joycian

What does "indirectly" include legally?

Actually, I think it could be said that Pompey did it illegitimately before he did it legitimately (legitimately meaning: with the support of the sitting government in Rome), raising troops in support of Sulla's invasion force. Of course, legitimacy is a bit strange in the Sulla-Marius years.

But can you distinguish those states reliably?

But how do you know space isn't filled with a network of probes to detect just that? It seems to me you need to be confident you're first on the scene, or at least that the Precursors don't have such a huge lead on you that your diversions are useless.

Edit: Also it seems that by a strange argument combining 1) any civilization earlier than you is likely to be massively more technologically advanced and you cannot hide and 2) you exist, that any civilization could assume they are either first or first enough, which also seems to break the dark forest.

I don't understand something about this: how would the civilization that destroys another one know that they don't expose themselves to some even more hidden civilization? Isn't the best option to sit still and hope the Precursors don't notice you?

I like that you're asking for the mechanics. Many people just repeat their mantras.

If QE led to inflation quickly and in a simple way, we could have known that long ago. We didn't even have to do it ourselves: Japan did the experiment long before we did.

If you know, please explain it to me.

Balance of payments.

Exactly, you give the government a way to replicate your insight, in return you get x years of monopoly. With the first part being non-existent (didn't inventors even have to supply physical prototypes etc.?) the patent system is easy to abuse.

Are there no widely used flak/AoE weapons that heavily punish tight formations?

If it's only that it would be pretty hard. Aggregated data would (probably?) be relatively safe.

Well even if you know that nobody can be identified from your data alone, if everyone releases data, it will become easier and easier to cross-reference and still identify people.

Yes, I think you're right, I should've written increased. Thanks for the correction :).

There's some evidence that around 2B years ago microbes decreased the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere so much by overpopulation that 99% of the biosphere died.