It’s a discussion about The Great Filter theory with a tech tutorial about Google’s AppScript at the end. 

The Topic Title

When I was thinking about the topic that I could present, AppScript instantly came to mind as it is the technology that I use in our company’s back office process automation. In my head, this will be a great talk since people might use it for their stuff (like budgeting) or if they want to build their company in the future and don’t want to subscribe to some specialized tools to help them manage their company.  But the thing about speaking about technology is that it quickly gets boring when it gets too complicated especially if your audience is not that savvy. Then Sheena’s talk happened! Sheena talked about dreams, it was unique as it did not tackle something techy as people expected with our weekly talks. So I thought, what if I tackle a topic that will potentially pick people's minds? Our existence – I contemplated going for the simulation theory vs. the great filter but ultimately picked the great filter theory due to its scope.

Did the research, and made the slides about the Great Filter but it was short. The majority of the info that I got was from Wikipedia and Kurzgesagt. It quickly came to me that this topic is not gonna be enough. Plus, I was known to teach my colleagues new stuff, technical stuff.

So I went back to my initial topic in mind and just concatenated it with the slides that I had already got. And “The Great Filter with AppScript” was born.

The Talk

What is the Great Filter? Well, it is about the failure to find any extraterrestrial civilizations in the observable universe that implies that something is wrong with one or more of the arguments (from various scientific disciplines) that the appearance of advanced intelligent life is probable. The gist of it is that if the filter happened earlier then we are good! If it hasn’t happened yet then we are doomed.

With the AppScript, well, it was technical. It got an exercise where everyone had to make a quiz form (via Google Forms, which logged the responses to Google Sheets. Since it is a quiz, they have to have a column that has a status and when that status changes to passed or failed, the owner of the response gets the email (via GMail) that they have passed or failed the quiz.

Closing

In retrospect, I should’ve gone with the AppScript topic since it was really helpful. But, the Great Filter theory was also nice since it picked my colleague's heads about our existence in the universe.