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One possibility I never see represented is that maybe capping out on tech isn't actually that hard on these timescales. Maybe once you get into the rapidly expanding bubble phase everyone has the same tech and there is some defensive advantage asymmetry that robs the first mover of an advantage.
Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.
Keep in mind that in this analogy, we're probably the Sentinelese.
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Theoretically, civilizations which can manage interstellar travel would be locked in MAD because if you can accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds and decelerate it into orbit, you can accelerate a very large rock into relativistic speed to crash into the planet and wipe out all life therein with no possibility of defense, orbital mechanics being generally well understood.
If you have an interstellar civilization based around some manner of FTL travel, whatever exotic technology is in use would also probably provide weapons of mass destruction- Alcubierre drives as currently understood could generate a massive gamma ray burst fairly easily, and that’s assuming that Alcubierre drive operation can’t be used to directly tear planets apart. A civilization which can build krasnikov tubes or artificial wormholes can also probably launch relativistic kinetic weapons, the energy requirements to build the other end being if anything more impressive.
I had considered going into the details of why defense might have some asymmetry, like maybe it's pretty easy to put a dead man's switch type deal that makes a defended star system unusable if threatened. Really it doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd be able to predict with current day physics knowledge, maybe dark matter can be used as a relativistic shield of some sort.
A relativistic bombardment would also make a planet unusable on less-than-geologic timescales, right? It seems like it should(although a gamma ray burst probably wouldn’t, even if it requires a planet get re-terraformed). No doubt sci-fi ftl changes the equation because faster than light sensors can give much more of an early lead time on relativistic bombardments, but any kind of shielding that works against, say, a dinosaur killer at .7 C is beyond physics as commonly understood.
I have to admit, I now kind of want to see the motte coming up with a hard sci-fi universe of its own centered around some kind of interstellar Cold War.
The dark forest looms large in such a discussion, but I do think it got the game theory wrong. I think in general in the space future a lot of civilization leaves the gravity wells and never returns.
Why? Everything a civilization needs is in gravity wells- energy, materials, resources. Given interstellar travel times it makes more sense to stick near a source of fuel and materials when you can.
Gravity wells will be used and mined but they're too easy of targets. And the friction of escaping the well to trade is going to be very important.
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Incorrect.
Moldbug has a piece on this which I was just reading the other week but now can't retroactively find (the wonders of living life on incognito mode), so you'll have to excuse my paraphrasing of the argument:
The West is perfectly capable of conquering e.g. Afghanistan. Because the West has nuclear weapons and Afghanistan doesn't. A handful of hydrogen bombs, and there are literally no Afghanis left alive to stop you from taking their clay and holding it in perpetuity. The West's failure to conquer Afghanistan is because the West self-restricts itself from deploying its high tech, not because the high tech ain't up to the job.
That being said, while I object to your analogy I think your overall point is sound. I can believe that after a couple more thousand years there will just be no more hyoeradvanced applied physics left to discover; the tech tree of Reality may indeed have an end that soon.
TBH, the west doesn’t have much difficulty conquering things it has strong reasons to conquer. Afghanistan was a failure because we didn’t think it was worth it to keep fighting. Same with Vietnam.
I think what you and @Butlerian are missing is that this is very much how you defend yourself successfully from stronger foes: you turn any fight into a quagmire and retain levels of enthusiasm for wanton slaughter of invaders that they cannot sustain.
The West can not conquer Afghanistan. Not because it lacks materiel, but because it lacks the will and it would destroy western society to try to manifest it. Vociferation about how you could have wiped your adversary off the map if only they didn't use successful tactics are always vacuous, whatever the tactics.
War is the art of making the enemy do what you want. Not of having the best weapons.
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