Well, that gets into game theory stuff, though. For example, one could say that logically any aggressively expansive intelligent species on that scale should take the position of being friendly and supporting to lesser-advanced intelligent species by default, as a way to encourage other more-advanced species than them to take the same position.

The real danger would be a super but unintelligent race doing the same (think "giant space ants"), since they wouldn't have philosophy department chairs.

I am a simple man, I am just afraid of sharks and box jellyfishes.

It's a great book. I might be the only person in the universe writing fanfiction of it, so I'm biased, but I think it's one of his best.

Can't quite make myself claim it's better than Orthogonal.

Sounds like they’re referring to vacuum decay: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum