I feel a need to add an important extra wrinkle. The front line of progress and growth in all things is driven by those who are pursuing progress and growth. If an upload cult arises in a planet, and 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, the remaining 10% are still around and we be selected to be exactly those people most invested in the material universe; within a few years (not millions of years, certainly) there’s a good chance they’ll be considering expansion. Or, consider how often new civilizations are formed by small populations of refugees from intolerably oppressive larger civilizations. Something like a war, extinction event or ecological difficult is similarly likely to prompt a desire for expansion as it is a total collapse.
Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, “The Klaatu were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago but have since moved on.” I always roll my eyes at this. Almost no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed. Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for the same reason our single planet (with much less serious communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective decisions.
What if 90% of the populace retreats into simulations, but in such a way that the remaining 10% have no political power and no industrial base, because that all remained with the majority? Hard for the non-uploaders to expand in that case.
That's quite contrived in my opinion. How can people uploaded into a simulation maintain that level of control in the physical world for any durable period?
They have to keep up all the computing infrastructure running the simulation, and deal with long-term threats like geological activity and asteroids. That requires having and maintaining considerable technology out in the real world, and if only a mere 10% refuse to enter the simulation, then that minority may not get to benefit from spacefaring technology, or have the capital or industrial base to develop their own.
In fact, since spacefaring presents a threat (kinetic bombardment) to any planetary-bound species, then that majority who choose to enter the simulation may want to expressly prevent the minority from leaving the planet.
This is obviously not impossible, but we are now in the realm of adding clauses to an already rather specific scenario, each clause adding another degree of improbability. (The odds of "an upload cult arises on a planet" is by definition greater than "an upload cult arises on a planet AND actively presents anybody else on the planet from ever leaving.)
I think the metaphor to look to isn't necessarily even human civilizations spreading around the globe; it's life spreading through the planet to colonize every niche out of which the slightest scrap of energy can be extracted.
Wouldn't it be a lot easier for the non-uploaders to, you know, just pull the plug? Or change the input to the digital existances in a way to simulate a reality "outside"?
No, because – as I mentioned above – the uploaders would still maintaining all kinds of technology to monitor and control the outside world in order to ward off any threats (natural disasters, sabotage from the non-uploaders) to the computing infrastructure on which the simulations are running. If the majority of society chooses to upload, then that suggests that such protective infrastructure is already so stable and advanced, that the non-uploaders would be powerless to simply "pull the plug".
It's an interesting question. How do people maintain control now? In general, it is not through physical control. We have institutions, we have "manufacturing consent".
We have those in a negative sense. Manufactured consent is mostly about directing motivation towards wars of control and acquisition and preventing other activities - including the peaceful development of sustainable energy, which is finally happening fifty years after it could have, and non-corporate non-military access to space on top of a non-corporate internet, neither of which are happening at all.
Manufacturing positive consent for a billion-year project is - obviously - a completely different kind of problem.
POTUS himself may be absent from Africa but not from physical reality, and the physically real resources under their command certainly aren’t absent from the various corners of the world.
I don't understand your argument. How much control do you think the White House exercises over chimpanzees? Your hypothetical chimpanzee is completely correct.
Change the “upload filter” to “total upload filter” smaller chance but still relevant. Also it was a silly sci-fi example, I’m sure sufficiently advanced societies can think up better forms of planetary dead ends.
Science fiction is full of sentences of the form, “The Klaatu were an alien race who colonized the galaxy a million years ago but have since moved on.” I always roll my eyes at this. Almost no matter what the Klaatu are or what they care about, there would be some group of them remaining. And the only Klaatu we would see would be the descendants of the ones who stayed. Giant galactic civilizations made of individuals are unlikely to make coherent collective decisions with no dissenters for the same reason our single planet (with much less serious communications obstacles) never makes unanimous collective decisions.