Greetings, people of OA

[Drashner1]

Hello Todd,

Thank you for your quick and informative response - my next question is essentially the following: Even if the majority of people want to keep population low and standard of living high, would not that reduce the time in which the civilization could thrive?

The Negentropy Alliance and a few other polities/groups/people concern themselves with maximizing their lifetime into at least multi-trillion year timescales or beyond, but the majority of the setting does not.

You'd actually do better in OA to just set the material aside and the use conversion tech to convert it to energy rather than storing it as amat (amat production is highly inefficient unless you have access to a Q-mirror - which are not generally available - and then you have to go to all the bother of storing it and whatnot.

The energy usage of the setting is comparatively low compared to what is available. Most stars are allowed to keep radiating into space and have not (yet) been disassembled, most matter has not been reorganized into convenient storage for future use into deep time. That may happen eventually (the Negentropy Alliance probably has plans for this somewhere). Quadrillion or quintillion year timescales don't currently concern the population of the setting and don't appear to concern their archailect rulers. Or if they do they may intend to create new universes with fresh supplies of matter and energy and just move there - wash/rinse/repeat as each universe dies. The archai can do that, after all.

In any case, I would still find it surprising if not a single system went down the higher population path. A single late K-type star, for example, could reliably support a sextillion people at that energy level, and it would probably only take a single S1 to build and maintain a system like that (if my understanding of the setting is correct), and it would be surprising if something like that had not happened even once over the entire setting.

Sincerely,
Rho Ophiuchi

Edit: I just saw your edits, but if a sextillion could sustainably exist around a K-star, even if they were contained by everyone outside of the system, that would still drastically increase the population of the entire setting from the numbers I found in the EG.

As mentioned, the transapients and archai manipulate things so that people don't do that. That means that people who are inclined to breed like rabbits experience some series of events or interactions with others that end up changing their minds (e.g., 'events' conspire such that they meet and fall madly in love with someone who passionately believes in limited population growth or some other endeavor besides having lots of kids and so the breeding binge is forestalled). Or people who are really inclined to breed end up having 'accidents' that eliminate them and their ideas from society. Or - if the archai decide to play overt hardball - a given 'breed breed and breed some more ' population will simply find themselves unable to conceive children. If they get aggressive about it and start attacking others who are limiting their own numbers they will be summarily stopped - by military force backed by archai level tech if necessary. Or the breeding population will undergo a mass Rewrite with their minds being remade into a belief set that doesn't involve unlimited breeding.

At the end of the day, the lower minds in the setting exist solely at the sufferance and mercy of the AI Gods and have no rights except what those Gods choose to allow them to have.

Hope this helps,

Todd