How Often Do Humans Legitimately Win?

[Vitto]

The comparison of humans with animals and transaps with modos is a common one in the setting/project and in some circumstances it is a reasonably useful analogy.

I personally disagree because animals lack distinct intelligence as we intend it for humans. It's quite possible that transap are beyond intelligence itself rather than being "mere" superintelligences but I doubt that the gap is at the same level between an human and an animal.

Regarding damagind/killing a transap I presume that below the ample use magmatter and plasma processor, I'd say below S4, anything can be killed by the right amount of antimatter/nuclear or heavy kinetic bombardment, which is avaiable even at S0 in the setting. Mass to energy is no trivial joke at any of those levels.
That should take care of any kind of armor like diamondoid or Ultimate Muscle. I assume that the average Moon Brain can't absolutely produce enough magmatter to coat itself with a magmatter infused armor.
The problem is scoring an hit against an hyperaware being with sensor array that probably outclass yours
 

An exception to this could be wormholes: we have a group of modos, I think, blowing a mouth of a wormhole in a system during the Version War and severely damaging a Transap in another system. They had their whole clade wiped out by hunter killer ISOs, but that is another story



Regarding the possibility of an archai to live without backups I think that is entirely possible, maybe for philosophical preferences: in the story "Festival Season" we have Lemmikki Kauppinen (an S1 or S2, I think), that do not have backups, like the rest of the polity:

"May I ask a question, Your Excellency?"


"Certainly."

"Some people say that if we all made periodic backups of our minds we'd never die. You could have brought back Lucy Miner."

"Or ten Lucy Miners. Or a hundred. If I write a self-aware program named Lucy onto a data cube, and then make an exact copy of it onto another data cube, which is the real Lucy? Each copy thinks it is the real thing. I can destroy the original, and lose nothing because I have an exact copy."

"So why then don't we make backups?"

"Because that is machine thinking. We can suck minds out of one life support system and place it into another without, we hope, disrupting the holistic entity that makes up a person. Look at it this way: if I make a copy of you, and that copy walks up and kills you, are you dead or alive? There's a 'You' still here. Does it matter?"

"I think it'd matter to me."

"Right. Because 'You' are gone, replaced by 'You Mark Two.' No one else may notice the difference, but you might. Assuming that there really is an afterlife."

"And if there is no afterlife?"

"Then nothing matters to you anymore. One way of looking at it is that a backup copy that survives your death is a type of immortality similar to begetting offspring to carry on some part of you. One is a 'personality line of descent' and the other is a 'genetic line of descent.' But you are gone. The only solace is that something of you lives on after your demise.

"I have trouble making my colleague Wang Khan understand this. My origin is organic, but Wang is an artificial intelligence. To Wang, one copy is as good as another, or as good as the original, and he sees no problem in discarding one for the other. I once suggested to Wang that he create a backup of e-self and then commit suicide. E's response was, 'Why would I want to do that?' Which only proves my point."

BTW, if the author will ever read this post: I loved those!  

A same philosophy regarding backups is adopted by the Sarge, the protagonist of Adam's stories, but he's human.


Anyway, for the setting stories, articles and blog posts I'd say that taking down a being a S level above you is so difficult that is usually a remarkable event. Still, it's possible.
Regarding humans taking down an S1 in a conflict  I'd say that is possible that a large amount of enanched human forming a military oriented tribemind with enough processing power to match an S1, I'm not sure if that was ever discussed in details. After that, as I wrote above, you have quite a lot of tools to deal horrific damage if you can strike even a single hit.
In time of peace there is no way an angelnet would allow any modos to go around with large amount of explosives.