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Notes -
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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