It spread over thousands upon thousands of worlds...
All centered around Arrakis and only stretching as far away from Arrakis as a ship could carry a sufficient supply of Melange for its Navigator. It was a lot of territory, yes, but it wasn't
all possible territory and furthermore, it was all controlled, parceled out and claimed by preexisting factions. Someone who monopolized a vital resources could, and did, conquer the lot of it.
Breaking this monopoly with Ixian Navigation Machines and artificially producing Melange via Axlotl Tanks allowed humanity to scatter across the entire universe rather than just the bubble of space reachable from Arrakis, making it impossible for anyone to ever be in a position to oppress
everyone ever again. On account of speed if nothing else, a civilization at one side of humanity's domain which attempted to invade everyone else would find that in the time it took their fleet to arrive at the other side, their enemies would've built colonies even further away.
There are two real-world parallel situations. First, Ming Dynasty China destroying Zheng He's Treasure Fleet, second, the fact that despite having the technology for orion drive and nuclear thermal rockets since the cold war space race and the absolutely ridiculously profitable
payoff-vs-
startup-costs of asteroid mining, the corporatocracy
isn't currently throwing military-industry complex levels of funding at conquering the solar system.
Baughn said:
So long as the Federation can expand faster than the RAIs.
That's the flip side of this. So long as either one can expand, then expansion is exponential (until you start running out of stars); so long as the RAIs can keep flying away, the Federation can never stop expanding, and they must expand faster than the RAIs can flee. At the very least, they must keep kicking the RAIs back down whenever they show themselves again.
Otherwise? The RAIs will find an empty corner of the universe, start over, and three centuries down the line all of Andromeda is coming at you. Worse, even if they do manage to eliminate the RAIs somehow, they can never be sure.
The UFAI is out of the bag. This is the sort of situation where you can never, ever stop fighting, but given time, perhaps they can at least reduce the cost of suppressing them to a small tithe.
Mew said:
You know... the nightmare AI scenario has a cave-at to it, I realize.
It assume the RAIs will never, ever figure that forever trying to keep up with, and fight, the Federation, which is itself AI-integrated, is worth it. That in order to continue, they absolutely must keep fighting.
Unless they're severely limited or have a cultural/logic method that prevent them from coming to such conclusions, I think they'd eventually realize that the Federation will continue to smash them up until they go into hiding and leave them alone.
Furthermore, I realize that if the AIs are capable of non-pragmatic thoughts, they'd eventually realize the pointlessness of a 100% efficiency, wipe-everything-out existence ; they've essentially given up their sapience, replicating the natural cycle of eternally feuding animal collectives, only in space and with guns. The very wonders, stability, and opportunities that sapience and civilization offer, the alternative to the life style of perpetual competition and survival, is lost upon them.
But then, just idle thoughts on my part. And probably nowhere near as smart as I think them to be. Oh well.
A Thousand Deaths by Orson Scott Card said:
But he thought this: That this starship and the others would be and had been sent out to colonize in prison worlds were not really what the Russians thought they were. True, the prisoners sent in the Gulag ships would be away from earth for centuries before they landed, and many or most of them would not survive. But some would survive.
I will survive, Jerry thought as the helmet picked up his brain pattern and transferred it to tape.
Out there the Russians are creating their own barbarians. I will be Attila the Hun. My child will be Mohammad. My grandchild will be Genghis Khan.
One of us, someday, will sack Rome.
A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven said:
“Corbell, I have no data on the nature of water-monopoly empires. I had to take your world entirely.”
“What are you talking about?” His answer came in Corbell’s recorded voice. “I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, there water-monopoly empires, they don’t collapse. They rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can’t fight. But it takes that push from the outside. There’s no revolution in a water empire.”
Corbell said, “I didn’t–“
“A water empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it. But, Peerssa, the State doesn’t have any outside.”
“–I don’t understand.”
“The State could last seventy or a hundred thousand years, because all of humanity was part of the State. There were no barbarians waiting hungrily for the State to show weakness. The State could have grown feeble beyond any precedent, feeble enough to fall before the hatred of a single barbarian. You, Corbell. You”
“Me?”
“Did you exaggerate the situation? I thought of that, but I couldn’t risk it. And I couldn’t ask.”
He’s a computer. Perfect memory, rigid logic, no judgment. I forgot. I talked to him like a human being, and now–“You have heroically saved the State from me. I’ll be damned.”
“Was the danger unreal? I couldn’t ask. You might have lied.”
“I never wanted to overthrow the damn government. All I wanted was a normal life. I was only forty-four years old! I didn’t want to die!”
In both cases, the Ming and corporatocracy knew what the creation of potential rivals with resources and territory outside of their control would mean for them. Of course in the long run this meant Dynastic China got completely fucked by European colonial powers who didn't limit their technologies and spread to assist their leadership in maintaining control of them and if we let modern China monopolize the Outside Context technologies our civilization isn't working on, we'll get equally fucked in a few generations, but for the time being, it kept the people with the authority to make those kinds of decisions, who had ultimate power under the existing system and consequentially, no desire to see it change, happy.
So for the Dune comparison, the Landsraad monopolized land on the basis of Houses owning planets, the Navigators monopolized travel and the Bene Gesserit manipulated everyone on a case-by-case basis but were allowed to do so by the Great Houses and Navigators as long as their goals remained seemingly harmlessly apolitical. Nobody realized the implications of their eugenics program until it was way too late. An Outside Context Problem like the development of a substitute for Navigators/Melange would break the basis of the Landsraad and Navigators power, it'd let anyone escape, build up forces in unexplored space and potentially come back as a rival superpower. They'd do anything to resist it.
Which brings us to Leto II's Golden Path. During Leto II's empire, he controlled the sole source of Melange* and consequentially the Navigators and Bene Gesserit by threatening to cut said supply off. During the entirety of his reign, he worked at breaking the Landsraad system by slowly raising the cost of Melange, transferring assets from the Great Houses to him, until he'd bankrupted the lot of them into Lesser House status. And since the more expensive Melange became, the less economically practical interstellar shipping became, he ensured no rival manufacturing or resource monopolies could form since it'd always be cheaper to build anything or harvest any resource on site than transport it.
Then he died, the location of his secret Melange stash was lost or he stopped secreting it and he'd crippled every single rival, made every single planet full of plebeians resource and manufacturing-independent aside from space travel and ensured that with all its rivals destroyed, there was nobody to sabotage an attempt at building alternatives to Melange on ideological grounds like "Ixian Navigation Machines violate the Butlerian Jihad prohibitions".
* Officially, he had a storehouse. Unofficially, I always suspected that would've been too much of a vulnerability, someone destroying or robbing it or it eventually running out would destroy his entire plan and actually, being part sandworm, he was secreting the stuff himself as necessary all along.
