More to the point, anything that DOES use matter and energy would rapidly dominate over things that do not and be selected for. Replicators spread until they can’t and evolve towards rapid rates of growth and use of resources (compromising between the two), not things orthagonal to doubling time like computational efficiency.
Yes. I think this paper addresses it with the ‘defense of territory’ assumption (‘4. A civilization can retain control over its volume against other civilizations’). I think the idea is that the species quickly establishes a sleeping presence in as many solar systems as possible, then uses its invincible defensive abilities to maintain them.
But in real life, you could well be right. Plausibly there are scenarios in which a superintelligence cant defend a solar system against an arbitrarily large quantity of hostile biomass.
More to the point, anything that DOES use matter and energy would rapidly dominate over things that do not and be selected for. Replicators spread until they can’t and evolve towards rapid rates of growth and use of resources (compromising between the two), not things orthagonal to doubling time like computational efficiency.
Yes. I think this paper addresses it with the ‘defense of territory’ assumption (‘4. A civilization can retain control over its volume against other civilizations’). I think the idea is that the species quickly establishes a sleeping presence in as many solar systems as possible, then uses its invincible defensive abilities to maintain them.
But in real life, you could well be right. Plausibly there are scenarios in which a superintelligence cant defend a solar system against an arbitrarily large quantity of hostile biomass.