> They analyse the tech in a day,
> figure out a perfect countermeasure, and send up a party to take us
> over a day after that...only to discover our nanoreplicators have
> already upgraded the by now seriously obsolete technology. All their
> attack brings is some strange looks ("You thought we were using *that*?
> That was two days ago! Get with the times, dudes!").
Yes, I thought of that, and liked that very much. I had once imagined a society that could advance too fast for its more primitive enemies to catch up such that it could even (irrationally) taunt them by broadcasting its technology at them. It seems to work in theory but may have the following pitfalls:
1) Information Asymmetry
Assuming that they know everything we know, but we know nothing about what they know except they know what we know. In such a case, the other party may had discovered something we had not, for instance, by chance (such as computer bugs) they discovered a major advance in nanotech. They could use this knowledge against us, even if we had upgraded our infrastructure because we may have too much bad luck and miss this discovery, even if only for a week.
2) Information Discovery Difficulty
It definitely takes more effort to discover something than to copy it from others. Allowing spies into our midst will merely allow larger military budgets at the expense of (now redundant) research budgets.
3) Information Utility Reduction
Once we know enough about something (depending on the complexity of the subject matter), the amount of additional information and its utility will decrease. This means that, once they know enough, we would need exponentially more knowledge to stop them.
For instance, the invention of computer viruses requires one to learn sufficiently about anti-viral techniques to contain it, with such countermeasures lagging behind by years. Of course, you could argue that we would foresee the threat far in advance and prevent it before it happens. As for atomic bombs, the world still has no effective defense except MAD (and perhaps radioactivity concerns).
Let us imagine that in the future, some hostile party discovers some way to use a super powerful energy weapon against us (which can blow through a planet, making normal defense irrelevant). Okay, we can raise shields like the starship Enterprise. However, while we know the basics of powerful energy weapons such as lasers, we still do not have an effective energy-based shield to deflect them (or maybe even a matter-based one, except highly reflective mirrors).
We would find it impractical to keep ourselves constantly surrounded by a protective casing if we want to conduct space exploration, allow ships to visit us and utilize solar energy. Even if we do so, we would have to find some way of protecting our open solar panels which an adversary can target easily. We can use stealth but it would not have much effectiveness if the adversary can simply locate the EM radiation we emit or send a spy ship to report on us.
Probably, we would have to discover energy based shields because most likely they can withstand multiple attacks and also that a matter based one would most likely need repairs after bombardments, and it would get technically difficult. Of course, you can use MAD, but what if an unknown adversary attacks us from the depths of space? How do we know whom to attack in retaliation?
4) Information as Goods
The last point, and perhaps most important one, lies with our ability to trade information. We can make a pact with planet Earth to exchange our technology with something else. We can make something useful we discovered very tough to reverse engineer, and sell it to them. Perhaps we can even sell weapons to them so that they will know better than to attack us.
You may wonder why I would suddenly support "Intellectual Property" since I had previously consistently advocated open information flow. The reason lies with open information flow only optimally works for rational societies with compensation based economies. When trading with other societies with no way to guarantee information symmetry and adequate compensation, we have no choice but to fall back on the most common (and somewhat inefficient) denominator, the "capitalist" system.
We will have to leverage information asymmetry against them or else they will do it to us and we get the sucker's payoff in game theory. Allowing one to ascend to the unstable equilibrium (but optimal outcome) has tremendous difficulties and requires us to fulfill certain conditions, which only a rational society with free information flow can achieve.
> But at the same time, we should be willing to assign the same space to
> any other habitat...which puts a limit on how much territory we may
> safely claim. If we orbit opposite Earth, and claim a 1 AU radius
> sphere...what if someone puts a colony 1/6th of an orbit ahead of us?
> It's far enough away to be nonthreatening, yet clearly within our
> space, to say nothing of us being in their space.
Not true. We must consider the argument about information trading as above. Finder's keepers, and if you don't grab the space, someone else will and they will put lots of weaponry to keep it when you think you need a little more space since you only grab such a reasonably small slice.
This incident happened in Singapore with the great land grab after its founding. My grandfather, not having enough foresight, believed that he need not bother to grab land since he would return to China anyway. However, he did not, and later, those who grab huge chunks of land subsequently ascended to the position of millionaires just because they bothered. Morale of story: In a zero sum game, it pays to grab as large of a pie as you can.
After we defined our territory to the extent as large as possible, we can still allow people and non threatening colonies to use parts of them, but on our terms, not theirs. If we can easily (such as at zero cost) define a large amount of space (such as half of our solar system) as our territory, then we should rationally do it, or someone else will.
> Hopefully, this would make little difference. In practice, though,
> instilling that form of loyalty might well guard against corruption -
> say, if some hostile power somehow managed to get a "let's blow up the
> colony and all head back to Earth to be sheep again" type elected to
> whatever government we have.
Well, I advocate the Intellicratic government and the condition allowing people to leave the colony freely, such as to return to Earth, at will. Intellicracy, and fully open information flow, will itself suffice against such tendencies, and the freedom to leave will alleviate it even if it occurs.
If you want to go back and join the herd, then by all means go ahead. It would seem highly irrational to having to fight an entire colony when you could simply walk out of the airlock into your spaceship and show the moon to everyone else who chooses to stay.
As I mentioned, irrationality above the threshold level cannot exist in the colony because it would cause destabilizing effects that would destroy the more unstable economical system, so we should need not worry too much of this.
If you mean a colony with a different system, then I have no comment, except that with any form of government separate from the people and without free information flow, then this scenario can indeed occur.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:05 MDT