Re: poly: Malign Probes

 hanson@econ.berkeley.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>You arrive at a system, set up some mining hardware, a launch system, and
>a probe construction factory. Then you mine some stuff, build some probes
>and launch them. Then you stop, leaving your mines, factories, and launch
>system unused. Why? What are you afraid of? So what if someone comes
>and destroys them, if you weren't going to use them anymore anyway?

 If the expected number of new oases your probes will find exceeds one,
then this strategy works and is inconsistent with the malign probe
hypothesis. But a universe with lots of malign probes around isn't going
to have a lot of undefended oases, which makes it quite possible for the
expected number of new oases to be less than one, in which case probes
which abandon existing oases before finding new ones tend towards
extinction.

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