I guess it’s a claim that advanced civilizations don’t hit K2, because they prefer to live in virtual worlds, and have little interest in expanding as fast as possible.
This would be hard. You would need active regulations against designer babies and/or reproduction.
Because, well, suppose 99.9% of your population wants to veg out in the Land of Infinite Fun. The other 0.1% thinks a good use of its time is popping out as many babies as possible. Maybe they can’t make sure their offspring agree with this (hence the mention of regulations against designer babies, although even then natural selection will be selecting at full power for any genes producing a tendency to do this), but they can brute-force through that by having ten thousand babies each—you’ve presumably got immortality if you’ve gotten to this point, so there’s not a lot stopping them. Heck, they could even flee civilisation to escape the persecution and start their own civilisation which rapidly eclipses the original in population and (if the original’s not making maximum use of resources) power.
Giving up on expansion is an exclusive Filter, at the level of civilisations (they all need to do this, because any proportion of expanders will wind up dominating the end-state) but also at the level of individuals (individuals who decide to raise the birth rate of their civilisations can do it unilaterally unless suppressed). Shub-Niggurath always wins by default—it’s possible to subdue her, but you are not going to do it by accident.
(The obvious examples of this in the human case are the Amish and Quiverfulls. The Amish population grows rapidly because it has high fertility and high retention. The Quiverfulls are not currently self-sustaining because they have such low retention that 12 kids/woman isn’t enough to break even, but that will very predictably yield to technology. Unless these are forcibly suppressed, birth rate collapse is not going to make the human race peter out.)
Anyway, I should drag my head out of this fun space and go do something more pragmatically useful. I intend to help our odds of survival, even if we’re ultimately doomed based on this anthropic reasoning.
Yes! Please do! I’m not at all trying to discourage people from fighting the good fight. It’s just, y’know, I noticed it and so I figured I’d mention it.
This would be hard. You would need active regulations against designer babies and/or reproduction.
Because, well, suppose 99.9% of your population wants to veg out in the Land of Infinite Fun. The other 0.1% thinks a good use of its time is popping out as many babies as possible. Maybe they can’t make sure their offspring agree with this (hence the mention of regulations against designer babies, although even then natural selection will be selecting at full power for any genes producing a tendency to do this), but they can brute-force through that by having ten thousand babies each—you’ve presumably got immortality if you’ve gotten to this point, so there’s not a lot stopping them. Heck, they could even flee civilisation to escape the persecution and start their own civilisation which rapidly eclipses the original in population and (if the original’s not making maximum use of resources) power.
Giving up on expansion is an exclusive Filter, at the level of civilisations (they all need to do this, because any proportion of expanders will wind up dominating the end-state) but also at the level of individuals (individuals who decide to raise the birth rate of their civilisations can do it unilaterally unless suppressed). Shub-Niggurath always wins by default—it’s possible to subdue her, but you are not going to do it by accident.
(The obvious examples of this in the human case are the Amish and Quiverfulls. The Amish population grows rapidly because it has high fertility and high retention. The Quiverfulls are not currently self-sustaining because they have such low retention that 12 kids/woman isn’t enough to break even, but that will very predictably yield to technology. Unless these are forcibly suppressed, birth rate collapse is not going to make the human race peter out.)
Yes! Please do! I’m not at all trying to discourage people from fighting the good fight. It’s just, y’know, I noticed it and so I figured I’d mention it.