[Gonna need to read closer, but I’m going to roll to disbelieve the math even works out this way. I think you’ve missed something, and I hope to find it in time. will comment again if I get back to reading this closely]
As I mentioned, I spent about a year (in the context of writing an ultra-high-tech hard science fiction story, about multiple cultures with access to quantum superintelligences, nanotech, and superb genetic engineering, with slower-than-light travel only) trying to get this to work. The best solution I came up with was to use a blend of biotech and cyborging to uplift to sapience all members over about half-an-inch long of two phyla (alien approximate-analogs of vertebrates and arthropods) using organically-grown inorganic quantum computronium, far more energy efficient and compact than nervous tissue, and make all predators whose natural prey were now sapient into omnivores. The end result doesn’t work much like an ecosystem, more a city that at first sight resembles an ecosystem, and you end up with a many-orders-of-magnitude range of intelligence levels from barely sapient to vastly above that, which leads to internal alignment issues: to solve that I made them an optical high-interconnect bandwidth semi-hive-mind, using bioengineered plants as a long-distance communication and data-processing network, and with some extremely sophisticated techniques for realigning criminals. In-story this was implied to be a labor-of-love project by a solar-system-sized Dyson-swarm quantum hyperintelligence, basically recreating its creators and their ecosystem in idealized uplifted form.
The closest human-culture analog I included was along the lines of the “reduced harm biosphere” I mentioned in a comment above to Shiroe. (Partly because I didn’t want to explore the same idea twice in one novel.)
[Gonna need to read closer, but I’m going to roll to disbelieve the math even works out this way. I think you’ve missed something, and I hope to find it in time. will comment again if I get back to reading this closely]
If you can find it, I’d really love to hear it.
As I mentioned, I spent about a year (in the context of writing an ultra-high-tech hard science fiction story, about multiple cultures with access to quantum superintelligences, nanotech, and superb genetic engineering, with slower-than-light travel only) trying to get this to work. The best solution I came up with was to use a blend of biotech and cyborging to uplift to sapience all members over about half-an-inch long of two phyla (alien approximate-analogs of vertebrates and arthropods) using organically-grown inorganic quantum computronium, far more energy efficient and compact than nervous tissue, and make all predators whose natural prey were now sapient into omnivores. The end result doesn’t work much like an ecosystem, more a city that at first sight resembles an ecosystem, and you end up with a many-orders-of-magnitude range of intelligence levels from barely sapient to vastly above that, which leads to internal alignment issues: to solve that I made them an optical high-interconnect bandwidth semi-hive-mind, using bioengineered plants as a long-distance communication and data-processing network, and with some extremely sophisticated techniques for realigning criminals. In-story this was implied to be a labor-of-love project by a solar-system-sized Dyson-swarm quantum hyperintelligence, basically recreating its creators and their ecosystem in idealized uplifted form.
The closest human-culture analog I included was along the lines of the “reduced harm biosphere” I mentioned in a comment above to Shiroe. (Partly because I didn’t want to explore the same idea twice in one novel.)