Meanwhile if you're hoping, why not just hope directly that the Great Filter is behind us? It's totally plausible that the window for multicellular life to survive on a planet is generally short, like on Mars, and not long, like on Earth. Or a million other possible explanations that we also have no data for or against right now. I like to keep my science-related hopes on the side of the coolest possible result .
Thus ever more potent tools are handed out to avoid confrontation with the "overcome" animal nature - and once that equation reaches the end of the line (easy energy and resources exhausted), a nearly unchanged animal with exponential power tools in hand, reverts to tribalistic warfare. Nothing recovers from this.
The greatest damage done, is the lie that life can learn and change, which never holds up under stress. The most valuable achievement to escape the filter, is investigate our nature realistically and apply controlled technological crippling, while testing the tools to calm the evil spirits of our nature, even under stress.
So technology is the problem and the solution, if applied with a real effort to understand humanity, beyond the "I wish for X and by the magic of wishful thinking it becomes reality instantly". Its hard work - similar to somebody diagnosing ones own mental limitations, and building a limited operating system for that crippled system. In a way- its the ultimate hack.
The lockdown mostly worked, because panem (food) and circensis (movie-streams and gaming) were continuously supplied. But, yes you have a point, the species behaved remarkably well under stress. But then, we also have a lot of social implants now too (cellphone-panopticon) and crowd-sourced anger-management.
Also its been half a year, since a angry crowd stampeded into the capitol building of a nuclear power.
So they either have an abundant source of nutrients that has not been depleted for their entire evolution, or they are not highly developed, or they have developed aggression.
For example some ficus grow over other trees, and later the roots cover the old tree until it dies. They don't eat the other tree, just "reuse" the wood to have an initial high place to get light. I coudn't find a nice link about this, but here are a few photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/rodolfocol/15129590163/in/phot... https://www.alamy.es/brasil-el-pantanal-parasito-higuera-fic...
Include in that the fire-economy of some forest and savannahs + the animals marshalled by these ecosystems and "peaceful" nature stops looking peaceful
We've only been broadcasting radio waves for a few decades now, and even that would just be lost in the background noise at large distances.
It would be extremely surprising if we even find any life outside the solar system for at least a few centuries.
If humans are ever able to leave the earth and even theoretically establish permanent habitation, it's unthinkable that no other civilization has done so.
That said my gut says hypothetically talking about the danger of a universal great filter is silly when we clearly face near term filters of our own design right now (climate change, environmental collapse, a nuclear arms race)
As for the great filter, yeah, it's a bit scary if we rule out bio-genesis as an option, but that still leaves the single to multi cell jump behind us (and arguably development of human level cooperation/problem solving, but I'm less sold on that one).
Do you have any concrete examples when this happened before? Writing (again) implies you think there was already such a precedent.
If we find even the most basic microbial life, NASA is going to shut down all future exploration in the interest of Martian planetary protection. China and Russia probably won't, but the US will cripple itself (again) out of caution.
On a more existential level, finding life elsewhere in the solar system (assuming it's not diaspora from earth or vice versa) says really dark things about our own potential. If life is truly common in the universe, the fact that we haven't seen it anywhere means that the great filter is still in front of us -- and nobody has slipped through.
OTOH, if the great filter is behind is, there's no data about our likelihood of killing ourselves before we do manage to explore the rest of the known universe. This is such a better outcome.