Once a civilization is thriving in space, materials are practically infinite, and self building factories mean that the only budget is time.
Personally I think that the great filter is surviving the pollution and climate destruction from a civilization's industrial revolution. And that very few civs make it past that to thrive in space. So we may get a big space faring civ every 10 million years or so, and we don't know whether a civ would stay as a space farer forever.
Unless there really is a whole field of physics that we haven't touched yet. If that's the case, all bets are off.
I personally believe there might be many "great filters" and we are simply at the filter between terrestrial and local space life. I feel like there would be another great filter between local space and interstellar space. There could even be another filter to access higher dimensions. This is purely speculation, but it's something I enjoy pondering.
Unless there really is a whole field of physics that we haven’t touched yet. If that’s the case, all bets are off.
I'm not a physicist, but it seems like we have the basic building blocks. It's clear we're missing a significant piece of the puzzle given that we're still unable to reconcile the physics of the very large (general relativity) with the physics of the very small (quantum mechanics). If I were a betting man, I'd place my chips on the notion that we only understand a small fraction of the nature of our reality and the rules that govern it.