Humans have a history of conquest because we fight for the same exact resources, but even in human history the first explorers were traders.

They were going out there to find spices, gold, silk, new plants to domesticate, new animals, etc.

They weren't going out there necessarily to conquer land. Eventually they did because of the finite resource,

the lemma, when you're stuck on earth. But the moment you get the technology to get off of earth,

finite resources go away. And if you want a resource, then you go find a neutron star.

You go find a star system. You don't go after a little planet. There's infinite Kepler planets out there

that are going to be much closer to them. It's ideas and trade that people want. And if you look at modern society,

even though I know this is not the common belief, we're becoming less warlike as we become more civilized.

And the reason is because you don't conquer Russia anymore for its natural resources.

You don't roll in the tanks because you're trying to grab all the natural resources.

The wealthiest places in the world now are the ones that have the best ideas. Silicon Valley was

on top for a while as a wealth creation engine because it had the best ideas. The new oil is ideas.

It's all digital. All the new fortunes are being created in ideas space. In fact, if you're starting out

today as a young ambitious person, you don't learn real estate. You don't learn coal and oil mining.

You don't go into extraction of physical resources to create wealth. You go into ideas space.

You go into programming, books, movies, blogs and podcasts and building robots which are mostly

intellectual property underneath. So even as a human civilization, we're moving away from conquest

of physical resources and moving much more into trading of ideas. The downsides scenario for the

human species is that too much of our larger countries and nation states believe that they've achieved

maximal ideas. Now it's time to save resources. They end up destroying the means of improvement,

error correction and creativity and they end up stagnating. Then you have the idea generation

coming out of a much smaller set of city states which then have to defend themselves against this

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