Colonizing the galaxy is a crazy thing to do take one:
Informational / economic network effects and the absolute lightspeed limit make advanced civilizations quite extremely reluctant to spread out—Civilizations of billions that have collapsed into single hive-cities / computational structures. This is, strictly speaking a variation on hiding, except that the stealth isn’t the point, it is a side effect. Colonizing other star systems means dooming yourself to abject cultural, social and material poverty because it means leaving reach of the technological and social engines of home. So it doesn’t happen, and when it does, the decendants of the original fanatics back-migrate back to the origin system because fuck that noise.
Take 2: “There are expansionist outlets much easier and faster than interstellar space travel. Brane hopping, timeline gates, dyson swarming..
Weird : Advanced civilizations employ the anthropic principle in engineering—which winnows their very existence out of most timelines. So all civilizations encounter empty universes in the bulk of their world-lines.
The difference between not colonizing the galaxy and dying out completely is small enough that I’d consider this a subset of dying out, not an alternative.
The size of the universe is irrelevant. If it’s bigger, there will be more intelligences to start with. Adding brane-hopping doesn’t just mean that all the denizens of this universe will enter others. It also means that the denizens of other universes will enter this one. In fact, since it makes expansion easier, it would mean more alien colonization.
Dyson swarming doesn’t have that problem, but they don’t take very long on a galactic timescale.
Your first point is just wrong. The difference between an extant civilization with a billion year tradition of science and engineering and a dead one is not irrelevant.
Among other things, just because they don’t settle, does not mean that we might not find their instrumentation lying around, and further it is one plausible tale of what happens to alien civilizations that think it is a good idea to turn the entire galaxy into more spawn—Sooner or later they run into a non-expansionist civilization sufficiently out of their league to summarily crush them.
Re: dyson swarm time scales—Building one doesnt take so long in galactic terms? No, I suppose not. Reaching the point where you honestly feel the swarm and the starlift mines are no longer sufficient to support an adequate lifestyle? I am kind of supposing that most advanced civilizations manage to suppress the urge to just reproduce without limit because Azathoth told them to.
I’m a total utilitarian. If a planet-sized civilization is good, a galaxy-sized civilization is billions of times better. Ergo, a civilization failing to expand to the galaxy-level is 99.9999999% as bad as a civilization dying. And there’s no reason to stop at galaxy-sized.
Even for an average utilitarian, a planet-sized civilization will make a trivial change in average utility of the universe compared to a galaxy-sized civilization. If you can get above-average utility, expand. If not, being small is better, but you might as well die.
I find it unlikely a non-expansionist civilization could pose a threat. An expansionist one has vastly more resources. Then can do science faster, especially where it can be done in parallel. I also suspect that they will quickly reach the point of diminishing returns, and a galactic civilization has vastly more resources at their disposal.
The theory I am entertaining here is that spreading out crashes average utility hard—If you don’t have ftl,
coordination and communication across stellar distances is very, very inefficient—and that includes research. The home system is always going to be a ridiculously better place to live because it has billions and billions of people in it, and embodied technological and social infrastructure representing trillions of Being-years of labor. Which you cant just stuff into a can and kick over to the next star system. Possibly you can stuff a copy of “enough” of it into a can that a self-sustaining colony could be launched, but the people building that colony? That’s a lifetime sentence of abject poverty (As compared to the home system) because they don’t have the tools, the markets and the networks of home. They have rocks and sunlight. Rocks and sunlight are useful, but they are not as useful as a contract with Nyarlothep Starmining Inc. Not even close.
And that situation could easily hold for every single civilization with the technological capability to launch a starship. Because if you can build a starship at all, that means you have a technological / social infrastructure representing that “Several trillion being-years” of labor investment
So. Science probes? Sure. Don’t have to put people on them, and even if you do put people on them, it’ll be the kind of people who value poking the tiger analogue on the plains of x3ytei9 − 5 with a probe over any other consideration. But colonization? That involves creating new people who didn’t volunteer for that post. Never gonna pass muster.
And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all. If “overrun the galaxy” is something you are inclined to do, you will do so as soon as you have the capability. Then when you run into the people 3960 starsystems over who reached that treshhold and decided not to be insane.. 228 million years earlier… the fact that you have more rocks isn’t going to help.
I don’t mean to suggest that they’d spread out as opposed to building dyson spheres. They would do both, and I don’t think they’d send out starships until they’re a good way through building the dyson sphere. Taking years to transmit data would make parallelization difficult, but if nothing else, they can at least do science in a larger system than the one they’re born in. And they can always smash a few stars together to get even more power.
Each star system would spend the vast majority of its lifetime as a dyson sphere with trillions of being-years of labor behind it. The first settlers won’t make a dent in the average utility. Besides, compared to the cost of simulating a mind, the cost of making it happy would be negligible. You can already imagine utopia. You just need to mess around with the little part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fiction.
“And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all.”
I can understand more resources dominating, and I can understand more science dominating, but the expansionists have both. And even if they didn’t, would the isolationists even care? I suppose from an average utility point of view, they’d have to wipe them out, and then send out probes to wipe out any other expansionists with below-average utility, but they’d have to become expansionists themselves to outweigh all the expansionists that take over a galaxy before meeting isolationists. I don’t think an isolationist would be average or total utilitarian.
There’s also the strategy of just pulling as much of the universe together as you can. You won’t get nearly the population of an expansionist, but if it’s that important that nobody ever has to be stuck on a starship with only a billion people for company, it can at least get you vastly more resources than a strict isolationist without having to spread out.
Theories other than “Deliberately Hiding”;
Colonizing the galaxy is a crazy thing to do take one: Informational / economic network effects and the absolute lightspeed limit make advanced civilizations quite extremely reluctant to spread out—Civilizations of billions that have collapsed into single hive-cities / computational structures. This is, strictly speaking a variation on hiding, except that the stealth isn’t the point, it is a side effect. Colonizing other star systems means dooming yourself to abject cultural, social and material poverty because it means leaving reach of the technological and social engines of home. So it doesn’t happen, and when it does, the decendants of the original fanatics back-migrate back to the origin system because fuck that noise.
Take 2: “There are expansionist outlets much easier and faster than interstellar space travel. Brane hopping, timeline gates, dyson swarming..
Weird : Advanced civilizations employ the anthropic principle in engineering—which winnows their very existence out of most timelines. So all civilizations encounter empty universes in the bulk of their world-lines.
The difference between not colonizing the galaxy and dying out completely is small enough that I’d consider this a subset of dying out, not an alternative.
The size of the universe is irrelevant. If it’s bigger, there will be more intelligences to start with. Adding brane-hopping doesn’t just mean that all the denizens of this universe will enter others. It also means that the denizens of other universes will enter this one. In fact, since it makes expansion easier, it would mean more alien colonization.
Dyson swarming doesn’t have that problem, but they don’t take very long on a galactic timescale.
Your first point is just wrong. The difference between an extant civilization with a billion year tradition of science and engineering and a dead one is not irrelevant. Among other things, just because they don’t settle, does not mean that we might not find their instrumentation lying around, and further it is one plausible tale of what happens to alien civilizations that think it is a good idea to turn the entire galaxy into more spawn—Sooner or later they run into a non-expansionist civilization sufficiently out of their league to summarily crush them.
Re: dyson swarm time scales—Building one doesnt take so long in galactic terms? No, I suppose not. Reaching the point where you honestly feel the swarm and the starlift mines are no longer sufficient to support an adequate lifestyle? I am kind of supposing that most advanced civilizations manage to suppress the urge to just reproduce without limit because Azathoth told them to.
I’m a total utilitarian. If a planet-sized civilization is good, a galaxy-sized civilization is billions of times better. Ergo, a civilization failing to expand to the galaxy-level is 99.9999999% as bad as a civilization dying. And there’s no reason to stop at galaxy-sized.
Even for an average utilitarian, a planet-sized civilization will make a trivial change in average utility of the universe compared to a galaxy-sized civilization. If you can get above-average utility, expand. If not, being small is better, but you might as well die.
I find it unlikely a non-expansionist civilization could pose a threat. An expansionist one has vastly more resources. Then can do science faster, especially where it can be done in parallel. I also suspect that they will quickly reach the point of diminishing returns, and a galactic civilization has vastly more resources at their disposal.
The theory I am entertaining here is that spreading out crashes average utility hard—If you don’t have ftl,
coordination and communication across stellar distances is very, very inefficient—and that includes research. The home system is always going to be a ridiculously better place to live because it has billions and billions of people in it, and embodied technological and social infrastructure representing trillions of Being-years of labor. Which you cant just stuff into a can and kick over to the next star system. Possibly you can stuff a copy of “enough” of it into a can that a self-sustaining colony could be launched, but the people building that colony? That’s a lifetime sentence of abject poverty (As compared to the home system) because they don’t have the tools, the markets and the networks of home. They have rocks and sunlight. Rocks and sunlight are useful, but they are not as useful as a contract with Nyarlothep Starmining Inc. Not even close.
And that situation could easily hold for every single civilization with the technological capability to launch a starship. Because if you can build a starship at all, that means you have a technological / social infrastructure representing that “Several trillion being-years” of labor investment
So. Science probes? Sure. Don’t have to put people on them, and even if you do put people on them, it’ll be the kind of people who value poking the tiger analogue on the plains of x3ytei9 − 5 with a probe over any other consideration. But colonization? That involves creating new people who didn’t volunteer for that post. Never gonna pass muster.
And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all. If “overrun the galaxy” is something you are inclined to do, you will do so as soon as you have the capability. Then when you run into the people 3960 starsystems over who reached that treshhold and decided not to be insane.. 228 million years earlier… the fact that you have more rocks isn’t going to help.
I don’t mean to suggest that they’d spread out as opposed to building dyson spheres. They would do both, and I don’t think they’d send out starships until they’re a good way through building the dyson sphere. Taking years to transmit data would make parallelization difficult, but if nothing else, they can at least do science in a larger system than the one they’re born in. And they can always smash a few stars together to get even more power.
Each star system would spend the vast majority of its lifetime as a dyson sphere with trillions of being-years of labor behind it. The first settlers won’t make a dent in the average utility. Besides, compared to the cost of simulating a mind, the cost of making it happy would be negligible. You can already imagine utopia. You just need to mess around with the little part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fiction.
“And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all.”
I can understand more resources dominating, and I can understand more science dominating, but the expansionists have both. And even if they didn’t, would the isolationists even care? I suppose from an average utility point of view, they’d have to wipe them out, and then send out probes to wipe out any other expansionists with below-average utility, but they’d have to become expansionists themselves to outweigh all the expansionists that take over a galaxy before meeting isolationists. I don’t think an isolationist would be average or total utilitarian.
There’s also the strategy of just pulling as much of the universe together as you can. You won’t get nearly the population of an expansionist, but if it’s that important that nobody ever has to be stuck on a starship with only a billion people for company, it can at least get you vastly more resources than a strict isolationist without having to spread out.