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The series of novels specifically deals with time frames much longer than "decades". The first book spans a few centuries, the second and third span millenia,

The series of novels specifically deals with time frames much longer than "decades". The first book spans a few centuries, the second and third span millenia, the fourth spans tens of millennia, and the fifth and sixth (not out yet) are supposed to reach much farther. The big idea of the book is that Einstein isn't wrong about C being the speed limit. Therefore, to be a starfaring race requires the ability to make commitments and hold to them over extremely long timespans. The connection to game theory is that, as in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the only way you can really make predictably right decisions in cooperation with other entities is if your decision-making formulas are spelled out mathematically in advance; so all can predict how you will act. The first book begins with mankind discovering the galaxy's "rules" on a kind of signpost at a nearby star. Read the books!

maxerickson 10y ago
Maybe I will, I'm kind of burnt out on scifi. My point is that the very concept of an interstellar resource war, and thus the concept of interstellar control, is incoherent given our present physics. You can take over a system that isn't technologically enabled, but that's it, the resources available to a technologically enabled system are greater than the resources that can be sent into the system.
- joeclark77 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's really true. What would it take to wipe out all the denizens of a star system? Maybe a few million atomic bombs? Certainly less than the mass of a small moon. And if that then gave you control of a whole star system's worth of matter and energy, it should be more than enough to fuel the conquest of the next star, and so on. So it's certainly feasible for an advanced race to build a star empire; the question is why they'd want to do it. If we're talking about humans you might say ambition or imagination. If Vulcans, maybe they'd think it logical to pre-emptively become stronger than any potential aggressors.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    That would work against a system incapable of similar production, but given roughly equal capacity, the target system could devote a small planets worth of material to defensive missiles. You could slam a bunch of mass into a system at extreme speeds, but then they just have to hop into life boats until the storm ends (if they have the capacity to ponder traveling the stars, they have the capacity to spend a decade on a space station).

maxerickson 10y ago

Maybe I will, I'm kind of burnt out on scifi. My point is that the very concept of an interstellar resource war, and thus the concept of interstellar control, is incoherent given our present physics. You can take over a system that isn't technologically enabled, but that's it, the resources available to a technologically enabled system are greater than the resources that can be sent into the system.

joeclark77 10y ago
I'm not sure that's really true. What would it take to wipe out all the denizens of a star system? Maybe a few million atomic bombs? Certainly less than the mass of a small moon. And if that then gave you control of a whole star system's worth of matter and energy, it should be more than enough to fuel the conquest of the next star, and so on. So it's certainly feasible for an advanced race to build a star empire; the question is why they'd want to do it. If we're talking about humans you might say ambition or imagination. If Vulcans, maybe they'd think it logical to pre-emptively become stronger than any potential aggressors.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  That would work against a system incapable of similar production, but given roughly equal capacity, the target system could devote a small planets worth of material to defensive missiles. You could slam a bunch of mass into a system at extreme speeds, but then they just have to hop into life boats until the storm ends (if they have the capacity to ponder traveling the stars, they have the capacity to spend a decade on a space station).