Re: poly: Solar system development

Hal writes:
>Presumably even in situations where further probe launches are worthwhile,
>there will eventually come a time when the frontier has moved too far
>away ... to usefully reach the frontier from [such] a great distance.
>However wide the zone is, it seems that evolutionary considerations
>similar to my earlier post would apply. Replicators in the expansion
>zone would devote their resources to expansion. Behind the expansion
>zone, behavior would be random and unpredictable.

As there is no sharp boundary regarding when one still has a chance of
reaching the frontier, behind the frontier behavior may be dominated
by whatever strategies are appropriate for nearly behind probes. If
probes that have fallen behind and are trying to catch up need to go
slower/faster, scrounge more for resources, or use more cunning to find
unoccupied oases or conquer poorly-defended oases, then we might expect
those behaviors to be what we see even farther behind the frontier.
Perhaps evolutionary analysis *can* tell us a lot about behind the
frontier behavior.

Robin Hanson
hanson@econ.berkeley.edu http://hanson.berkeley.edu/
RWJF Health Policy Scholar, Sch. of Public Health 510-643-1884
140 Warren Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720-7360 FAX: 510-643-8614
Received on Tue Dec 16 18:03:08 1997