> Those who are the earliest to expand into the universe, would have access to the most resources

Eons ago, the universe was room temperature. I've always wondered how an intelligent species adapted to that time would perceive our universe.

Likely, he wouldn't. The window in which the universe was roughly room temperature is very narrow in astronomical terms, so even if life did form during that period, it probably would not have been able to form even animal life, much less intelligent life.

If everything was happening faster back then, and if we assume there were more interactions between everything and more kinds of interactions back then, then life and intelligence may have evolved faster too.

There's no reason to expect more kinds of interactions; the laws of physics were the same then as they are now. It also isn't clear that there would be more interactions. Galaxies hadn't formed, even if we stipulate that stars could have. So, the good: wherever a planet forms it should be warm enough for life (although it could still be too warm if it's close to its parent star). The bad: There are probably far fewer planets and ingredients for life and there is precious little time. For reference, for intelligent life to form during this period, it would have had to have done so at a rate of about 500:1 compared to the evolution of homo sapiens on Earth. Even life evolving in this narrow window would be difficult (~50:1 compared to on Earth).

That also sounds like a recipe for maintaining causality as in the faster you are trying to go to more you’ll expand space time maintaining the luminal speed limit from the point of view of an observer.

>That sounds like a recipe for some terrible monopolization by the first few civilizations that manage to achieve FTL:

Yeah, that's where the "evil empire/East India Trading Company but in Spaaaaace" was going to come from. I wanted to use hyperspace/FTL as a vague metaphor for a scarce but crucial resource like fossil fuels (or whale oil, back in the day.)

> "evil empire/East India Trading Company but in Spaaaaace"

I think it would be much more sinister.

The FTL controllers would be seen as gods by species who have yet to leave their homeworld. Every civilization within their sphere of influence would be either have to be their allies, thralls, unable to move around in the galaxy unless they get piggyback rides by the FTL barons, or engulfed and extinguished by them.

Imagine if we in the real world found out that there was no way to explore the universe we've been observing for centuries, unless we allied with some alien species that does not, can not, have our best interests on their minds.

Interstellar travel would require resources, and resources would require interstellar travel..

To go against the FTL species you would need to control at least as many planets as they do, and to control that many planets you would need FTL travel..

Sounds like a monumentally hopeless reality.

> Sounds like a monumentally hopeless reality.

In terms of darkness and hopelessness, this is getting close to Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem trilogy.

A rot13 spoiler follows.

V xabj V fgvyy unir cnatf bs rkvfgragvny qernq nsgre gur frpbaq be guveq obbx vagebqhprq gur pbaprcg bs qvzrafvbany erqhpgvba jrncbaf. Onfvpnyyl, n fhcrejrncba gung fgnegf n furrg bs 2Q fcnpr rkcnaqvat ng yvtug fcrrq, juvpu erqhprf rirelguvat vg gbhpurf, vapyhqvat fcnpr vgfrys, gb 2Q. Vg'f bar bs znal JZQf ninvynoyr gb cbjreshy fcrpvrf. Abj gur qnex guvat vf, vg pna'g or fgbccrq. Bapr hayrnfurq, vg'yy xrrc rkcnaqvat ng yvtugfcrrq, qr-qvzrafvbavat fcnpr sberire. Ohg fcrrq bs yvtug vf fb fybj, gung lbh pna qebc vg ng lbhe rarzl'f ubzr flfgrz naq abg pner nobhg vg sbe zvyyravnf.

Nsgre gung, sbyybjf gur dhrfgvba. Unir lbh rire jbaqrerq jul jr yvir va 3Q fcnpr naq abg, fnl, 12Q? Gung'f jul.

Decoding it to ROT18 makes some amusing changes to the numbers.

I think I have kinda grown out of such existential dread, once I started having a sort of intuition that the Universe is too inconceivably large to be uniformly altered, let alone "damaged", by any single event or entity (which also makes me cringe at sci-fi which throws the word "universe" around so lightly.)

More importantly, I started thinking of the "backdrop" of Reality itself to not be Nothingness, but Everythingness.

That is, the blackness we see out there, must not be the default state. I imagine a flood of "white" behind the void, and the reality we perceive is just a heavily-filtered slice of it.

What led me to this way of looking at things was a comment on HN or Reddit, that talked about how, in certain axioms of mathematics, you can have a null/empty set but it's impossible to have a set which contains everything including itself. Whereas in another group of rules, it's impossible to have an empty set because everything else is arrived at by "subtracting" from the "infinite" set!

Maybe someone here knows better of what I'm referring to.

Nice use of rot13.

Why thank you. It's common elsewhere in places that don't have rich comment markup supporting spoiler tags; it dawned on me recently that I didn't see it used much on HN for some reason.

And don't think for a minute that the first human company that gets that tech wouldn't do the exact same thing.

Wilbur and Orville Wright did precisely that for flight until the US govt dismissed the patents due to WWI. The patents, and their insane lawsuits, were poisoning the whole US on flight. Europe grew by leaps and bounds, and had all sorts of aircraft.

This story is oft-repeated here but this paper provides convincing historical industrial evidence that it's a myth: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2355673

Sounds like the Spacing Guild from Dune.

>Sounds like a monumentally hopeless reality.

Well... actual reality doesn't even old much hope for FTL.

hah but at least, we seem to have the luxury of exploring our neighborhood at our own pace, in any direction, without capitulating to alien overlords.