Science buff- Like Barack Obama? Better not like manned spaceflight then

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Anyhow you are forgetting something else, there is vertical growth & scientific progress as well, all it takes is for an isolationist species older & more advanced than the expansionist one to experience an attack and after defeating them, starting a program of extermination across the whole galaxy and confine them to their home system or even kill them off. If they are successful they may even go as far as to begin monitoring the development of all developing species and steering them away from such evolutionary paths.

Once again it takes only one such species.

I certainly haven't forgotten that. However this falls back to the fluke assumption because any non expansionist civ will be at an extreme disadvantage compared to the expansionist unless we assume that..by fluke of chance...none of the early civs were expansionist and all remained powerful and active enough to catch all expansionist ones before they could catch up.

[Heraclitus]

We humans are not the only intelligent species to evolve on Earth, there were in fact several kinds of humans most of them sentient that are extinct today.
I'm willing to bet that Neanderthals could have just as easily developed a civ.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
We humans are not the only intelligent species to evolve on Earth, there were in fact several kinds of humans most of them sentient that are extinct today.
I'm willing to bet that Neanderthals could have just as easily developed a civ.

Neanderthal intelligence may well have been more like the horse sense I mentioned earlier. sapience that leads to civilization probably requires two components. first is tool usage which was already established in the common ancestor of all hominid species. The second is symbolic language and symbolic thought processes which neanderthals may have lacked or if they possessed it it may have been inherited from a common ancestor as well. It is very suspicious that all of these candidates for sapience are so closely related genetically and temporally. It suggests that these qualities really only ever arose once.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
I'm willing to bet that Neanderthals could have just as easily developed civ.

Maybe they could have developed a better version of Civ4

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by LordShiva


Maybe they could have developed a better version of Civ4

I am convinced that any species sufficiently advanced to discover the alphabet will at some point devise a better version of Civ4.

[Heraclitus]

Why should they be at a disadvantage? I mean we are achieving rapid technological progress with just one planet. A System wide civ could have wast resources which would be more efficiently spent on improving itself than on procreating for the time being.

Anyhow what happens when the species you mentioned runs out of space and starts differentiating? Or even before that what happens to the home star system civ, which can no longer create colonies despite this uber expansionist natural instinct you describe? All the star system they can reach in a few centuries are all ready colonized any colony ship they send to more distant worlds would get there after other ones sent from their old colonies? Do they simply abandon this instinct it?

Third option the advanced species may have constructed Von Neumann probes and may infact monitor the entire galaxy for such virulent civs, plus the added bonus of receiving vast amounts of info by studying other species.

@LS No, but they would have made a decent CtP3

[Heraclitus]

I am convinced that any intelligent species would eventually make a kick-ass SMAC2.

@Geronimo wouldn't such a civ with strong desire to expand be frustrated at the centuries of not being able to expand anywhere? For all we know maybe humans have as a result of warfare acquired space and nuclear technology uncharacteristically early? And a species that acquired it even sooner because of warfare might be hard species to hold together in a system wide unified state and likewise would only sporadically send colony ships. With such an unstable culture and slow expansion. They could eventually stop expanding at all.

Maybe somehing like this.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Why should they be at a disadvantage? I mean we are achieving rapid technological progress with just one planet. A System wide civ could have wast resources which would be more efficiently spent on improving itself than on procreating for the time being.

Anyhow what happens when the species you mentioned runs out of space and starts differentiating? Or even before that what happens to the home star system civ, which can no longer create colonies despite this uber expansionist natural instinct you describe? All the star system they can reach in a few centuries are all ready colonized any colony ship they send to more distant worlds would get there after other ones sent from their old colonies? Do they simply abandon this instinct it?

Third option the advanced species may have constructed Von Neumann probes and may infact monitor the entire galaxy for such virulent civs, plus the added bonus of receiving vast amounts of info by studying other species.

@LS No, but they would have made a decent CtP3

The disadvantage is that unless they got a substantially earlier start they will always have less matter/energy at their disposal than the expansionist civ. They also will need absolute counterintelligence and faster than light travel to avoid having a distant arm of the expansionist civ closing the technological gap while they pursue. if they are merely 1000 years ahead of the expansionist civ they will find that even with absolute counterintelligence success and no technological leaks and with extermination fleets moving out at the speed of light their ships will be at a technological disadvantage as soon as they start reaching systems more than 1000 light years away as the expansionist civ in those systems will have had 1000 years to close the gap with indigenous research. Non expansionist civs are at a huge disadvantage when compared to expansionist civs.

I speculate that those individuals of the species who don't see any means of expansion would cooperate on basic research in the pursuit of technological fixes for their problem. They would likely continue such research until Hell freezes over or until they find a new avenue of expansion.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus

@Geronimo wouldn't such a civ with strong desire to expand be frustrated at the centuries of not being able to expand anywhere? For all we know maybe humans have as a result of warfare acquired space and nuclear technology uncharacteristically early? And a species that acquired it even sooner because of warfare might be hard species to hold together in a system wide unified state and likewise would only sporadically send colony ships. With such an unstable culture and slow expansion. They could eventually stop expanding at all.

Maybe somehing like this.

All civilizations face the prospect of what to do when they can no longer make further progress towards whatever goals motivate their behavior. It doesn't mean they can't exist.

I assume the expansionist civs won't suffer from percolation effects because they don't require moving population enmasse to the new colonies. Rather they require developing colony ships that rely mostly on resources in situ and a small capital investment in the form of ultra sophisticated colony ships that contain just enough material of their own origin for them to recognize the colonies that result as successful expansion of their species/offspring. I can't see how building such a ship would be hugely expensive to a thousand year old technologically adept civ. We don't even have to speculate on exotic technologies or loopholes in our understanding of physics.

[Heraclitus]

You could get anywhere in within our galaxy in just over 100,000 years. And the species you describe would take 3-50 million years to take over every single system in the galaxy. Is it not possible that in 3 million years a much faster advancing civ appears a civ with vastly superior technology?

Plus, when you notice such an expanding civ all, you could easily dispatch it, start expanding on the less interesting word (which you could do better since your tech is better) send Berserker type self-replicating machines programmed to kill this or anything the home system or local probes declares the descendant of this species.

Heck, if they could make the Hive system go nova, with a stealthy vessel, they could easily sterilize quite a few neighboring systems and hunt down any remaining colonies.

Your assumption that they have more matter/energy at their disposal is not necessarily true as well. Maybe the species that builds itself a dyson sphere is better of than a species that colonizes the surfaces of several hundred worlds?

Tell me why would the Hive species just cooperate and ignore the juicy ever more alien peoples inhabiting neighboring systems after they had no queries at eliminating every intelligent species they could find? Since those peoples will because of genetic drift become a different species very very fast even as short as 50,000 years, or if they geneticaly modifiy themselves just a few centuries.

[Heraclitus]

And don't forget if these two extreme species exist there would probably be a myriad of other civs expanding at various rates, some eventually stopping to expand. These would be in the way of the virulent one and not in the way of the isolationist one. Who knows maybe the isolationist species could conveniently let the location of all hive colonies be know to some of these hybrid civs via a "lost probe of an extinct species".

And if the Expansionist civ has found another realm to expand into, isn't it likely that the one system or pocket empire civs would discover this realm sooner?

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
You could get anywhere in within our galaxy in just over 100,000 years. And the species you describe would take 3-50 million years to take over every single system in the galaxy. Is it not possible that in 3 million years a much faster advancing civ appears a civ with vastly superior technology?

Plus, when you notice such an expanding civ all, you could easily dispatch it, start expanding on the less interesting word (which you could do better since your tech is better) send Berserker type self-replicating machines programmed to kill this or anything the home system or local probes declares the descendant of this species.

Heck, if they could make the Hive system go nova, with a stealthy vessel, they could easily sterilize quite a few neighboring systems and hunt down any remaining colonies.

Your assumption that they have more matter/energy at their disposal is not necessarily true as well. Maybe the species that builds itself a dyson sphere is better of than a species that colonizes the surfaces of several hundred worlds?

Tell me why would the Hive species just cooperate and ignore the juicy ever more alien peoples inhabiting neighboring systems after they had no queries at eliminating every intelligent species they could find? Since those peoples will because of genetic drift become a different species very very fast even as short as 50,000 years, or if they geneticaly modifiy themselves just a few centuries.

First unless we accept that civilizations arise less than once every million years or so it becomes very unlikely that none of the fastest advancing, most technologically adept or however advantaged civs will be of the expansionist type. In a galaxy in which there have been lots of civilizations arising we should expect at least one expansionist civ to enjoy the other possible advantages and take over. If you want to rely on superior civs preventing that then:

A. there must have been few civs arising in the galaxy in the time it took for the enforcing civ to grow strong enough to exterminate any civ anywhere in the galaxy otherwise it likely would have run into an equally competent expansionist civ that leveraged it's expansionist advantages into victory. Furthermore, the enforcing civ must itself be immortal or by fluke has always been replaced by another advantaged enforcing non expansionist civ with a large enough head start.

B. A uniquely advantaged non expansionist enforcing civ emerged first and faster than light travel is possible. With FTL enforcement becomes much easier and it would only be necessary for the first civ to be an non expansionist enforcing civ and be immortal or for most civs to tend towards being non expansionist enforcing. It would no longer be necessary that the appearance of new civilized species in the galaxy be a rare event

So it looks like either civilization arises only rarely in our galaxy or that FTL is possible. FTL has it's own issues though. If FTL is possible we would expect to see more rather than less evidence of ET civs since the possibilities for contact dramatically increase.

Even if we speculate that the expansionist civs would have to eventually self conflict, that wouldn't explain the lack of any use of our local resources in their endless wars. So long as the process of differentiating into potential targets took longer than say 25,000 years the species should still expand over the whole galaxy in various forms rather than exterminating themselves leaving no evidence behind. We would have to postulate that no species would be able to recognize itself as self for periods greater than a few thousand years if we want to explain their absence as inevitable self destruction.

[edit] I forgot that you mentioned the possibility of "Berserker type self-replicating machines programmed to kill this or anything the home system or local probes declares the descendant of this species". If you can see the power of such a weapon system surely you can see how a built in one would be an even greater advantage and how such a system would make it even more likely that we would have local evidence of ET? In fact we would expect a high probability that such an aggressive self replicating weapon system designed to efficiently expunge possible expansionist rivals would likely already have dispatched us as soon as we demonstrated our first aggressive tendancy.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
And don't forget if these two extreme species exist there would probably be a myriad of other civs expanding at various rates, some eventually stopping to expand. These would be in the way of the virulent one and not in the way of the isolationist one. Who knows maybe the isolationist species could conveniently let the location of all hive colonies be know to some of these hybrid civs via a "lost probe of an extinct species".

And if the Expansionist civ has found another realm to expand into, isn't it likely that the one system or pocket empire civs would discover this realm sooner?

you kinda lost me here. In the scenario you describe here there seems to be even less to explain why nobody has come along to exploit the stuff in our area and make a home for themselves here.

[Heraclitus]

The myriad of civs provide pockets of stable resistance to the expansionist civ, these stable pockets are bigger or smaller according to how large the civ was. (did you look at the link?)

The other realms of expansion are the ones that you mentioned the Hive civ might find, I said maybe their civ, the not so expansionist civ found them and got all the resources it needed to make sure their long term self-preservation measures in this galaxy remained in effect.

You said a self-destructing civ leaving no evidence behind. Who said that they wouldn't?

Plus you said equally many expansionist civs, what about the isolationist non-expanding cics? If anything I would imagine that it is more likely for a civ that has survived several centuries stuck on its home world to be much more focused on vertical growth. Thus there would be a majority of non-expanding civs many of them interested in other systems and could recognize virulent civs perhaps with the aid of other non-expansionist civs.


I don't see why you find FLT changes the dynamics that much. Maybe its important to us who only live for a century max a very old civ would see a hundred thousand years as we see a decade.

Plus you are forgetting the cost of expansion, you are assuming it is cheap (for a system wide civ), I assume it is at least sufficiently expensive so that it is not necessarily the best investment.

[Heraclitus]

by expanison I mean interstelar colonisation