Ecofeminist Insights into the Goliath of Extinction: How Quantum Physics, Queer Ecology, and Degrowth Can Prevent a Global Annihilation Event.

Have you ever looked up at the stars, wrapped in the quiet existential dread of a Sunday night, and wondered why it is so silent out there? This is the Fermi Paradox, a contradiction between a universe that should statistically be teeming with advanced civilisations and one that completely lacks of any observable evidence or contact. In 1998, Robin Hanson proposed an explanation known as the Great Filter. He argued that along the evolutionary trajectory from a lifeless rock to a galaxy-colonising civilisation, there sits a developmental barrier that is extremely challenging that almost every species crashes right into it.

If this filter is in our evolutionary past, we might be the lucky cosmic exception. But if those past steps for us (current life on planet Earth) were relatively easy, then the Great Filter lies ahead of us: The challenge is yet to come, and we don't know what it is. This implies that technological civilisations have a short lifetime, and they eventually self-terminate through catastrophe: Either climate change, nuclear self-annihilation, or biosphere collapse before they can establish a multi-planetary presence.

But what if this future filter is not an inevitable law of physics? What if it is simply a design flaw in our socio-economic and philosophical programming? If the filter is indeed still ahead of us, I believe that we can break this pattern of extinction by executing a shift toward global degrowth, ecofeminist economies, and climate policies that leave no one behind, and by no one, I mean all humans, and all other-than-humans.

Quantum physics and the illusion of separation

To understand how to rewrite our cosmic destiny, we must look at what reality really is. Classical physics and capitalist economics operate on Cartesian reductionism and atomism: the same flawed assumption that the world is a collection of separate, pre-existing objects. Classical mechanics views nature as a passive, dead machine: an empty backdrop where separate living organisms collide like billiard balls, and where natural resources sit waiting to be managed, extracted, and of course, controlled for profit.

But quantum physics shatters this illusion of separation. Drawing on Quantum Field Theory, physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad formulated a framework called agential realism, which asserts that the universe is not made of independent objects that occasionally interact. Instead, special entities only emerge through their relational entanglements, a dynamic Barad calls intra-action. Barad shifts our view of ourselves from mere observers standing outside of a passive nature to actual participants in the universe’s ongoing self-becoming.

When we view nature and culture as separate, we make an ontological error that poses an existential threat to human and more-than-human survival. If we are quantum-entangled with the Earth, then extracting from the planet is a violent act of self-amputation that destabilises our shared material-discursive reality.

The iron grip of the Goliath State

This quantum separation has long fueled what Dr. Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk calls Goliaths. Kemp suggests we must ditch the word 'civilization', which functions primarily as propaganda to legitimise extractive power structures, and instead recognise these states as Goliaths: unequal, state-enforced hierarchies built on systemic domination.

These top-down structures require three specific inputs: storable surplus food like grain that can be easily confiscated and taxed by a ruling elite, a monopoly on advanced weaponry to enforce compliance through violence, and caged land bounded by deserts or mountains that prevents the exploited population from fleeing. Historically, Goliaths were run by elites high in dark triad traits like narcissism and cold psychopathy, who hollowed out their societies through environmental degradation and extreme inequality. When these Goliaths collapsed, it was kind of a relief for ordinary citizens who returned to egalitarian, decentralised farming.

But because our globalised capitalist Goliath is hyper-interconnected through supply chains and armed with thermonuclear weapons, a future collapse will not be a localised reset this time. It will be global and catastrophic. Market capitalism is incapable of factoring in long-term survival, and has proven to treat the interests of future generations as a complete economic externality since it prioritises short-term profit above anything else.

The trap of reproductive futurism

Perhaps we all remain paralyzed in the face of this impending filter because our cultural imagination is trapped in what queer theorist Lee Edelman calls reproductive futurism. Almost all mainstream political and environmental discourse is organized around a heteronormative consensus that places the absolute value of the deferred future in the figure of the Child. We are told to recycle, consume less, and of course, preserve resources for subsequent biological generations.

While this sounds noble, it tethers environmental stewardship to the preservation of the heterosexual nuclear family and its private property relations, abjecting the queer as a threat to futurity. Queer ecology rejects this normalised recourse to reproductive futurism. As Sarah Ensor argues, environmental ethics must develop a model for relating to a terminally ill planet, one that is not dependent on the promise of a biological future, but is grounded in non-normative intimacy, care, and mourning of the present.

If civilisations inevitably self-destruct due to inherited behavior patterns that prioritise genetic expansion and short-term competitive fitness over planetary limits, then survival requires a conscious, structural rupture of these heteronormative, growth-oriented behavior patterns.

Queering the biosphere and entering the mesh

Once we strip away these heteropatriarchal biases, we find that the non-human world is already beautifully queer, fluid, trans*, non-binary, and relational. Female-female albatross pairs successfully raise chicks together, clownfish switch their sex to maintain social stability, and reptiles engage in asexual reproduction. Nature does not conform to a straight, productivist factory; it is what Timothy Morton describes as the mesh: a non-totalisable, open-ended web of interrelations that blurs the boundaries between species, between the living and the non-living, and between the organism and its environment.

If we start incorporating queer perspectives and begin challenging heteronormative, patriarchal, binary, deterministic frameworks, we'll start producing a more accurate and objective science. This must extend to the material conditions of scientific work itself. Queer field biologists for instance navigate extreme physical hazards and geopolitical hostility during fieldwork. Closeted professional cultures carry a concrete productivity cost, as scientists who must spend cognitive energy on vigilance author significantly fewer peer-reviewed publications.

Supporting these scientists expands our collective capacity to understand ecosystems. Implementing frameworks like Queer Death Studies is a path towards stepping away from the neoliberal obsession with individual survival.

Imagine focusing instead on shared vulnerability and posthuman grief in contemporary death worlds created by capitalism? 

A policy blueprint for an ecofeminist degrowth economy

To overcome the Great Filter (if it's still ahead of us), we must turn this quantum, relational understanding of the world into a socio-economic program of ecofeminist degrowth. Degrowth is a planned, equitable downscaling of material and energy throughput in affluent nations, designed to restore biophysical health while guaranteeing a good life for all. It is not a chaotic recession like many people would assume.

The Feminisms and Degrowth Alliance emphasizes that economic downscaling without radical institutional reform is dangerous. Without systemic changes, a contraction will most likely result in a re-traditionalisation of care work, where the state cuts social services and dumps the unpaid burden of keeping society alive back onto the exploited domestic labor of women and people from postcolonial countries.

The ideal scenario, which is quite urgently needed, is to dismantle the two-tiered capitalist economy, where we must sell our work to survive, and transition toward a one-tier provisioning system that centers care and use-value.

I am introducing this ecofeminist transition as hope, driven by key climate and economic policies.

The first is a state-supported universal care income, which financially compensates reproductive and ecological care work. By providing a steady income for care, we will disentangle basic livelihood security from traditional wage work. This will allow all people to refuse carbon-intensive industrial work and shift societal time toward ecological preservation.

The second policy is the creation of Reproductive Commons, where basic survival infrastructures like land, water, housing, and urban spaces are deprivatised and managed collectively by communities globally. Rather than relying on the resource-intensive nuclear family home as the primary unit of consumption, commoning care, reintroducing non-traditional family structures, and encouraging interdependence organises social reproduction horizontally through neighborhood kitchens or shared stewardship.

Rather than competing, these policies would work in a supportive loop, where the universal care income provides the material security and temporal freedom that allows communities to build autonomous Reproductive Commons from the bottom up.

Rewriting the cosmic math of extinction

The systemic risk of extinction is a direct consequence of the divergence between our destructive technological capacity and our capacity for cooperative, ecologically integrated governance. Under the extractive Goliath paradigm of capitalism, humanity maximises material throughput, which, consequently, drives destructive potential exponentially upward while systematically depleting both social coordination and biophysical carrying capacity. This, unfortunately, forces the probability of self-termination to approach certainty.

If global world leaders decide (sooner rather than later) to shift towards an ecofeminist degrowth framework, we may have the power to rewrite these variables. Downscaling will lead to the stabilisation of the planet's carrying capacity, while dismantling hierarchical dualisms would establish a horizontal decolonial framework of global  care-first cooperation, allowing technological development to be safely and democratically regulated, and of course, not used for power nor domination.

This synthesis also resolves the exodepopulation filter, which posits that advanced species collapse due to voluntary non-reproduction. Under reproductive futurism, declining birth rates are a terrifying economic emergency because they threaten the supply of workers for capitalist expansion. Under a queer-ecofeminist degrowth framework, population stabilisation is a graceful, self-limiting adaptation. Now, imagine with me, a world where non-reproductive kinship is the norm, and sharing the work of care across generations and species through a supportive community commons... I believe we may have all it takes to decouple human survival from the demand for infinite growth.

A final quantum leap

The universe is silent because perhaps civilisations keep trying to escape their biophysical limits through a tech-capitalist race to the stars. But the true path to traversing the Great Filter is not a rocket ship, but a mere relational shift.

It's about time we realised that we are entangled intra-actively with our biosphere, and that the environment is not an external object, but our very flesh. Through the policies of a care income, reproductive commons, and planned degrowth, we can dismantle the psychopathic Goliaths that drive us to self-annihilation and cultivate a resilient, posthumanist mesh of relations that can co-exist with the biophysical realities of our shared Earth.

I mean either that, or... boom?