The Pandora Filter: Accumulation of Critical Feedback Risks in Self-Replicating Technological Species

We propose that the concurrent emergence of multiple planetary-level challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and technological risks is not coincidental but rather a predictable consequence of the Pandora behavior patterns exhibited by self-replicating species as they approach planetary boundary. The inherently expansive nature of such species, driven by generational replication and resource utilization, inevitably leads to the accumulation of systemic risks over time. We introduce the Pandora Filter: a probabilistic framework that quantifies the cumulative effect of these risks as a product of individual probabilities of avoiding catastrophic side effects from specific actions or systemic behaviors. Our analysis suggests that the evolutionary trajectory of such species is bounded by two critical thresholds: planetary (Tp): the point at which the species achieve the capacity to generate planetary-scale impacts, and the Pandora Point (Te), the threshold at which the cumulative probability of system-caused severe or extinction-level feed-back impacts exceeds 0.5. We argue that the window between Tp and Te is sufficiently narrow, relative to the span of a civilization’s adaptive trajectory that the accumulation of unmitigated secondary risks may critically con-strain its subsequent development. This framework provides a novel lens to interpret the existential risk dynamics of replication-based technological species resulting from second-level feedback loops.