re: low profile

From: Robin Hanson (hanson@hss.caltech.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 14 1996 - 11:56:57 MDT


Forrest Bishop writes:
>With the competition this fierce, the best places for the long term
>may be the less desireable real estate- the dark matter galactic
>halos, the Great Voids (here's where you send the big starships),
>perhaps the interiors of stars. ]]

This would only buy you a little time. You really need to advance
your tech as fast as possible. Anyway, the point is if competition
were this fierce, it would soon be visible, so that can't be what is
going on out there now.

>It seems to me that the outcome of all this strategizing is that the
>best strategy is just to expand as aggressively as possible. ...
>
>[[One showstopper is the possibilty of a speed of light pulse
>(perhaps even an electromagnetic pulse of unspeakable amplitude),
> used as a last resort weapon against just such an expansion.
> It is my intuition that no matter what level a civilization reaches, its
>"people" cannot ever be sure they know all the possibilities of mind and of
>technology that are permitted in this Multiverse.

That could be a show stopper for any strategy, it doesn't imply that
this isn't the best strategy. And if such pulses had an arbitrary
radius, that would be the end of the living universe.

Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/



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