I’ll note that most of the theorised catastrophes in that vein look like either “planet gets ice-nined”, “local star goes nova”, or “blast wave propagates at lightspeed forever”. The first two of those are relatively-easy to work around for an intelligent singleton, and the last doesn’t explain the Fermi observation since any instance of that in our past lightcone would have destroyed Earth.
My mental model of this class of disasters is different and assumes a much higher potential for discovery of completely novel physics.
I tend to assume that speaking in terms of ratio of today’s physics knowledge to physics knowledge 500 years ago, there is still potential for a comparable jump.
So I tend to think in terms of either warfare with weapons involving short-term reversible changes of fundamental physical constants and/or Planck-scale-structure of space-time or careless experiments of this kind, resulting in both cases in a total destruction of local neighborhood.
In this sense, a singleton does indeed have better chances compared to multipolar scenarios, both in terms of much smaller potential for “warfare” and in terms of having much, much easier time to coordinate risks of “civilian activities”.
However, I am not sure whether the notion of singleton is well-defined; a system can look like a singleton from the outside and behave like a singleton most of the time, but it still needs to have plenty of non-trivial structure inside and is still likely to be a “Society of Mind” (just like most humans look like singular entities from the outside, but have plenty of non-trivial structure inside themselves and are “Societies of Mind”).
To compare, even the most totalitarian states (our imperfect approximations of singletons) have plenty of fractional warfare, and powerful fractions destroy each other all the time. So far those fractions have not used military weapons of mass destruction in those struggles, but this is mostly because those weapons have been relatively unwieldy.
And even without those considerations, experiments in search of new physics are tempting, and balancing risks and rewards of such experiments can easily go wrong even for a “true singleton”.
I’ll note that most of the theorised catastrophes in that vein look like either “planet gets ice-nined”, “local star goes nova”, or “blast wave propagates at lightspeed forever”. The first two of those are relatively-easy to work around for an intelligent singleton, and the last doesn’t explain the Fermi observation since any instance of that in our past lightcone would have destroyed Earth.
My mental model of this class of disasters is different and assumes a much higher potential for discovery of completely novel physics.
I tend to assume that speaking in terms of ratio of today’s physics knowledge to physics knowledge 500 years ago, there is still potential for a comparable jump.
So I tend to think in terms of either warfare with weapons involving short-term reversible changes of fundamental physical constants and/or Planck-scale-structure of space-time or careless experiments of this kind, resulting in both cases in a total destruction of local neighborhood.
In this sense, a singleton does indeed have better chances compared to multipolar scenarios, both in terms of much smaller potential for “warfare” and in terms of having much, much easier time to coordinate risks of “civilian activities”.
However, I am not sure whether the notion of singleton is well-defined; a system can look like a singleton from the outside and behave like a singleton most of the time, but it still needs to have plenty of non-trivial structure inside and is still likely to be a “Society of Mind” (just like most humans look like singular entities from the outside, but have plenty of non-trivial structure inside themselves and are “Societies of Mind”).
To compare, even the most totalitarian states (our imperfect approximations of singletons) have plenty of fractional warfare, and powerful fractions destroy each other all the time. So far those fractions have not used military weapons of mass destruction in those struggles, but this is mostly because those weapons have been relatively unwieldy.
And even without those considerations, experiments in search of new physics are tempting, and balancing risks and rewards of such experiments can easily go wrong even for a “true singleton”.