Industrial act Stoneburner hands over ‘The Great Filter’ EP to the masses and offers video for ‘Narcissus’
Out now is the brand new EP, “The Great Filter”, by the industrial act Stoneburner. Stoneburner is the project by Steven Archer, also known for co-founding the darkwave gothic rock duo Ego Likeness with Donna Lynch.
Drawing inspiration from Hanson’s “Great Filter” argument, Stoneburner in its new 7-track EP handles the enigma of intelligent life and its potential demise, and visits the realms of human existence, self-destruction, and the haunting implications of an uncertain future.
The EP also holds a cover of Psychedelic Furs’ “Book of Days”.
Here’s Stoneburner’s “Narcissus” video.
Regarding the “Great Filter”
The Great Filter is the idea that in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox, which is about the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.
The concept originates in Robin Hanson’s argument that the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe implies that something is wrong with one or more of the arguments (from various scientific disciplines) that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable; this observation is conceptualized in terms of a “Great Filter” which acts to reduce the great number of sites where intelligent life might arise to the tiny number of intelligent species with advanced civilizations actually observed (currently just one: human). This probability threshold, which could lie in the past or following human extinction, might work as a barrier to the evolution of intelligent life, or as a high probability of self-destruction. The main conclusion of this argument is that the easier it was for life to evolve to the present stage, the bleaker the future chances of humanity probably are.
The idea was first proposed in an online essay titled “The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It?”, written by economist Robin Hanson. The first version was written in August 1996 and the article was last updated on September 15, 1998. Hanson’s formulation has received recognition in several published sources discussing the Fermi paradox and its implications.
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