn’t merely returning to normal, it was celebrating. Among the casualties of the first wave was the much anticipated 75th annual Victory Day parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany, usually held on May 9. On the heels of yet another crisis, the parade, even if delayed, was non-negotiable.

In addition to the parade there was another grand exercise in pageantry afoot: the similarly rescheduled constitutional referendum. The final results—a questionable 79% in favor—granted Vladimir Putin two additional six year terms in office and amended a number of other deeply conservative laws into the Russian constitution. Though it was quite clear what the result would be as voting got underway, tensions were running high. I reached out to some of my Russian classmates and friends who, only a few weeks prior, had been directing their questions at me as the Black Lives Matter protests spread across every major city in the US.

“How’re you planning to vote?” I asked.

“Against.” “Against.” “I’m not voting.” “Well, in principle I’m apolitical, but my dad is voting against so maybe I will too.”

The last response struck me the most, as indicating something deeper about the apathy that pervades Russian politics. With this still in the back of my mind, I was surprised to see, half a year later at the end of this January, the same friend post a shaky video captioned “going to my first protest…”. In the video was the same Moscow street—where only three-quarters of a year earlier, I had been coming from or going to classes, restaurants or bars—filled by a massive crowd from sidewalk to sidewalk. As I flipped through the next few clips, the crowd was slowly superseded by tear gas, batons and an equally large mass of OMON (Russian riot police) and the optimistic captions by a series of expletives. What these images immediately brought to mind was the US last summer as militarized police imposed de facto martial law throughout the country. The parallels between the two are more significant than they may at first appear—beyond the visual resemblance of violent state repression, both situations demand the question of what comes next when spontaneous protest movements run up against the boundaries of what the existing political system is able to offer. How do we move forward when the obstacle isn’t within the order of things, but that order itself?

The protest in question was part of a wave of dissent set off by opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s arrest on January 17 upon his return to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from an attempted poisoning in August. Navalny, the most prominent opposition figure of the past decade, was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent, allegedly by Russian state security agents. Navalny’s medical evacuation out of the country was ruled a violation of his parole terms, the result of a 2014 sentencing for embezzlement widely considered to be politically motivated. Undeterred, Navalny landed in Moscow, stepped off the plane (not unironically operated by the budget airline Pobeda, or ‘Victory’) and was immediately detained at passport control. In response, his supporters and the Russian opposition at large urgently called for protests.

The initial protests on January 23 were the largest since the 2011-13 protests which first elevated Navalny to prominence within the opposition. Moscow saw up to 40,000 people in the streets and 1,500 arrests—thousands more protested and another 3,500 were arrested in other cities. Footage of horrific police brutality spread online like wildfire. In one widely shared video, St. Petersburg police kicked an unarmed elderly woman to the ground when she tried to speak to a detainee. Another officer points a loaded handgun at the crowd. A clip of Moscow police captioned “ANIMALS” shows them viciously beating a mass of bloodied, unarmed protesters on the asphalt.

Navalny was not released. On February 2, the Moscow City Court sentenced him to two and a half years in an infamously harsh penal colony in Vladimir Oblast. The emergency protests staged on Manezhnaya Square in Moscow that same night were brutally put down. Almost cartoonishly dystopian pictures of OMON walling off the city center were followed by videos of people cornered and outnumbered, chanting “We don’t have weapons!” as the police continue to assault them. Two days later, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov called off the protests, urging supporters to refocus their attention away from street action towards the upcoming Duma elections this fall.

Sporadic actions have continued, but the momentum, energy and rage of the protests have dissipated as quickly as they came. Demonstrations have largely shifted to small, symbolic gatherings aiming to stay as much as possible within the law and out of harm’s way. While the elections are sure to bring a fresh wave of protests to the streets, the chances for an opposition victory (or even substantial gains) are slim. By all appearances, the Russian opposition is spinning in circles. As dangerously close to bursting as the rickety political boiler system may seem, the order built by the Putin government over the last two decades ultimately appears to be as stable as ever. The complex politics beneath Navalny’s individual spectacle of martyrdom have found little traction in Western coverage of the protests—Navalny has for years been the chosen favorite of Western media seeking a foil for Putin. The incredible personal courage and self-sacrifice he demonstrated in his return only bolsters that image. If the past two months have done anything, it is to further entrench Navalny’s status as a persecuted dissident—which, of course, he is— often to the detriment of understanding his actual politics and the politics of Russia writ large. In fact, beyond his canonization as the anti-Putin, the actual substance of Navalny’s political programs and beliefs rarely seems to interest Western media.

The prominence of the persecuted dissident narrative in such coverage often obscures more than it reveals (even when factually true), as it reduces Russian politics to a clash of the heroic individual and the monolithic state. It is likewise unable to account for the Russian opposition’s undeniable failure, despite both its own tremendous effort and the precariousness of the government’s situation. The past decade has seen a declining economy, rising inequality and a torrent of other political crises, but against expectations, Putin seems to emerge stronger each time. If the struggle was won by self-sacrifice and moral righteousness, Navalny would have toppled Putin long ago. To truly grasp the situation and, more importantly, to change it, something more is required.

While the dualistic account of Navalny as the counter-Putin remains largely unchallenged, Navalny’s increased prominence has forced Western media to finally acknowledge his long-running nationalism and cooperation with the far-right. This association ranged from regular attendance at the yearly ultranationalist ‘Russian March’ (for which he was expelled from the social democratic Yabloko party in 2007) to a series of abhorrent—and proudly unrecanted—statements from the 2000s comparing migrants to cockroaches and rotten teeth. This distasteful history has ‘flummoxed’ prominent liberal critics like Masha Gessen. In light of this, on February 24, Amnesty International stripped Navalny of his status as a prisoner of conscience. Though this belated controversy has done little to change broader coverage of Navalny in either Russia or the west, it reveals fundamental fault lines in the political coalition that has brought him to this point. After Amnesty’s decision, the first response of Navalny’s core liberal base was to attack his critics on the Russian left as state collaborators orchestrating a conspiracy against him.

What is lost in this important debate on Navalny’s far-right connections is the fact that, by and large, there is not a single prominent Russian politician of the past thirty years who hasn’t flirted with hardline nationalism—as an instrument to power or as a genuine belief. Some of the most active protest movements of the 1990s and 2000s were driven primarily by left-right coalitions such as the National Bolshevik Party (which, since being outlawed in 2007, has rebranded as ‘The Other Russia,’ swapping its former logo of a hammer and sickle on a Nazi flag for a graphic of a grenade). In more pressing and more practical terms, however, Navalny’s connections to the far right are not only disturbing opportunism but a political dead end. If the Putin regime

has shown itself capable of anything, it is absorbing and deflecting challenges from the right.

One of the most telling moments in recent Russian history has been the unwavering support of the same left-right opposition groups (including The Other Russia) for their supposed arch-enemy Putin’s annexation of Crimea and war in eastern Ukraine. Putin’s own double feint, positioning himself as both a nationalist willing to stand up to the NATO and the west and the sole trustworthy defender of (strictly limited) multiculturalism—the only man who can prevent the “really crazy ones” from taking power—has been remarkably successful with power brokers and the electorate alike. While the right-wing fringe can and does exacerbate a hostile cultural climate for migrants, women, LGBT people and other minorities, what it cannot do is mount any kind of meaningful challenge to Putin’s authority.

But what about the rest of Navalny’s coalition? The Russian opposition, which arguably reached its peak in the protests after the rigged 2011 Duma elections (from which Navalny emerged as its leader), is made up of a shaky alliance of anti-government groups across the ideological spectrum. The only common ground of the coalition—which includes liberals, oligarchs Putin failed to win over or suppress, an assortment of fringe nationalists, social justice groups and the left wing of the Communist Party—was and is its enemy: Vladimir Putin. In the last decade, as the opposition’s energy has lagged and burst, it has become clear that not even the charismatic figure of Navalny is enough to hold it together in any other way.

Navalny’s personal beliefs seem to go where the wind blows, as evidenced by his leaps from party to organization to party. Following his expulsion from Yabloko, he co-founded right-wing anti-immigration movements, backed centrist parties based on ‘e-democracy,’ ran for mayor of Moscow, and attempted to run for president (but was blocked by his 2014 conviction). Navalny’s rhetoric likewise tends to stick to grand polemics and emotional declarations, rarely elaborating on the affirmatively neoliberal political project he advances—being a man of action rather than convictions seems to be both his public brand and his private character.

His own maximally flexible political vision notwithstanding, Navalny nevertheless does have real political constraints. He has to play to and represent his core base—affluent urban liberals and a handful of oppositional oligarchs in favor of some reforms, but only those that won’t threaten their own positions. The liberal elites want a westernized Russia, a ‘functional’ democratic Russia—in which they are the power-holding class—and want nothing to do with socialist policies of any kind. Since 2013, Navalny’s core supporters have moved to further alienate the left wing, publicly distancing themselves from groups such as Sergei Udaltsov’s Left Front—including refusing to support imprisoned activists—and Socialist Alternative (both of whom came out in force on Navalny’s behalf regardless).

Navalny has also not, however, drawn meaningfully closer to the right—if anything he now keeps them much more at arm’s length than he did during the 2000s. He instead finds himself in a position of immense rhetorical and symbolic power, capable of drawing hundreds of thousands into the streets, but with practically no coherent vision or direction from there onwards besides, of course, himself. “Anti-corruption” is not a political position—everyone is “anti-corruption” in principle, including Vladimir Putin, whose own reputation is founded on having broken up the political power of the oligarchs in the early 2000s. The question is, rather, what does a politics of “anti-corruption” mean in practice? For Navalny, at least, it does not mean anything close to a redistributive—dare we say socialist—state, and it is not difficult to see how Russia’s aging, impoverished population finds the message that privatization didn’t go far enough to ring false.

Despite the poverty of neoliberal politics, the Russian institutional left is in equally bad if not worse shape. The Communist Party, having long abandoned any real opposition on a national scale, nonetheless maintains a firm grip on the rhetoric and imagery of socialist or even social politics. The federal Communist Party today occupies a comfortable niche of performative resistance far from its militant resistance to the reforms of the 1990s (to which the violence of the state response remains almost entirely written out of Western narratives of the post-Soviet transition). Though more radical members—particularly outside Moscow or St. Petersburg—continue to protest, Gennady Zyuganov (Party leader since 1993 and likely till death) officially opposed the January and February protests. Other left groups remain active but marginal. The ghost of the Soviet Union—remembrance of which has become in many ways a fundamentally conservative, even nationalist, position that the Communist Party and Putin both share—continues to hold the Russian left hostage.

The current methods of resistance seem to be reaching their limit, and while come September and the Duma elections the people will almost certainly be out on the streets again, the way forward seems less clear than ever. The answer for much of the Western media and many Russian liberals seems to be throwing their hands up in dismay, citing Russia’s inherent despotism. But rather than accept this reductive, exoticizing and reactionary interpretation, perhaps the most instructive approach to what is happening in Russia is to look towards the parallel crisis of another slowly crumbling imperial state: the United States.

The eruption of popular energy of the Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 has likewise by appearances failed to deliver ‘real’ political change. Despite the Democratic Party’s control of the government, American politics seem to be continuing on their consistently center-right course. But to read this as a failure of the protests would be to completely misunderstand what happened last summer. The Black Lives Matter protests were less the presentation of complaints to the recognized political system than the tearing open of a space for mass politics outside that system—a rejection of the political system’s legitimacy. In this sense they offer something genuinely new, a way to move past the power structure’s unwillingness to confront the crises in which we now find ourselves.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the greater part of the Russian domestic and diasporic elite reactions to the Black Lives Matter protests were largely virulently racist and hostile, especially among vehemently anti-Putin liberals. Beyond their anti-Blackness, what was particularly untenable was the way in which the protests made it impossible to ignore the ever-widening chasm between the real America—blatantly and violently repressive—and the idealized, imaginary West which they believe Russia must become.

Following the disaster of post-Soviet privatization, economic liberalism in Russia has relied on a long-standing discourse of westernization and unfulfillable desire. Rather than admitting to the failure and violence of the privatized economy, the locus of this ideology moves to the alleged absolute incongruity between authoritarian Russia and democratic America. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to call this in part a politics of self-hatred. Regardless, it is a politics of idealism, increasingly detached from the material realities of the modern world. To doubt that America is the epitome of democracy is to collapse its entire structure. How can one square the fact that the shining city on a hill is not only a fiction, but in fact greatly resembles the oligarchic Russian state itself? ‘Westernizing’ is wholly insufficient—the failure of capitalism is the same East and West.

In turn, resistance to these systems of oppression everywhere is inextricably linked. While the recent Russian protests are fundamentally distinct from those in the US last summer in their goals, scale and intensity, they share enough of the same challenges to offer each other instructive solutions for the future. The future of the Russian opposition—and of Russia itself—will not be found in Navalny or the Duma. Rather, it is in and through the protests themselves, the continuous strikes of the past year in Khabarovsk, Vladivostok and other provincial cities, the civil and legal defense watchdogs and regional environmental and indigenous rights organizing that the groundwork of the movement is being built. Navalny the man doesn’t matter—the people fighting on his behalf do.

All the dust seemed to have settled when that same formerly ‘apolitical’ friend messaged me a few weeks later with a video of fireworks. Every year on February 23, Defender of the Fatherland Day, originally Red Army Day, Moscow fires off a staggeringly impressive array of fireworks from Sparrow Hills overlooking the city to commemorate members of the Russian military. We had spent the last one together right under the fireworks on the riverbank below the Hills. While on the surface it seemed that everything in Russia, like the United States, had returned to stasis, I would instead suggest that the real lesson of either story is that it only takes so many nameless individuals to act before the situation explodes, leaving streaks of color across a quiet, late winter sky.

ALAN DEAN B’21 prefers marches to parades.

Where is The Fermi Paradox and the search for intelligent life

In 2018, Avi Loeb, then chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, co-published a paper arguing that the puzzling object ‘Oumuamua, which had just passed through the solar system, may have been a piece of alien technology. The news made few waves beyond the scientific community. Coming from the direction of the star Vega, ‘Oumuamua—seen only as a telescopic image depicting a small speck of light— appeared to possess various anomalies. It accelerated like a comet, but did not have an icy tail, as comets usually do. Its quarter-mile length, elongated shape, and that it was less than a millimeter thick (or else ten times less dense than air) all distinguished it from any other known interstellar object. Most of the scientific community concluded that the object was simply a strange rock—but not Loeb.

In January 2021, Loeb, who received his PhD in Physics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published a book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, now a New York Times bestseller, in which he further outlines his hypothesis. Calculating that the chances such an object would arise naturally are less than one in a trillion, he argues that it is no less reasonable to assume that ‘Oumuamua was a probe created by extraterrestrials. The hypothesis has explosive potential. It would finally answer an age-old question: are we alone in the universe?

As far back as 2,000 years ago, philosophers like Epicurus and Lucretius thought that humans just like them might live on faraway stars. As modern science continues to expand our understanding of the universe, questions of extraterrestrial life remain elusive. This explains, perhaps, our continued obsession with aliens; three of 2019’s top ten domestic box office successes—Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, and The Rise of Skywalker— explicitly deal with other lifeforms. The shows Cowboy Bebop, The Book of Boba Fett, and Resident Alien, set to premiere throughout 2021, all explore the ways humans might interact with extraterrestrial life. A conspiracy theory stating that aliens helped build the Egyptian pyramids continues to cling to the edges of mainstream discourse, suggesting pervasive enthusiasm for the possibility of human-alien encounters.

And yet, not many people seemed to care about Loeb’s astonishing theory. In a review of Loeb’s book, biologist and legal scholar Dov Greenbaum pointed out that, irrespective of ‘Oumuamua’s origins, the object’s discovery points the finger at the cognitive dissonance dominating mainstream discourse when it comes to alien life. Billions of dollars have been spent looking for proof of life beyond Earth. NASA’s voyager probes, launched in 1977, for example, carry goldplated disks introducing humanity to hypothetical extraterrestrials. The general public’s disregard for Loeb’s contested but reasonable hypothesis suggests, however, that most of us consider the prospect of actually finding such proof highly unlikely, no matter how much we love Star Wars.

Still, there is plenty of reason to believe that aliens are out there. The universe is 13.7 billion years old and over 90 billion light years across. According to Astronomy Now, it contains more stars “than there are grains of sand on a million Earths.” Astronomers utilizing NASA’s Kepler telescope estimate up to 40 billion planets in the observable universe may enable liquid water to pool on their surfaces, a requirement for sustaining Earth-like life. If only 0.01 percent of those planets host life, this would still come out at 40 million planets inhabited by aliens. The sheer size of this number is daunting, which explains, perhaps, why it can be easier to think of the vast emptiness of space, rather than the potential abundance hidden within it.

Everybody?

Planets, presumably the absolute baseline condition for life, first started to form twelve billion years ago. That’s a lot of time for alien life to evolve, especially considering the human species made it from the development of speech to spaceflight in 150,000 years. To the scientific community dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, it appears awfully unlikely that, in all that time and across all those planets, not a single other lifeform or civilization has developed.

Though scientists have been monitoring radio waves since the 1970s, they have yet to detect alien communication or any other artificial signals. Despite vast technical improvements in radio telescopes, receiver techniques, and computing power, SETI has so far turned up nothing. This conundrum is known as the Fermi Paradox. First formulated by Enrico Fermi in 1950, it describes the apparent contradiction between the theoretically high probability of extraterrestrial life and the total lack of evidence for it. In other words, if the universe is so big and old, where is everybody?

Astrophysicists, climate scientists, and science fiction writers have come up with a variety of possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Proponents of the Rare Earth Hypothesis argue that Earth is simply the only planet of its kind. What if complex life can only evolve under a combination of astrophysical and geological conditions that are so rare they exist nowhere but Earth? Though astronomers have found plenty of planets of the right size and distance to their stars, conditions such as a star system’s location within the galactic habitable zone—the cushy middle between the radiation-dense center and the resource-poor outer ring—may be more important than previously assumed. Other factors the Rare Earth Hypothesis considers are the existence of a large moon and plate tectonics, both known to be essential for climate stability on our planet.

Some scientists focus their attention on biochemistry. What if, instead of the necessary planetary conditions, the evolution of life itself is highly unlikely? By mixing water and gases believed to have been present in Earth’s early atmosphere, scientists have attempted to re-create life’s beginnings in the lab, but these experiments have produced little more than a few amino acids. This indicates that even the formation of simple self-replicating chemical compounds is highly improbable and occurs only over a very long period of time. This hypothesis is supported by the hundreds of millions of years which, as far as geologists can tell, lie between the formation of our planet and the emergence of its first lifeforms. But there is one caveat: just as we cannot assume Earth-like planetary conditions are common in the universe, we also have to consider that there might be planets which are more hospitable to life than primordial Earth. These theorized planets are known as superhabitable worlds.

Others argue that life may be common throughout the universe, but the kind of intelligence that can create advanced technology, which is much easier to spot, is rare. As far as we know, it has taken 4.6 billion years for Homo sapiens, Earth’s first species to use complex tools, to arise. If the galaxy is teeming with microbes, or even the alien equivalent of chimpanzees, it will be hard for us to tell, simply because we don’t have the technology to see them at long distances. It is theoretically possible to search for atmospheric traces of life on other planets, such as a methane imbalance, but such measurements are extremely difficult. Within humanity’s present technological limits, SETI is restricted to listening for artificial radio signals, which means that, at least for now, we can only look for aliens by looking for their technology. What’s more, this technology needs to be better than ours. Interstellar communication is possible even at our current level of technology, but it is a bit like trying to contact Australians via a message in a bottle. A pictogram introducing Earth and the human species sent in 1974, for example, will reach its destination, the star cluster M13, in about 25,000 years. Encouragingly, this might indicate the Fermi Paradox is no paradox at all, the lack of proof for extraterrestrial life simply being a feature of the kinds of proof we are able to look for. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, says a popular maxim in SETI. At the same time, the apparent dearth of such technology may indicate that life among the stars, if we are ever to find it, will be very different from the little green men in UFOs we like to imagine.

It is possible we have yet to hear from the little green men not because they don’t exist, or because they can’t talk to us, but because they don’t want to. Given that space flight was pure science fiction a mere century ago, we should be careful to assume extraterrestrials simply don’t have the technical abilities to contact us. It’s easy to think of reasons they might choose not to; our own SETI efforts are expensive, and actually venturing out into space, in a way that would be noticeable from faraway, will always be more dangerous than staying on the planet that offers our air, sunlight, and atmospheric radiation-shielding for free. On the other hand, selfreplicating probes have been deemed within reach by the robotics community since the invention of 3D printers. Philosopher Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford calculates that a single such probe would be capable of colonizing the entire Milky Way in 20 million years if it travelled at only one percent of the speed of light. Given the cosmic timescales involved, 20 million years is very little, and we should therefore expect to see, if not the aliens, at least their machines.

This expectation is predicated on the assumption that all civilizations would choose to colonize space if they could do so safely and affordably. Yet, as our own history shows, colonization is by no means a universal process, but rather the product of culturally and historically specific conditions. YouTuber and Fermi Paradox-nerd Isaac Arthur considers this question from a cultural perspective: He argues that the kind of intelligence and cultural values that lead to the development of technologies enabling spaceflight are likely predicated on a certain tendency for curiosity, willingness to experiment, and risk tolerance. Such traits, he claims, would lead a population to eventually venture into space. Even if

this weren’t the case, he posits, it seems unlikely that not a single alien or rogue AI has broken its cultural code.

The economist Robin Hanson makes a less speculative argument: The human species at large has settled its planet wherever possible. Even when some populations did not expand into unchartered territories, others eventually did. In fact, lifeforms on Earth generally tend to adapt to fill every ecological niche they can, with stable populations and species consistently branching out via non-trivial mutations and sexual mixing. Hanson concludes that we should expect life elsewhere to be predicated on similar evolutionary principles, and therefore to act in similar ways. Past natural disasters such as supervolcano eruptions and ice ages, as well as genetic bottlenecks when the human population was greatly reduced, suggest that Homo sapiens’ propensity for geographical expansion and cultural diversification has been indispensable to its survival. From this perspective, it seems logical that humans will, if they can, one day colonize space—if not by settling it, then at least in the form of resource extraction.

Considering the evolutionary and cultural factors that may encourage space exploration and colonization, the Fermi Paradox further confuses. If it is logical that a lifeform will venture beyond its planet when it can, then what is keeping everyone at home? This question was first seriously considered by economist Hanson in 1998, when he coined the term “Great Filter” to describe the obstacle that must lie somewhere between inanimate matter and expansive life. The ‘Great Filter’ is a probability barrier, ‘filtering’ life such that most of it cannot ‘advance.’ Hanson asks, who or what is the ‘Great Filter’ that is keeping life from expanding across the universe?

Many possible Fermi Paradox solutions, such as the Rare Earth Hypothesis and the possibility of a highly improbable evolution of life, are feasible Great Filter candidates. If, say, single-celled life is an unlikely biochemical fluke, this would mean that the Great Filter lies in our past, 3.5 billion years ago, when the first single-celled organisms appeared on Earth. It would mean that all life on Earth, the human species included, has beaten astronomical odds in making it to the present. Because highly unlikely things are even more unlikely to occur twice, we would be forced to conclude that no other independently evolved life lives anywhere within billions of light years from Earth. A possible caveat is the Panspermia hypothesis, which posits that we ourselves are the aliens, settled or seeded on Earth by someone else. This transposes the origin of life further away in space and time, but leaves the question of its likelihood—and, thus, the Fermi Paradox—unanswered.

Some scientists think the Great Filter might be ahead of us rather than behind us—future technological barriers, not past biological ones, might prevent us from reaching the stars. If the great obstacle keeping everyone else at home happens to civilizations at a technologically advanced stage, it has to be very big. A future Great Filter, according to Bostrom, would have to be an existential catastrophe that ends all Earth-originating intelligent life, or at least permanently and extremely limits any future development. Cultural developments, such as an anti-science movement or the rejection of space colonization in favor of other projects, seem unlikely to have such long-lasting effects. Instead, they would simply prolong the seemingly inevitable. Since an effective filter has to be so probable that it applies to every civilization in the galaxy, astronomical and geological disasters like asteroid impacts and supervolcano eruptions aren’t great candidates either. Rather, the most universal threat to civilizations in the universe, even those that live in radically different environments than us, might be civilization itself. Nuclear war and high-energy physics experiments have long been feared as potentially world-ending disasters, but, in a world suffering the consequences of Western industrial climate science-denying culture, climate change appears the most daunting Great Filter candidate. In a study titled The Anthropocene Generalized, researchers at the University of Rochester argue that any technological civilization with a growing population will inevitably harvest and use its planet’s resources. Inevitably, this will have consequences for the ecologies of those planets, leading to changes in the environments lifeforms evolved in and are adapted to and potentially creating destructive feedback loops. Climate change, the study suggests, may represent a not only catastrophic, but universal, trend. If the Great Filter is in our future, we have no reason to think it will spare us, warns philosopher Bostrom. This is why he hopes we are alone. If we continue to find no traces of extraterrestrial life, and even if we do find very simple, microbial life, we will have reason to believe that the Great Filter lies somewhere at the fundamental evolutionary level. But the more complex the life we find, the more past Great Filter candidates would have to be eliminated—if the number of times we know of that single-celled organisms independently evolved rises to two, it is no longer a highly improbable step—and the more likely it would be that the filter is ahead of us. If it turns out that the galaxy is populated by thriving alien empires, the Great Filter—and with it, the Fermi Paradox—doesn’t exist. But if we find anything other than that, the filter looms large, and it seems probable Homo sapiens will go extinct, most likely by our own doing, before we can explore much further than we already have.

The Great Filter thus presents us with a unique dilemma: Either we are heading for a disaster which, by definition, is basically unavoidable—or our future is a bright, but lonely one. Whether ‘Oumuamua was an artificial piece of technology made by an extraterrestrial civilization, or simply the strangest rock we’ve ever seen, thus becomes a deeply existential question. Ultimately, how we meet the challenges we are faced with today determines not only our own future, but will allow us to extrapolate whether or not we should expect to ever find alien life. And, though it would crush our millennia-old dream of meeting other lifeforms, a bright and lonely future would offer meaningful adventures, too. “If we are truly alone in this great, vast cosmos then that leaves us with a terrible responsibility,” writes Keith Cooper. “As the sole beacon of consciousness amongst the stars, we will inherit the Universe, and represent the one, single chance to unlock the secrets of the cosmos.”

ANTONIA HUTH B’21 hopes the Martians take her last.