Chapter 8

The Rapacious
Hardscrapple Frontier
Robin Hanson
A hardscrapple life is one that is tough and absent of luxuries.
It refers to the dish scrapple, made from whatever’s left ofthe pig after the ham and sausage are made, the feet pickled,
and the snouts soused.
Alix Paultre, 2003 1

The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, awarning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nora romance to touch our hearts. The future is just anotherplace in spacetime. Its residents, like us, find their world
mundane and morally ambiguous relative to the heights
of fiction and fantasy.
In this chapter we will use evolutionary game theory tooutline the cycle of life of our descendants in one million
years. What makes such hubristic conjecture viable is that
we will (1) make some strong assumptions, (2) describe
only a certain subset of our descendants, and (3) describe
only certain physical aspects of their lives. I estimate at leasta 5 percent chance that this package of assumptions will
apply well to at least 5 percent of our descendants. Even
if these assumptions are drastically violated, this analysis
at least offers a simple and clear baseline for comparing
other scenarios.

Robin Hanson 169

Our Assumptions
Five hundred million years ago brains appeared, and thendoubled in size every thirty million years. About two million years ago, protohumans began to double in number
every quarter million years, until ten thousand years ago,
when with the advent of farming, our population began to
double each millennium. With the Industrial Revolution
about two hundred years ago, we began to double our
economy every fifteen years. Statistics of prior transitions
suggest that within this century we might somehow transition again, and then double (incredible as it might seem)
every two weeks.
This rapid change is mainly the result of all the techniques,insights, and arrangements we accumulate. Since significant
innovations are hard to anticipate, it is hard to forecast suchabilities through even a few future doublings. So the only
way we can see a million years in the future is to assume
that, by that point, our descendants have long since run
up against hard limits, limits even we can now foresee. Yes,such limits would defy our can-do, never-say-never spirit,
but the future is not an inspirational story.
The situation we’ll consider is a region of spacetime
toward the edge, by contrast with the center, of a wave ofinterstellar colonization. We assume the speed of light isan absolute limit on moving matter and information, andthat our descendants still won’t have seen any hints ofnearby intelligent aliens that might hinder their advance.
We proceed as a wave of colonists steadily expanding out
from Earth, hindered only by nature and each other.
Within this wave, our descendants would have access170 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

to physical resources such as mass, energy, negentropy,
and information, all of which are useful for colonization
activities, such as making, maintaining, and transporting
artifacts and our descendants themselves. We focus here onthese activities, and will have little to say about resources
not particularly useful for such activities. We assume thatafter a million years of searching for better ways to use such
resources for such activities, technology no longer improvesmuch, and is almost equally available to everyone.
We also assume that at least one key physical resource ishighly concentrated somewhere in space, near relatively stable,
identifiable oases such as stars, separated by a desert of nearempty space. And we assume that these oases are limited in
two ways. First, each has a limited quantity of quickly usable
physical resources. To quickly obtain more resources thana single oasis can offer, one must colonize many. Second,oasis resources have few economies of scale across oases. Thatis, there are few productivity gains from coordinating thedevelopment of resources at neighboring oases.
To colonize an oasis, our descendants will send a seed tothe oasis, perhaps ranging in size between a grain of pollen
and a battleship—a seed that then grows in its command ofresources until it becomes capable of sending a new generation of seeds to other oases. (By analogy, picture a plant
species adapted to distributing its seeds on the prevailingwinds, slowly filling the oases of a lifeless desert.)
We assume that this seed-to-seed cycle is destructive,in the sense that resources used to support this process
cannot be quickly reused for other purposes, and that longdistance interstellar travel is neither too hard nor too easy.
That is, over the next million years our descendants will

Robin Hanson 171

not become extinct, but instead, within a half million years,
will be capable of making seeds that can move from thenear Earth oasis to oases several light-years away.
We make several more assumptions. Our descendants
will not make a seed that can reliably and rapidly travel a
million light-years in a single vast voyage. Most seeds aredestroyed en route, but if not destroyed they probably
arrive near their intended destination. All else being equal,
seeds fail more often the farther they are sent, and so thefastest way to go a very long distance is to stop frequently
to develop oases along the way. There are few benefits
from earlier seeds clearing or finding safer paths throughthe desert. We assume instead that oases can see accurately
a long way ahead and are very familiar with the kinds ofobjects they observe.
While it is possible to make predatory seeds that can
travel between oases, such travel is usually too expensive
to make invasion of occupied oases cost-effective in termsof resources gained, even for very patient invaders. That is,even moderately developed oases find the resource cost to
defend themselves against invasion is much less than thecost to build and deploy seeds with a substantial chanceof taking over an oasis at which a seed has had a moderate
time to develop. Long-distance weapons to destroy oases
and their in situ colonists might, however, be affordable.
How our descendants act in this situation will depend not
only on the physical and technical constraints they face, butalso on their “personalities” —that is, their strategies, goals,
plans, and other behavioral tendencies. Some personalities
might be inclined to gleefully rape their environment as fast
as possible, while other personalities might seek minimal

172 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

disturbance and sustainable development. What will be
the personality mix?
The answer depends on how strongly our descendants
coordinate  t heir behavior during a crucial era. The familiar
biological world contains only local coordination. Genes
can coordinate within a body, and creatures can coordinate
within a tribe but, on larger scales, genes, creatures, andtribes compete for scarce resources with little coordination.
This uncoordinated competition is what allows biologists
to use hard limits and evolutionary selection theories topredict biology’s rough outlines. If our descendants prove
to be similarly uncoordinated, evolutionary analysis might
accurately outline their behavior.
Compared to most creatures large and small, however, we
humans today coordinate our actions on an unprecedented
scale, via markets and governments. But even we do nothave a strong planetary government; most of the dimensions
in which we compete are not tightly constrained by theUnited Nations or by global contracts and treaties. Will
our descendants coordinate more than we do?
At the extreme, imagine that a strong stable central government ensured for a million years that colonists spreadingout from Earth all had nearly the same standard personality,with each colonist working hard to successfully prevent any
wider personality variations in their neighbors, descendants, or future selves. In such a situation, the standard
personality might control colonization patterns; if everycolonist wanted colonization to be slow, for example, thencolonization would be slow.
The crucial era for such coordination starts when competitive interstellar colonization first becomes possible. As long

Robin Hanson 173

as the oasis near Earth is growing or innovating rapidly, any
deviant colonization attempts could be overrun by later,richer, more advanced reprisals. But as central growth andinnovation slows, such reprisals would become increasingly
difficult.
Why? Because with a common unchanging technology
and a speed-of-light limit, the farther one falls behind a
rapid colonization frontier, the harder it becomes to influence events on that frontier. For example, longer distanceweapons are more easily evaded by unpredictable movements. Because of this circumstance, rapidly advancing
frontier colonists could act largely independently of those far
enough behind them. Thus, once enough colonists with awide-enough range of personalities are moving away rapidly
enough, central threats and rewards to induce coordination on frontier behavior would no longer be feasible. The
competition genie would be out of the bottle.
This scenario, of an uncoordinated colonization wave,
assumes that sometime after near  Earth growth and innovation slows, enough colonists with behavioral variety
will get sufficiently far away from the rest, fast enough, toprevent large-scale coordination from much influencing
their behavior. And if that uncoordinated competition
lasts long enough, an evolutionary analysis would thenapply, allowing us to foresee now the outlines of ourdistant descendants’ way of life. Let’s find out what ourassumptions imply. (The analysis method that produces
these conclusions from these assumptions is given at theend of this chapter.)174 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

Oases in the Desert
It seems hard to say much about what styles of music, art,or fiction, or what languages or operating systems, will befavored by our descendants in the Year Million. It is also
hard to say much about the kinds of minds they will have.
Distinct minds with their own sense of a coherent self,
history, and personality might be far larger or far smaller
than our own, perhaps broken into millions of parts thatinteract with trillions of other parts in unfamiliar ways.
Though these aspects are fuzzy, others are clearer. For
example, “local” talk is much cheaper than distant talk.
Thus, mental coherence is easier to obtain locally than overbroad distances, and consequently more uncertainty exists
about distant mental states. That is, even our Year Million
descendants still have some relatively local beliefs, goals,
and plans that have a privileged influence over local actions.
And they have sharper memories of those local—by contrast
with distant—activities that have led to current activities.
Our descendants also suffer tensions between local anddistant beliefs, goals, and plans, resulting in interactions
analogous to what we call conflict, persuasion, promises,and deals.
Even more so than today, the spatial distribution ofactivity is highly uneven because of the highly uneven
distribution of useful physical resources such as mass,energy, negentropy, and information. Such resources arehighly concentrated at those small bountiful oases
separated by vast “deserts” (or we could think of themas small islands separated by vast oceans). These oases
might be comets, planets, stars, centers of star clusters,Robin Hanson 175

galactic centers, or centers of clumps of as-yet-unknown
types of dark matter; we cannot yet discern which oases
will be important, or how.
The speed of light limits travel, and interstellar distances
are so enormous that reliable travel is prohibitively expensive.
Still, our descendants sometimes send seeds to cross thevast desert between oases. While the desert’s density isvery low on average, its total mass is immense; we can now
only dimly imagine the dangers and obstacles such deserts
might contain. Perhaps “here be dragons.” Over such vastdistances and times, seeds can suffer internal failures andcollisions with stray desert matter—risks that increase withtravel speed and distance.
A seed might contain just a single coherent mind, or
information for constructing trillions of minds. It will
not be a gigantic starship staffed by a human crew, theparochial Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica vision. At aminimum, each seed contains information and equipment
sufficient to turn raw oasis resources into organized productive capital. Seeds can vary in their speed and capacity tocarry cargo and fuel. Seeds can have eyes, ears, and scouts
to identify and locate oases, other seeds, and obstacles.
They might carry weapons to direct at obstacles, seeds, oroases, or shields to protect themselves from weapons andobstacles. They could also have maneuvering abilities, toevade weapons and approach targets.
Once a seed arrives intact at a virgin oasis, it begins todevelop resources at that oasis into more usable capital. Suchcapital would support a largely self-sufficient local economy,
and could take the form of mines, refineries, factories, roads,
transports, generators, sensor grids, radiation collectors,

176 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

heat radiators, signal and power lines, construction andrepair units, and command and control centers.
Such capital can be used to create more capital, as wellas to increase oasis abilities to observe, talk with, hide
from, and defend against outsiders. Even moderately
developed oases have enough resources to defend themselves ably against invading seeds intent on displacingthem. As noted, defense against long-distance weapons
might be harder.
Importantly, the capital of an oasis can also be used
to launch a new generation of seeds, the first of whichmight be the original seed refurbished. Capital would
be used to construct the seeds themselves, and perhaps
launchers to give them a push, or power and informationtransmitters to help seeds in transit. Oases might also
create observatories and simulators to help refine plans
for where seeds should land.
Descendants could ride in on seeds or be received
later as signals [as Wil McCarthy speculates in Chapter
7—Ed.]. The rate at which capital can be created fromoasis resources eventually slows down as oasis resources are
exhausted. Different types of oases have different mixturesof resources and different points at which such resources
become exhausted.
The Bleeding Edge
What sorts of lives will our descendants live, empoweredby the most advanced technology possible and steadily
domesticating the vast resources of the galaxy, as they
develop oases and travel between them? Will they build

Robin Hanson 177

immense mansions with armies of servants to reenact famous battles on the south lawn? Will they isolate planetsof primitive life to study their evolution, build vast Jupiter
brains or MBrains to calculate more digits of pi, or shapemolecular clouds into exquisite sculptures visible a billion
light-years away?
Perhaps some settled descendants will do such things,
but we are considering a realm near the edge of a wave ofcolonization hundreds of thousands of years after it began
expanding away from Earth. Over this vast time, there has
been a continuous race to see who can expand fastest, a racethat has given the winner of each stage extra advantages
in future stages.
This long competition has not selected a few idle gods
using vast powers to indulge arbitrary whims, or solarsystem-sized Matrioshka Brains. Instead, frontier life is as
hard and tough as the lives of most wild plants and animals
nowadays, and of most subsistence-level humans throughhistory. These hard-life descendants, whom we will call“colonists,” can still find value, nobility, and happiness intheir lives. For them, their tough competitive life is justthe “way things are” and have long been.
Let us start by considering a wave of colonization witha locally flat wall or wave-front separating a colonizedregion from a fresh, uncolonized region. This is the sortof wave-front that might pass through any desert peppered
uniformly with similar oases, such as the stars in a galaxy.
The seeds all fly in nearly the same direction, away fromthe wall, and fly faster than the wall itself moves. Behind
them, most of the good oases are occupied. Ahead, more
and more virgin oases are available. A few lucky seeds find178 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

themselves at the very leading edge of the wave, and havethe luxury of picking a destination ahead with little fearthat a competing seed will arrive first.
At the leading edge, all colonists follow similar strategies—that is, context-dependent behaviors. Colonists prefersimilar oases, build similar colonies, and stay similar durations before launching similar numbers of similar seeds
that move a similar speed and distance. These strategies are
similar because they are close to the fastest possible way tomove forward. By this time, recall, advanced technology
is largely shared in common, and unchanging. Any slower
strategies have, by definition, fallen behind and are nolonger represented at the leading edge.
Though hardly noticeable to us, small strategy differences might loom large to our descendants. They mighttie group identities to such differences, and obsess about
whether variations in success are signs of random luck orof quality distinctions. The status ranking is clear; those
closer to the leading edge rushing outward into the cosmos
are more likely to have better strategies, and in any casewill have more influence over future events.
It is not clear how many seeds an oasis typically sends
out. But regardless of whether that number is ten or ten
trillion, seeds certainly choose ambitious high-risk strategies
so that, on average, only one seed survives the journey tocolonize a new oasis. That is how plants today replicate, astrategy shaped by the pressures of natural selection. Of
the thousands of seeds a plant might distribute, on average
only one seed produces a new plant that lives to distribute
more seeds.
To tolerate such a high failure rate, leading-edge colonists

Robin Hanson 179

are relatively tolerant of local risks. Any given seed might
fail internally or hit a local obstacle. These risks tend to
average out across a wide colonization frontier. Colonists
might be less tolerant of correlated risks, such as uncertainty about a common characteristic of a larger region;
correlated risks do not so easily average out.  
Leading-edge descendants are rapacious and hardscrapple.
That is, they devote few resources to luxuries that could
instead be used to speed oasis growth or seed travel. Oasis
colonies try to grow as fast as possible, neglecting long-term
consequences for the oasis after seeds have gone, while seeds
travel as fast as they reliably can, neglecting consequences
for the desert they pass through. An oasis sends out newseeds only when its local capital growth rate is slowing
down, and seeds in transit do not stop until the fractionthat fail per distance traveled is increasing.
Interactions between leading-edge oases or seeds are probably minimal. However, if there were very fast and effective
long-distance weapons, then seeds and colonies might try
harder to hide and to choose unpredictable destinations.
When the wave-front is not flat but round, leading-edge
strategies would adjust to prescribe slowing down, staying
longer at oases and moving more slowly between them, to let
more seeds survive and populate the larger volume ahead.
Leading-edge strategies would also adjust to a foreseeably nonuniform distribution of oases or desert obstacles.
For example, outside the galaxy the density of useful oases
probably falls by a larger factor than does the seed failure
rate between oases. If so, the colonization wave would haveto move more slowly outside the galaxy. To compensate,colonists would stay longer at oases and travel in slower

180 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

seeds. Strategies at the galaxy edge would also slow down,in effect building up resources during years of plenty inanticipation of years of famine ahead. Dwarf galaxies would
be prized places to replenish resources.
Falling Behind
On average, colonists near the leading edge tend to slowly
fall behind the lucky few who remain there as it rushes
outward. How does behavior change as they fall behind?
It depends on how intense (that is, how selective) was thecolonization competition and race so far.
If competition was only moderate, then behind the leading edge we would see a mix of descendants, some who
had suffered unlucky setbacks using pretty fast strategies,
together with descendants using not quite as fast strategies.
In this case, behavior behind the leading edge would look
similar to that on the leading edge, but more random.
In the more likely case, wherein the competition has been
more intense, it would select for colonists who adapt their
behavior well to falling behind the leading edge. After all,the random factors that make one fall behind now mightalso help one to catch up later. So the best strategy for those
who fall somewhat behind is to seek their best chance toreturn to the leading edge. Strategies that include giving
up too easily would suffer on average and eventually fall so
far behind that few seeds would be found anywhere near
the leading edge.
In this case, seeds behind the leading edge would be
not just risk-tolerant but actually risk-loving about theirtravel speed. That is, they would happily give up a middle

Robin Hanson 181

speed for a chance to either go much faster or much slower.
Expect them to scour technical or terrain uncertainties
for unlikely scenarios that might catapult them back to
the leading edge.
Since the first colonists to an area grab the best oases,
those arriving later must make do with lower-quality oases.
Later arrivals must also suffer a larger chance that they will
arrive at an oasis only to find another seed already settled in(and perhaps heavily defended). Seeds can try to compensate
for such congestion by attempting to signal their intended
destinations, by watching and replanning in flight, or by
fighting over newly occupied oases.
To compensate for congestion and lower-quality oases,
those that fall behind send out more seeds that travel more
slowly and less far and invest more in observing, fighting, andmaneuvering. Colonists would stay longer at each oasis to
pay for all this, invest more in defense, and consider a wider
range of oasis types. The net result is that those behind theleading edge move, on average, more slowly than the leadingedge and fall even farther behind.
Congestion is a form of interaction, and it suggests otherkinds of interaction behind the leading edge. We have so
far considered the “lowest rung” of the local food chain;
there might also be analogues of parasites and predatorsthat “feed” on this basic colonization process. Working
out the details of such a complex ecology is well beyond
the scope of this chapter.
Congestion interaction also suggests the possibility of
local coordination. A very intense colonization race might
select for extreme local cooperation within local colonization“threads.” A thread of cooperation would be a volume in182 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier

space that follows a group of cooperating colonists and theirdescendants along a path of colonization, ending with aregion of the colonization wave-front surface. Such colonists
would cooperate to exclude predators and outsiders fromtheir thread, and coordinate to avoid having their seeds
target the same oasis. Threads thus avoid congestion costs
except on the thread’s surface. Better-performing threads
would slowly increase their fraction of the surface of thecolonization wave-front.
Staying Behind
Even among colonists who use the fastest possible strategies, a great many will find themselves far behind theleading edge and falling ever farther behind. Such colonists become increasingly desperate to find any long shot,
however risky, that might move them closer to the leadingedge. They would not accept just growing very slowly atpoor oases; there is a limit to how slow an oasis growthrate they will tolerate.
So if all colonization behavior were devoted entirely towinning the race for the leading edge, the only things to
be found a long way behind the leading edge at most but
not all oases would be the wreckage of failed seeds, empty
abandoned oasis colonies, and a notable absence of theprime resources. It would be as if a wildfire had passed
through the area, converting the easy kindling to ash, but
burning itself out while leaving slow-burning tree trunks
largely untouched.
It is possible, however, to stay competitive at the lead-Robin Hanson 183

ing edge for a long time even if from time to time one
diverts a tiny fraction of resources at far-behind oases awayfrom the task of chasing the leading edge. If the process oflaunching seeds sometimes does not quite exhaust all local
capital, then the remaining colonists could give up on everreaching the leading edge and instead devote themselves
to staying put.
Such rare, diverted resources are likely, and would
entirely change the character of far-behind regions fromdead and empty to lively and full. For example, if a few
colonists always remained at every occupied oasis, then in
short order all such oases would become well developed.
Alternatively, if colonists stayed at only a few rare oases,
then once those oases developed enough, they could sendout seeds to repopulate the local area. Under this second
scenario, it would take only a bit longer for almost all local
oases to be well developed.
Because seed travel is so expensive, it would cost far moreto successfully conquer even a moderately developed oasis
than could be gained from the invasion. There is thus anatural defensive advantage against oasis conquest. Longdistance destructive weapons might perhaps be cheap, butthey would probably allow one to destroy an oasis, not toacquire its resources.
Because the first colonists at an oasis could repel invadersindefinitely, the distribution of colonist types in a region longafter a colonization wave had passed would be determined
mainly by the stay-put choices of the leading-edge colonists
who had passed by long before. That is, the fraction of local
oases dominated by any given type of colonist would depend

184 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontieron the fraction of their ancestors on the leading edge ofcolonization, weighted by the fraction of oases at whichthose ancestors left behind colonists inclined to developthat oasis enough to resist invasion and to send seeds tosimilarly develop neighboring deserted oases. The earlier
a colonist begins to stay put, the more of the local deserted
oases it could colonize.
The competition for the leading edge selects against
devoting resources to stay-put colonists, though only
weakly. So to the extent that such stay-put behavior exists
anyway, it is in defiance of that selection. Thus such strategies
could be somewhat arbitrary (i.e., determined by hard to
anticipate details of the way colonist behavior is encodedand varied). So for a long time after a colonization wave
has passed, the activity in a region is determined largely bywhatever arbitrary stay-put strategies have been chosen bysuch diverted colonists.
Eventually local selection effects might privilege certain
kinds of stay-put behavior over others, but such effects, too,
are well beyond the scope of this chapter. It is interesting to wonder whether the universe we see around us isconsistent with such a scenario. That is, could a wave ofalien interstellar colonization once have passed this way?  
Perhaps some combination of powerful weapons and oases
in hiding from such weapons could be consistent with thevirgin appearance of the universe we see.  
Conclusion
The future is just another place in spacetime. We haveused an evolutionary game-theory analysis to outline basic

Robin Hanson 185

physical aspects of the cycle of life toward the edge of awave of interstellar colonization. I have estimated at leasta 5 percent chance that this package of assumptions will
apply close enough to at least 5 percent of our descendants
in the Year Million. Given how very far away one million
years is, that would be doing very well at forecasting.
The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams,
a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us,
nor a romance to touch our hearts. I am not praising thispossible future world to encourage you to help make it
more likely, nor am I criticizing it to warn you to make itless likely. It is not intended as an allegory of problems or
promises for us, our past, or our near future. It is just mybest-guess description of another section of spacetime. I
can imagine better worlds and worse worlds, so whether I
am repelled by or attracted to this world must depend on
the other realistic options on the table.

Analysis Method
When different personalities choose different colonization
strategies, then those strategies effectively compete to see
which of them produces a faster expansion out into thecosmos. Of course, from its own point of view, a personality
might be happy to lose such a race, deeming the price of
winning to be too high. Nevertheless, as we look farther
out into the cosmos, we should tend to see the faster colonization strategies prevailing.
If the descendants and future selves of a personality
tend to have similar personalities, then the competition

186 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontierin each new colonization generation should select more
for the faster strategies at the leading edge. Also, laggards
who arrived after the first colonists to an area would haveto make do with leftover resources, the resources the firstcolonists chose to not use, hide, destroy, or defend. Yes, inrecent times humans well behind frontiers have competed
effectively with frontier humans, but the scale economies
that have made this possible are being assumed away for
future oases.
After many generations, these advantages should increasingly select for and emphasize faster personalities on thefrontier. Eventually, regions anywhere near the leadingedge should be populated almost entirely by variations
on, and descendants of, personalities that took the fastest
winning colonization strategies. These fastest personalities
dominate the “way of life” I describe in this paper.
To study these fastest strategies, I have elsewhere constructed a mathematical game-theoretic model to calculate
optimal colonization strategies.3 In its most general form, thecolonization problem is described via five key functions:
An oasis function gives the distribution of oases
in spacetime by type.
A growth function says how the resources available
to a colony depend on oasis type and the time since
a seed landed at that oasis.
A cost function says how the resources needed tomake and launch a seed vary with features.

Robin Hanson 187

A mortality function gives the rate at which seeds
fail in transit, depending on the local oasis density
as well as seed speed, hardness, and distance fromsource.
A targeting function says the chance a seed successfully gains and holds an oasis of a given type,given the local fraction of occupied oases, the rateof change of that fraction, and the seed’s speed
and targeting ability.
These functions are usually described abstractly in termsof the signs of various derivatives.
To analyze the optimal strategy in this game, I consider
two functions across spacetime: a density function, giving
the fraction of oases of each type that are occupied, anda value function, giving the value of having a new colony
there. There are two key consistency equations.
First, a flow equation connects the oasis occupancy rate
to the rate of arrival of seeds with various features.
Second, a strategy equation sets the value of a seed starting
to colonize an oasis equal to the best possible sum of the
expected value of seeds later launched from that oasis thatend up successfully colonizing new oases one generation
later. By “best possible” we mean considering all possible
strategies for how long to wait at an oasis until sendingout how many seeds of what type, how far and how fast.
We consider colonist actions that are close to these best
possible actions.
As usual in such analysis, to get concrete answers wemust make a variety of “technical” assumptions of varying

188 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontierplausibility. While the intent of such assumptions is tosimplify the analysis without overly compromising realism,
this intent is not always realized. Also as usual, we try to see
how far we can get by making relatively weak assumptions,and then we add stronger assumptions as needed to getclearer pictures.
For example, my math analysis has so far always assumed
that seeds travel many oasis spacings, that there is only
one kind of oasis resource, and that oases are constantly
and uniformly distributed in space. Sometimes this mathassumes a flat colonization wave-front.
Surely the main question in many readers’ minds is: howreasonable is our basic evolutionary modeling approach?
This depends on how reasonable are its key modelingassumptions, of “enough” (1) stability of personalities
across generations, (2) generations of colonization, and(3) variations of personalities. Whether there is enoughpersonality variation depends in part on the level at whichstable behavior tendencies are encoded.
For example, it might be that the stable tendencies are
inclinations to build seeds a certain time period after landingat an oasis, or to make seeds of a given speed and hardness
that travel a given distance, but with little tendency to adapt
these behaviors to changing environmental features suchas local colonization congestion or the types and density of
local oases. If so, an evolutionary analysis might do well at
describing average behavior, but poorly at describing how
such choices vary with such environmental features.
On the other hand, there might be some colonist personalities that want to win at any cost the race to dominate
the leading edge. Such personalities would calculate in far

Robin Hanson 189

more detail than we have done the best behavior to achieve
this goal, assuming other independent competitors had
a similar aim. With enough initial colonists like this, orwith just one or two of them and enough generations ofcompetition, optimal behavior models might do very wellat describing behavior near the leading edge.

Notes 319

Chapter 8: “The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier” byRobin Hanson
1. A. Paultre, Definition of “Hardscrapple,” Everything 2,
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1509110,
December 28, 2003.
References
Hanson, “Burning the Cosmic Commons,” working paper,
http://hanson.gmu.edu/filluniv.pdf, July 1, 1998.
“Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential
Modes,” working paper, http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf, December 2000.
Chapter 9: “Do You Want to Live Forever?” by Pamela
Sargent and Anne Corwin
1. R . Pells, “History Descending a Staircase: American
Historians and American Culture,” Chronicle of Higher
Education, 53, 48 (Summer 2007).
2. http://www.legacy98.org/timeline.html, “In Griswold
v Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), the Supreme Court
overturns one of the last state laws prohibiting the prescription or use of contraceptives by married couples.”3. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., Ending Aging (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 2007), 42–43.
4. http://methuselahfoundation.org/index.
php?pagename=lysosens.
5. http://methuselahfoundation.org/index.
php?pagename=mitosens.
6. http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/SayAh/
index.html.
7. http://mr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/
PR12745.html.