Scary indeed. I really don't like the Great Filter argument. The idea that we are somehow special and the singular survivors of some great event is preposterous to me when you consider the sheer amount of space that is unexplored, unprobed, or untouchable by current human standards. The idea that a filter event may be forthcoming is certainly unsettling. I'd like to think that probabilisticly speaking we are an average civilization just beginning to reach outside our home sphere. I didn't know it had a name, but I like that title, The Mediocrity Principle.Even Carl Sagan (a general believer that any civilization advanced enough for interstellar travel would be altruistic, not hostile) called the practice of METI “deeply unwise and immature,” and recommended that “the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.” Scary.
We just have not been advanced long enough to hit "The Great Filter." Either we will blow each other up with nukes, unleash extinction level climate change, screw up the oceans to the point the whole ecosystem collapses, we all get super-ebola and cannot recover, or we stop exploring space and get wiped out by something the size of Mt. Everest hitting us at 45,000 miles an hour. Or, we pull our shit together and stumble upon the physics that the other intelligent people use to communicate, figure out fast space travel or any of the other ways to not kill ourselves off and eventually meet up with whatever is out there. Honestly? Either outcome will be exciting to watch.