Was The Great Filter Beer?

The Fermi Paradox is a recurring topic here, and for good reason. It addresses one of the most interesting questions in science fiction: are we alone in the galaxy? What other minds are out there? And today it asks another important question: was the Great Filter beer?

Hanay, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Some of my posts about the Fermi Paradox are heavily researched. This one will be a little more speculative.

First, a quick note for any home brewers who came across this post while looking for beer filters or other homebrewing equipment. The Fermi Paradox, briefly stated, is a shorthand for the following observations and questions.

1. Based on our sample size of one solar system, it appears tool-using intelligent life that can produce signals detectable across interstellar distances, or even travel to other stars, is highly possible.
2. Given that, the galaxy should be teeming with intelligent life, but there’s no sign of any. Not just now. Ever. We seem to be alone in the galaxy.
3. Why?

Questions of why often assume one step on the pathway from planet formation to technological species with interstellar reach is essentially impossible to cross. Put another way, one of the factors in the Drake Equation is extremely small. That small factor, that bottleneck in the process, is often called the Great Filter.

A Great Filter may lie ahead of us. Perhaps we’ve just now come to the attention of malevolent aliens, as in Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Problem series. Perhaps our human frailties (nuclear war, civilizational collapse) will doom us.

However, a lot of possible Great Filters lie in the past. Intelligence may be unlikely to evolve. Perhaps only Earth had the energy source needed to get to pre-interstellar technology.

Or maybe the beer before bread hypothesis is true.

Was Beer Necessary For The Rise Of High-Tech Civilization?

Why did hunter-gatherers settle down? Farmers spend more time producing food than hunter-gatherers do, and had worse health and fitness. So why did farming start in the first place?

Alcohol can occur in nature. Crush the grains of wheat or rice, drop them in water, and wild yeast will grow, converting sugars in the grain to ethanol and CO₂. In an effort to recapture the buzz, hunter-gatherers may have settled down to grow the grains required to make beer. At that point, they were stuck in one place, and had to switch to farming to provide enough food.

Though accidental, farming enabled the population density, specialization of labor, and ultrasociality required to take our first tentative steps into space.

Hence, if the beer before bread hypothesis is correct, the only reason human beings have an advanced civilization is because ethanol is just poisonous enough.

No buzz, no point

If ethanol was not poisonous—if it had no psychoactive powers and was just another calorie source— hunter-gatherers would have no incentive to grow grain to produce ethanol, and thus wouldn’t have had to turn to farming. Picture human beings using stone tools to hunt animals, forever.

On the other hand, if ethanol was extremely poisonous, like methanol, where the equivalent of half a drink can permanently blind you and three drinks has a 50% chance of killing you, then no one would want to grow the grain to produce it. Again, no one settles down to farm, and human beings use stone tools to hunt animals, forever.

The wide variety of animal responses to alcohol suggests that intelligent lifeforms having a relationship like ours with alcohol may be uncommon.

Down goes the probability of intelligent lifeforms developing a high-tech civilization.

Summing up, was the Great Filter beer? I don’t claim to have a final answer. Maybe we should get together over a couple of pints and debate the question further.