The “Great Filter” theory — as in “filtering out” various forms of life — argues that other civilizations, possibly several, have existed during the life of the universe. But they all destroyed themselves before they could make contact with Earth, noted the paper, “Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe.”

The scientists fear that all intelligent life, such as humans, have deeply ingrained dysfunctions that may “snowball quickly into the Great Filter,” they wrote.

But there’s still a bit of hope for humans — provided we can learn and take steps to avoid our own extinction, noted the paper by a team of researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California.

“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance,” astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and his coauthors wrote in the paper that appeared online on Oct. 23.