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A totally rational civilization will never explore the stars, because the actual use cases for space are not that far. Yes, satellites and 0-g manufacturing are real things but you DON’T go past the orbit for them. Maybe asteroid mining but that’s still not interstellar travel.
Theres game theoretic reasons for interstellar WMDs, but not for much actual exploration.
And it doesn’t address that when kids are optimized, parents want something back from that, which leads to grinding hangwon helicopter parenting into zero sum competitions. Notably higher tfr strata are the ones that are OK with their kids becoming plumbers- republicans in the US, yankis in Japan, and so on. We can reasonably expect the adoption of literal designer babies to have the same effect on people who optimize for IQ as selective college admissions.
What are you talking about? A rational civilization will want to grow. They'd seek access to more resources. Exponential growth in population demands it.
They could legislate and move against zero-sum competitions, especially if they're a civilization composed of geniuses. We can avoid zero sum competitions and handle collective action problems sometimes. So can they. Imagine they've been through these cycles and traumas and declines many times, their history is thousands of years longer. They'd learn eventually.
A powerful civilization is not South Korea with a few more fancy gadgets, just like we are not Ancient Egypt with combustion engines. The whole structure of their society would have developed to fit with their technology base. They would be on a whole other level to us.
Perhaps there are no families and engineers are in charge of making children by carefully splicing together genes, there are no parents, only technical factors, input and output. Perhaps they're educated and raised in a series of simulations carefully orchestrated by AI so they have excellent skills and character. Perhaps they're uploaded beings that can reproduce in a tenth of a second, printing out bodies like clothes.
A conservative assumption is that they'd have biological immortality which renders fertility much less relevant.
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