Re: poly: The singleton hypothesis

> Nick B. writes:
> >It follows from the assumption that it's mainly the colonized volume
> >that determines the military strength of an advanced nanopower,
> >together with the assumption that everybody would expand at very
> >close to c.
>
> I question this first assumption. When two c-expanding waves meet,
> it seems to me that local dynamics dominate. If one side is able to
> beat the locals and penetrate the other at near speed c, then the
> rest of the losing side will have little warning before the wave
> reaches them.
>
> Even given subsantial warning it's not clear that resources are
> transportable enough to help. If you can keep 100 units of resource
> locally to use in a defense, or transport them far away to deliver
> one unit of resource to a front line, you may just want to wait and
> defend.

What if, at each battle scene, the power with the most units of
resources (matter or energy) wins? The power with the bigger volume
would seem to be able to have more and bigger chunks of resources,
and would therefore win, or at least would not lose.

_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
Received on Tue May 5 02:37:13 1998