Good question! I didn’t actually think about this consciously, but I guess my intuitive assumption is that the sufficiently advanced civilizations are strongly constrained by the laws of physics, which are the same for everyone, regardless of their intelligence.
A genius human inventor living in 21st century could possibly invent a car that is 10x faster than any other car invented so far, or maybe a rocket that is 100x faster than any other rocket. But if an alien civilization already has spaceships that fly at 0.9c, the best their super-minds can do is to increase it to 0.99c, or maybe 0.999c, but even if they get to 0.999999c, it won’t make much of a difference if two civilizations on the opposite sides of the galaxy send their bombs at each other.
Similarly, human military in 21st century could invent more powerful bombs, and then maybe better bunkers, and then even more powerful bombs, etc. So the more intelligent side can keep an advantage. But if the alien civilizations invent bombs that can blow up stars, or create black holes and throw them at your solar system, there is probably not much you can do about it. Especially, if they won’t only launch the bombs at you, but also at all solar systems around you. Suppose you survive the attack, but all stars within 1000 light years around you are destroyed. How will your civilization advance now? You need energy, and there is a limit on how much energy you can extract from a star; and if you have no more stars, you are out of energy.
Once you get the “theory of everything” and develop technology to exploit nature at that level, there is nowhere further to go. The speed of light is finite. The matter in your light solar system is finite; the amount of energy you can extract from it is finite. If you get e.g. to 1% of the fundamental limits, it means that no invention ever can make you 100x more efficient than you are now. Which means that a civilization that starts with 100x more resources (because they started expanding through the universe earlier, or sacrificed more to become faster) will crush you.
This is not a proof, one could possibly argue that the smarter civilization would e.g. try to escape instead of fighting, or that there must be a way to overcome what seems like the fundamental limitations of physics, like maybe even create your own parallel universe and escape there. But, this is my intuition about how things would work on the galactic scale. If someone throws a sufficient amount of black holes at you, or strips bare all the resources around you, it’s game over even for the Space Einstein.
Good question! I didn’t actually think about this consciously, but I guess my intuitive assumption is that the sufficiently advanced civilizations are strongly constrained by the laws of physics, which are the same for everyone, regardless of their intelligence.
A genius human inventor living in 21st century could possibly invent a car that is 10x faster than any other car invented so far, or maybe a rocket that is 100x faster than any other rocket. But if an alien civilization already has spaceships that fly at 0.9c, the best their super-minds can do is to increase it to 0.99c, or maybe 0.999c, but even if they get to 0.999999c, it won’t make much of a difference if two civilizations on the opposite sides of the galaxy send their bombs at each other.
Similarly, human military in 21st century could invent more powerful bombs, and then maybe better bunkers, and then even more powerful bombs, etc. So the more intelligent side can keep an advantage. But if the alien civilizations invent bombs that can blow up stars, or create black holes and throw them at your solar system, there is probably not much you can do about it. Especially, if they won’t only launch the bombs at you, but also at all solar systems around you. Suppose you survive the attack, but all stars within 1000 light years around you are destroyed. How will your civilization advance now? You need energy, and there is a limit on how much energy you can extract from a star; and if you have no more stars, you are out of energy.
Once you get the “theory of everything” and develop technology to exploit nature at that level, there is nowhere further to go. The speed of light is finite. The matter in your light solar system is finite; the amount of energy you can extract from it is finite. If you get e.g. to 1% of the fundamental limits, it means that no invention ever can make you 100x more efficient than you are now. Which means that a civilization that starts with 100x more resources (because they started expanding through the universe earlier, or sacrificed more to become faster) will crush you.
This is not a proof, one could possibly argue that the smarter civilization would e.g. try to escape instead of fighting, or that there must be a way to overcome what seems like the fundamental limitations of physics, like maybe even create your own parallel universe and escape there. But, this is my intuition about how things would work on the galactic scale. If someone throws a sufficient amount of black holes at you, or strips bare all the resources around you, it’s game over even for the Space Einstein.