Life is pretty robust, civilization is not. I'd say it's pretty intuitive that the filter is ahead of us - civilizations collapsing has happened multiple times already in the last few millennia. Earth becoming sterile has never happened as far as we know.

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withinboredom 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, but a civilization collapsing doesn’t kill off an entire species nor (usually) wipe out knowledge completely. Thus it wouldn’t be a great filter. However, perhaps it is pretty common to create a grey goo, or nuke yourself, or whatever. That would be a life ending event.

	▲	pantalaimon a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's still about what we are able to observe. If there is a bronze age civilization in the vicinity of betelgeuse, how would we tell? You'd need a civilization advanced enough to do radio communication - and that has a lot of fragile interdependencies.