“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

My understanding is that the great filter theory means this is bad news for us humans here on earth. And considering the state of the world right now, it's especially ominous. Fate loves irony.

The great filter is only one of the possible explanations of the Fermi paradox however. There are other far less bleack including that there is actually no paradox at all: life is indeed frequent and but we are just bad at detecting it/have not been looking for it long enough.

I used to think that rare earth/rare life was the bleak option. As I get older, I think the bleak thing would be a galaxy full of technologically advanced species with morals potentially equal to, or worse than ours.

How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.

With due respect, the Great Filter is a hypothesis, not a theory.

That being said, I agree. I read in a similar thread yesterday someone confused how this would be bad news rather than good news—that there are many other intelligent species indicates that such a filter either doesn't exist or is very easy to pass. But, like your point does, I think it's important to recognize that such a "good news" position is predicated on the notion that we as a species are already past the Great Filter, rather than that we're still behind it and the others are ahead.

Not necessarily. I think it's reasonable to imagine that 'some sort of low-level life' might be fairly common across the galaxy ('one in a ten million'), whereas complex life - never mind 'intelligent' or technologically-sophisticated life might be very much rarer.

The older I get and the more I appreciate Just How Lucky we are to exist at all on our planet here, the more I favour the above thinking.