Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

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Life. Individuals compete. Resources have limits, and life quickly scales to them.

Life harnessing new resources is the most constructive way to compete.

Creatures that expand, expand exponentially.

Creatures that don’t, collapse exponentially.

It takes a minuscule percentage of a population to be expanders, for the whole population to quickly become expanders.

It would take an exceptional explanation to explain why creatures that could expand, don’t.

An exceptional explanation on par with explaining how a balloon could be popped in a vacuum, but the compressed air inside somehow remained in place instead of dispersing.

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Also - starlight is going unused on a galactic scale. Actively managing energy production will enable a larger, longer, and more efficient future.

But as we've seen with human societies once you reach a certain level of affluence you tend to reproduce less not more. Why would we assume that civilizations that are presumably far more advanced and affluent than ourselves would desire to expand? Expansion is fast on galactic timescales, but it's still very slow in the scale of a human lifetime. We don't tend to undertake projects knowing that we won't finish them within our lifetimes.

Again, only a tiny fraction of a civilization needs to be motivated to expand for a civilization effectively be a fully expanding civilization.

1/1,000, 1/1,000,000 ... it doesn't matter how small the fraction is to start.

Affluence in humans vastly increases consumption. By several orders of magnitude. Billionaires enjoy jets, yachts, and build companies that use vast resources to accomplish new things.

AI isn't going to be concerned about human lifetimes. 20 years to the nearest star for a laser sail ship smaller than a human takes physics we have now. For nano tech that would be a massive ship.

If you want a teleological argument, here is one: Life expands by colonizing and adapting to new environments and inventing new capabilities. Then expanding and adapting over and over again in response to each wave of change. Life expanding across the galaxy will produce beauty and complexity we can't imagine.

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