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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Both civilizations are quite sub-optimal:

How does a 1000-planet civilization manage to get itself wiped out after such a short period of time? They must be taking terribly unwarranted risks to enable their expansion.

A civilization which can last for a billion *generations* obviously has considerable technological acumen (deflecting asteroids, building a replacement for their star, total-conversion energy supply, etc.); why not expand? The social strictures required to prevent humans from expanding over such a long time-period would most likely be quite unpleasant.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I would say it's a mistake to speak of the societies as having consciously different spatial vs. temporal 'approaches'. We are not told that. We are told only that Space is more numerous than Time and that Time lasts longer than Space. Empirically, this probably means that Time had the better overall 'approach', whatever that might mean.

So Time didn't get to be Time by 'using the temporal approach', they got to be Time because they did the sorts of things that help societies last a long time. Many of those things might correspond to what someone would consider a 'spatial approach'.

Indeed, I would say that consciously using a 'temporal approach' (fretting too much about 'sustainability', say) is probably not a good way to become a Time civilization. Not do I think a 'spatial approach' (spreading out as thinly and as quickly as possible??) would help you become a Space civilization, just a dead one or a splintered one.

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