&gt; simple economic analysis of our future tells us that we will tear them down in favor of more efficient arrangements of matter and energy?<p>What tells us this is the case?<p>How do we know there isn&#x27;t an upper limit on the amount of computing resources a civilization desires, even if it&#x27;s an absurdly high limit like &quot;disassemble all the inner planets&quot;? How do we know there is an incentive to build interstellar civilizations, versus independent civilizations? Is computronium even worth spreading?<p>Analogous to r&#x2F;K selection, is there more incentive to replicate a particular way of life (eg civilizations uploaded to a particular computronium implementation), or is it more beneficial to simply shotgun probs with very primitive seeds capable of bootstrapping new implementations of life? Is the interstellar competition between civilizations, or is the competition between different fundamental forms of life where civilizations simply mark a system developing to the point it can reproduce?<p>Given the distances between solar systems, why would a civilization span multiple systems? Wouldn&#x27;t each system become culturally and economically isolated, evolving independent from the parent civilization? If that&#x27;s the case, why invest in cloning the parent civilization when they could bootstrap native life from-scratch?