@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin Actually, while I contemplate cancer analogies for growth-for-growth's sake, it occurs to me that there are obvious modes of failure that apply to tumors which also apply to GFGS civilizations.
Necrosis, in which logistic problems starve the center; and cancer-gets-cancer, in which attacking your neighbors to expand into their territory provides better returns than trying to expand into the now-distant margin of the tumor/sphere.
@cerebrate @nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo
Reminds me a bit of Baxter's 'Manifold: Space', where the aliens that come to Sol are the outer edge of a colonisation sphere, while their homeworld has long since began to decay.
@cerebrate @nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin that’s why the empire in my setting was uninterested in resources and was more of a cultural hegemony dedicated to the survival of the Terragen clade. To the point of creating more low-tech penal colonies than incorporated worlds.
@nyrath @Hcobb @isaackuo @MeiLin
Applying the same principles to growth-obsessed societies/peoples suggest to me that GFGS civs are acutely vulnerable to breaking down into civil resource wars - and, if you're using relativistic transports, probably the kind of civil resource wars that leave nothing behind except the Cancer Emulation Is Not A Viable Strategy Memorial Stellar Graveyard of 3162.