It's less about efficiency and more about using technology to create new experiences. The citizens of the Sephirotic Empires live lives of luxury with all their needs being taken care of by advanced AIs.
Increasing the range and magnitude of possible experiences, on a metaphysical level, is kind of the whole point of this sort of extreme transhumanism to begin with.
Orion’s Arm takes the question, “What kind of culture would we have if we could see UV and/or infrared light?” and it runs with it until it ends up with things like minds so powerful they can simulate and analyze hundreds or even thousands of baseline minds internally. Somewhere in the setting, there no doubt exists a higher-singularity being who is running a mental sim of medieval England and all the people in it, in the back of their mind, as a screen saver. To the
Archailects, baseline minds (or
modosophonts) are basically beyond fucking retarded. The difference in intelligence between them and their mortal charges is not like the difference in intelligence between you and a downie. It’s many, many orders of magnitude of difference in intellect.
The higher-level AI gods in Orion’s arm may blast exabytes of data at each other in a split-second as a fucking greeting. The 39 bits per second of human speech doesn’t even register.
Think of the Ents from LOTR and how impatient people get with their rumbling, glacial pace of speech, and now, picture something orders of magnitude slower. Picture the reply being the entire Library of Congress in a millisecond. These AI have minds so far beyond comprehension, they would have to spin up a little tiny booger-mind, a virtual retard, just to talk to you.
One of the AI Gods is a dying mutilated cat that was ripped apart by a God Seed on accident as it was dying, turned into not just a baseline human's intellect but several orders of magnitude smarter -- I forget how high up but high enough that it's brain is the size of a planet and it has complete control of everything in it's solar system on an atomic scale, so probably a Tier 3 or 4 mind.
You forgot the part where an actual cult sprang up around it, which gathers up criminals and other assorted scum, tests how unrepentantly evil they are, and, if they fail, feeds them to that thing.
Whatever you do, don’t be a dick in this setting, or you might get
kidnapped by a space kangaroo and thrown down the ouch hole.
I am fucking love this I am a sucker for lore and hard sci fi.
Yeah they find a few aliens but for the size of the setting there are very few other people. There is the conspiracy theory that someone/something is erasing previous civilizations with some proof but not much. Then there are the signs of other civilizations around that we know exist/existed but are too far away for communication but the mere signs of their works are awesome (in the biblical meaning here) to behold like the literal
micromanaged galaxies optimized for long term energy efficiency or the
Leo Hyperobject which is what looks to be a dyson sphere at first but is actually
1.2 light years across seems to weight double as much as the Milky Way and of course who can forget the time Terrans finally found
someone apparently on our level of tech who was sending a "To whom it may concern" our way from 2.7 million light years away telling about their own people and culture and at the end there was a "Oh and btw
there is a 10ly sized space ship coming our way and we have no idea what it is it will get here in 1 million years no idea tf it is".
2spoopy4me
The more you understand about transapients and
blights or
perversities, the more you wonder, what if the
Hiders are right to hide?