Hello. Long-ish time wiki reader here.

[alexanderhamiltonalaska]

That’s more modos than exist in the setting. The idea could work still but you’d have to have to tribe mind merge, go virtual, or otherwise radically alter itself to cross to S3. Archai begins at S3.

Yes, good point. I should have raised it myself since looking at what I posted in the light of a new day I can see how it could potentially make the OP think that eir idea couldn't work in OA.

IIRC we were recently discussing tribemind/group mind based transapients in the Discord a bit and this fits in with that nicely.

A group of modos could form a tribemind, which eventually ascends to S1 and then S2. At that point any S2 will need to get its hands on a lot more processing power to ascend to S3 (among other things). At that point it could move into pre-existing computronium that is large enough to accommodate an S3 (Jupiter brain or above class processors that are operating as habitats for some number of virtual beings rather than hosting a single S4 or higher) or build a moon-brain or equivalent. Eventually, it might ascend to S4, again either first moving into a large enough virtual habitat or building a J-brain or equivalent.

S5 or above would pretty much need to build eir own processor core since virtual environments don't seem to run that large in the setting at this point.

Hope this helps,

Todd

What about if it was almost entirely composed of aiods in the first place? In addition, the polity might actually take an overall stance somewhat closer to Solipsism than what is generally found in standard sephirotic empires (likely being derived from the Dry Empire something similar), which combined with the fact that outside observers aren't necessarily going to be given a lot of access to the brains of minor archai for obvious reasons would mean that they wouldn't necessarily be being included in estimates of terragan population. While there might be a relatively 'small' minority of, say, 1.5e13 individuals that are willing to directly interact with the rest of terragan civilization, their claims of being part of a much larger tribemind-based metaempire could very easily be dismissed as being memetic engineering from the ruling archai.