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Dave Lindbergh's avatar

If grabby civ expansion is driven by acquisition of mass/energy resources, and assuming those are roughly equally available in all directions, once such a civ is more than a few thousand years old, it occupies a rough sphere.

The interior of the sphere is stuck with Malthusian limits - resources there are scarce, lots of transactions are zero-sum, and expansion doesn't help because the edge of the sphere is too far away to matter. (Maybe they even lose the ability for interstellar travel, if that's expensive in resource terms.)

At the edges, expansion and acquisition of new resources is possible so they live in what you've called a "dream time", temporarily escaping Malthusian limits.

Living conditions, and therefore culture, are probably extremely different at the edges vs. the interior.

Expansion continues, enlarging the sphere, until they meet a neighboring grabby civ.

At that point, every contact with the neighboring civ is a first-contact, because the spheres are large relative to the speed of light. So the contact surface expands far faster than the speed of light.

If every contact is a first contact, I wonder how much military coordination and planning re contact is possible at all. Esp. if the interior civ is very different from the edge civ. And movement of resources over long distances (any significant fraction of a civ's diameter) is pointless due to the time required.

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我是我对我感知's avatar

Thanks for your response to my comment. Yes, software bugs and and unforseen consequences seem like a far more likely source of such diverging factions. Especially if the "civilisation" involved is highly complex.

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