The Fermi Paradox, Reified Agency, and the Projection of the Great Filter
Confronted by cosmic silence, discussions of the Great Filter frequently turn inward to diagnose contemporary institutions, lamenting that civilization has grown risk-averse and complacent. Yet a civilization possesses no sovereign agency or will of its own. Agency belongs exclusively to living individuals; macroscopic patterns of local stability and low-variance allocation are downstream statistical aggregates of discrete actors optimizing under immediate constraints and felt friction. Reifying this aggregate into a ghost decision-maker and panicking over its apparent paralysis is an…
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