I've started to wonder if the Great Filter isn't some extinction-level event, but rather, that intelligent species eventually become so content with their surroundings and risk-averse that NIMBYism and related movements make further technological progress impossible
Seeing NIMBY backlash against data centers is what made me wonder about this. New AI is literally the largest driving force behind technological progress in the world right now. That fact that a bunch of 70-year-old NIMBYs can hold it up just because of "neighborhood character" or they don't want to pay a few dollars more in utilities each month is appalling to me. I guess something similar happened with nuclear power in the 20th century; people at the time opposed it based on extremely misguided beliefs about its risks and benefits, and as such, it never got as widely adopted as would have made economic sense. In almost every developed country, NIMBYism and related movements become stronger, not weaker over time, as indicated by housing prices continuing to compound well beyond even what rent prices would indicate in major cities. The fact that regulators make thinks like germline genetic engineering of humans virtually impossible is just another example of this; regulators prove to be the biggest limiting factor of human technological progress, for no other reason than because people dramatically inflate the risks associated with it in their minds.