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.

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.

On the other end of the spectrum, how would you go about limiting, sabotaging, and destroying your opponent’s conscious life?

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 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.