THE GC’S HANDBOOK
The purpose of this section is to give some insight on how the principles in this theory could be
used to guide both development and destruction of life. By doing so, the intent is to show how
these actions might have shaped our own universe, how they might have shaped us, and how they
might continue to affect us.
HOW TO CREATE AND NURTURE CONSCIOUS LIFE
If you were a GC, how would you go about creating and nurturing conscious life?
Obviously, providing life with an opportunity to evolve and flourish would be your first goal. You
would have to use your resources to create worlds which could serve as life's cradles. You would
want to try and keep matter from flying off too far into empty space to create those worlds. Then,
you would do your best to guide evolution through mutations and adaptations favorable to species’
environments, starting from basic life forms and progressing through complex, conscious beings,
and from there, true intelligence.
As humans, we have certainly come a long way since our humble beginnings. Using us as a model, if
you were a GC trying to help your planets’ intelligent inhabitants survive, it would probably be a
great idea to try and guide the development of cardinal virtues that benefit their societies as a whole. Moral universalism, ethics, and by extension, a system of justice, are all good ideas to encourage because those
concepts and practices help your beings to mitigate the negative and destructive behavior that is
influenced by your opponent. Within this theory, I would think it could be possible-to-probable
that the 10 commandments may have been written with divine inspiration from the PGC. The
principles therein lay a foundation for our success as a species, especially at the time they were
written.
If you were a GC, you would want to do your best to discourage degenerative and dysgenic behavior
that both serve to shorten the lifespans of your creations, as well as reduce the possibility that
they can produce viable and healthy offspring. You might encourage them to develop religion, as
any that follows basic moral and ethical guidelines could be generally positive for societies that
are not technologically-advanced enough for science to explain their origins. Even though a
religion they develop may not be the whole story, it can be grounded with principles that allow
their society to flourish. Even threats of eternal damnation may have a net-overall-positive
effect on society if it encourages enough people to adhere to a religion, and therefore the morals
and ethics thereof.
Encouraging scientific curiosity and the pursuit of wisdom would also be helpful. By fostering a
sense of wonder, you could allow your beings to explore their surroundings to think of better ways
to overcome the obstacles in their path. If your goal is to guide your beings into figuring out
“the truth”, science is the path towards that goal. Giving them the intelligence to change their
situations for the better allows them to expand the mass of their collective consciousness. In
turn, that allows the few to think of ways to help the many in their tribes, cities, and nations.
Eventually, that technology makes its way to the masses through the exchange of ideas. Science
also has another fundamental purpose – it allows the possibility that your conscious beings can
agree on what is real. By encouraging them to engineer repeatable experiments, your beings might
be able to come to a consensus on what exists versus what is conjecture, misinformation, or
fantasy.
Along the lines of the virtues of prudence, justice, and temperance, guiding your intelligent
beings into eventually accepting each other as allies or equals would also be desirable. Once they
advance to a certain point, the weapons they have at their disposal will be capable of destroying
all (or a large percentage of) complex life on their planet. From then on, the only hope for their
continued survival is if they hold back when conflict occurs. Total war could become a death
sentence for all and must be avoided. The best possible outcome would be to foster a spirit of
cooperation between intelligent beings, so they could work together to overcome obstacles rather
than expending energy and resources waging (or preparing for) war.
The final step – one, we as humans, have certainly not achieved – would be to encourage ideals and
behaviors that allow them to exist in a sustainable balance with their own environment. If the
dominant form(s) of life on the planet decide to keep overproducing and consuming resources at an
unsustainable rate, they will eventually destroy the ecosystems and empty the resource reserves
their very lives depend upon.
HOW TO LIMIT AND DESTROY CONSCIOUS LIFE
On the other end of the spectrum, how would you go about limiting, sabotaging, and destroying your
opponent’s conscious life?
Your first order of business would be to use your abilities to spread out (dilute) the matter in
your opponent’s OU as much as possible. Doing so serves several purposes:
- It reduces the amount of hydrogen that can coalesce into stars. Those stars are necessary to generate the heavy elements and energy necessary for life.
- It accelerates the process of heat death, at which point no more energy would be available to power conscious life.
- It spreads out any life that does manage to exist as much as possible. This makes it very difficult for civilizations to contact each other (and possibly work together) due to the universal speed limit.
After that, your moves would best be utilized by trying to cause disasters (asteroid strikes,
gamma ray bursts, novas, supervolcanoes, etc.) to the worlds that could support life. If those
attempts are unsuccessful, you could then turn to sabotaging evolution in a couple of ways:
- You can use your energy to guide genetic mutations that would be detrimental to species’ existence, rather than helpful.
- Through advancing infectious disease, you can utilize a planet’s less-complex life to kill off more-complex life.
But the stakes get higher and the “fun” really begins once that life starts to become conscious,
and your opponent’s beings begin to develop intelligence. Their reliance on quantum computations
for that intelligence makes subverting them even easier. At that stage, you can start influencing
their thoughts more directly, allowing you the possibility to sway them to engage in behaviors
such as the cardinal sins. Possibilities include:
- Exploiting their genetic, cultural, religious, and ideological differences to cause fractures and divisions.
- Utilizing the above divisions, with or without the additional motivation of resource competition (greed), to promote the horrors and injustices of enslavement, war, and genocide.
- Using their religion, fear, and hubris against them by causing them to reject science and logic (and therefore reality) in the name of faith.
- Encouraging the inclusion of ethnocentric ideas such as a “chosen people”, as well as moral justifications of violence, war, and genocide, in their religious texts and doctrine.
- Convincing them it is acceptable to poison themselves and their planet. Addictive drugs, fuels containing heavy metals, unchecked carbon/particulate emitters, overprocessed/unhealthy foods, unnecessary pharmaceuticals – pick your poisons! Then, use their greed to your advantage by encouraging them to sell and proliferate those poisons in the name of “progress” and profit.
- Then, as they continue to develop technology, you can also use that against them:
- First, by making their initial instinct to weaponize any new technology. Referring back to the second main bullet point, this allows them to devise methods to exterminate each other more efficiently.
- Second, by encouraging them to disseminate misinformation (starting from the spoken word, and progressing through the digital age, when that misinformation can spread virally). This erodes trust and causes them to question each other and reality itself.
These same tactics work no matter how complex life becomes, and whether that life is natural or
artificial, since you can use the same tactics against a conscious quantum AGI that you would use
for fully biological life. You can cause them to destroy themselves, each other, and their
technology. Best possible case: you cause them to unleash weapons that sterilize their homeworld,
causing your opponent to start evolution all over. If you are lucky, this could mean that by the
time any intelligent life was able to evolve again, the star that feeds life on that world
would no longer be in its main sequence, and further intelligent life would become impossible (such
as in our case, the Sun becoming a red giant).
If you are unable to cause them to annihilate each other, you can instead simply delay them long
enough so that they run out of resources before they can expand beyond their homeworld. Your
objective here might be to encourage political ideological cycles to cause repeated collapses of societies and nations. If
those societies and nations are continually forming, fighting, and dissolving over this style of political
conflict, they will never have the time or resources to dedicate to becoming multi-planetary.