If you have lots of entities with root permissions on matter, any of whom has the physical capability to attack any other, then you have entities spending huge amounts of precious negentropy on defense and deterrence.
That is what we have today. Perhaps strangely—if you walk through a tropical rainforest, you don’t see that much fighting—it all seems rather peaceful most of the time. Nature really likes cooperation.
If there’s no centralized system of property rights in place for selling off the universe to the highest bidder, then you have a race to burn the cosmic commons, and the degeneration of the vast majority of all agents into rapacious hardscrapple frontier replicators.
The frontier folk would be very cool! They would have amazing technology—and would travel near the speed of light. That’s a funny sort of “degeneration”.
“—if you walk through a tropical rainforest, you don’t see that much fighting—it all seems rather peaceful most of the time. Nature really likes cooperation.”
It might look peaceful on the Discovery Channel, but have you ever walked in a real tropical rainforest? Everything has spikes, everything is poisonous, almost anything that moves will fight or flee at first sight—everything but the very largest and most dangerous things. It’s not the organized warfare of humans, but rather a cosmic, bloody, free-for-all, with survival and replication the only criterion for success. Evolution is not only a Blind Idiot God, but also a very harsh and unsympathetic mistress.
That is what we have today. Perhaps strangely—if you walk through a tropical rainforest, you don’t see that much fighting—it all seems rather peaceful most of the time. Nature really likes cooperation.
The frontier folk would be very cool! They would have amazing technology—and would travel near the speed of light. That’s a funny sort of “degeneration”.
It might look peaceful on the Discovery Channel, but have you ever walked in a real tropical rainforest? Everything has spikes, everything is poisonous, almost anything that moves will fight or flee at first sight—everything but the very largest and most dangerous things. It’s not the organized warfare of humans, but rather a cosmic, bloody, free-for-all, with survival and replication the only criterion for success. Evolution is not only a Blind Idiot God, but also a very harsh and unsympathetic mistress.