poly: Malign Probes and expanding civilizations

It seems that most scenarios for the civilizations' expansion assume that
their power and spread will be shaped more by their spacial expansion than
growth in complexity, power over the laws of physics, ability to create more
space/time where they are, etc. Of course, extensive factors are easier to
model and extrapolate, but their role seems to be smaller and smaller even
in recent human history, and will probably continue to diminish. So I do not
seriously consider any expansion scenarios based on currently known - or
currently existing - laws of physics and technology.
  Also, with technological development speeding up, a civilization that lags
its neighbor in development for even a century (a nanosecond, when things
really speed up?) would be desperately inferior technologically. That would
make any attack against a stronger neighbor futile, and an attack against a
weaker neighbor unnecessary.
  The origins of the civilization (hand/fire; thinking ocean, etc.) may not make
any difference after a while, as with the discovery of better technologies the
intelligent systems will keep replanting themselves on new substrates and
recreating their architectures accordingly, so in a few generations one would
hardly tell whether the thing started from biochemistry or from vacuum patterns.

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Alexander Chislenko <http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html>
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Received on Mon Dec 22 00:46:04 1997