Quote Originally Posted by LittleFuzzy View Post
But those ARE always an Other that is either in "local" reach or has something that can clearly be taken and exploited by the attackers in a reasonable time-frame. I didn't suggest there'd be no interstellar war but I can't see it being common from our perspectives.



There are corollaries to life-span extension. Having the life-span to do something also means they can take more time generally. Which means that their activities still wouldn't necessarily be coming often enough to be considered common from our perspective. And relativistic time-dilation effects only apply to that which actually gets sent to another system, not to anyone left behind in the originating system. You know, the people investing resources to send them off in the first place. That helps enable the nomadic/semi-nomadic invasive migration type warfare I mentioned as a caveat in my first post but it's not necessary for that either so. . .
I think we're agreeing more than we think we are.

I've wondered about what having an extended lifespan would actually mean for people's perspective. Would people suddenly be more concerned about climate change, for example? Population control? Doubtful... Would they contribute less to their 401ks? Probably... Making a species designed for short term thinking into a long-lived species, without changing anything else, probably won't affect the typical individual's behavior much. But I digress.

The more I think about that article, the more I think the premise is stupidly wrong -- *unless* some super-xenophobic subspecies creates Von Neumann Berskerers and turns them loose. That would be a problem. But it wouldn't be any more risk to our long term existence than staying put here on Earth, I don't think. Some day, sooner than later probably, somebody's going to invent a horribly deadly *thing* and let it loose to kill us all.