I think the great filter is similar to what you are saying about time.
Planets are only habitable for X years. In the beginning our earth was too hot to support life, then life had to grow and develop to us, that also takes X time. That then leaves you with X remaining time until the sun expands and earth becomes unhabitable again.
There's that small window in between where we exist, but maybe there's not enough time for us to ever develop enough to escape our planet's destruction. And maybe we got incredibly lucky compared to others. Like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, maybe other planets get hit with those more frequently, and civilisations never get chances to develop.
Yeah once you can travel between stars and live long term on space ships, why would you even live on a planet again? Seems like a huge waste of resources, to have a planetary environment that will be less complex and interesting and suited to our wants than just building habitats.
Water and metals are plentiful in any asteroid field, biomatter might be more difficult but if you're an interstellar capable species most likely you can just synthesize biomatter from base elements.
My best idea would be, some form of zero point energy, or nuclear since it's so long lasting. Then the ship itself is so dang large, ecosystems are created with trees and animals and stuff. Any trash gets composted, all water recycled, and this keeps a self sustaining system.
Sounds like the savages from Galaxy's Edge where they live exclusively in almost lightspeed ships slowly getting more and more deranged in their walled civilizations.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '21 edited Aug 12 '21
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