3. TIL that finding evidence of even microbial life on Mars could be very bad news ...

TIL that finding evidence of even microbial life on Mars could be very bad news for humanity. One of the most popular solutions to The Fermi Paradox is that there exists a "Great Filter" for life. Finding evidence of life elsewhere would mean the the filter is most likely still ahead of us.

There's too much to talk about, but i'll shorten one of the points.
The "Great Filter" is a barrier that all life, eventually, must encounter. We don't know if we already did, because we don't know, with certainty, what it is. It might be either: 1) The evolutionary leap from single cellular life forms to multi cellular life forms.
2) Some kind of x leap we are yet to discover. It can be technological, evolutionary... anything, we cannot know for now.
Now, considering that passing the Great Filter is an extremely extremely rare occurrence, chances being 1 in billions, here's what's happening:
1) In the first case (Evolutionary leap), we have already passed the Great Filter. We were incredibly lucky to survive, evolve, become what we are, and are the only (as far as we know) race to have succeeded in that.
2) In the second case, where we cannot even imagine what the leap might be, we have not yet reached the Great Filter. Considering it might be ahead of us means that we will eventually reach it, and chances of survival when we do are, as i said already, extremely low.
Think about it like this; If the Great Filter is not the evolutionary leap, that means that advancing from single cellular to multi cellular life forms isn't so rare. Taking that into consideration, it's completely fine to say that there are billions of life forms similar to us all across the universe, all going towards the Great Filter. We are one of those races, and we are simply a dot among countless other dots that have an incredibly high chance of perishing when the Great Filter is reached.

Finding life of Mars would mean that the Great Filter is almost certainly ahead of us. Why? Well, if the Great Filter is already so hard to pass, what are the chances for 2 races to pass it in, roughly, the same period and same place? They're low, meaning the Great Filter most likely isn't the evolutionary leap, but the unknown one that we are yet to reach, which doesn't bode well for the Human Race.

Let me know if it's too confusing, i'll try to explain it better.

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