I don’t mean to suggest that they’d spread out as opposed to building dyson spheres. They would do both, and I don’t think they’d send out starships until they’re a good way through building the dyson sphere. Taking years to transmit data would make parallelization difficult, but if nothing else, they can at least do science in a larger system than the one they’re born in. And they can always smash a few stars together to get even more power.
Each star system would spend the vast majority of its lifetime as a dyson sphere with trillions of being-years of labor behind it. The first settlers won’t make a dent in the average utility. Besides, compared to the cost of simulating a mind, the cost of making it happy would be negligible. You can already imagine utopia. You just need to mess around with the little part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fiction.
“And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all.”
I can understand more resources dominating, and I can understand more science dominating, but the expansionists have both. And even if they didn’t, would the isolationists even care? I suppose from an average utility point of view, they’d have to wipe them out, and then send out probes to wipe out any other expansionists with below-average utility, but they’d have to become expansionists themselves to outweigh all the expansionists that take over a galaxy before meeting isolationists. I don’t think an isolationist would be average or total utilitarian.
There’s also the strategy of just pulling as much of the universe together as you can. You won’t get nearly the population of an expansionist, but if it’s that important that nobody ever has to be stuck on a starship with only a billion people for company, it can at least get you vastly more resources than a strict isolationist without having to spread out.
I don’t mean to suggest that they’d spread out as opposed to building dyson spheres. They would do both, and I don’t think they’d send out starships until they’re a good way through building the dyson sphere. Taking years to transmit data would make parallelization difficult, but if nothing else, they can at least do science in a larger system than the one they’re born in. And they can always smash a few stars together to get even more power.
Each star system would spend the vast majority of its lifetime as a dyson sphere with trillions of being-years of labor behind it. The first settlers won’t make a dent in the average utility. Besides, compared to the cost of simulating a mind, the cost of making it happy would be negligible. You can already imagine utopia. You just need to mess around with the little part of your brain that distinguishes reality from fiction.
“And the “resources” of a hegemonizing swarm don’t matter at all.”
I can understand more resources dominating, and I can understand more science dominating, but the expansionists have both. And even if they didn’t, would the isolationists even care? I suppose from an average utility point of view, they’d have to wipe them out, and then send out probes to wipe out any other expansionists with below-average utility, but they’d have to become expansionists themselves to outweigh all the expansionists that take over a galaxy before meeting isolationists. I don’t think an isolationist would be average or total utilitarian.
There’s also the strategy of just pulling as much of the universe together as you can. You won’t get nearly the population of an expansionist, but if it’s that important that nobody ever has to be stuck on a starship with only a billion people for company, it can at least get you vastly more resources than a strict isolationist without having to spread out.