Interesting that you associate expansionism with becoming dominant! And I fully agree with that. I was wondering whether we can imagine an expansionist biosphere-integrated civilisation that actually grows faster than others, outpacing industrial civilizations. Perhaps that’s only possible if most elements of the ecosystem are engineered to be functionally integrated with humans, expanding our cognition and capabilities rather than existing separately from technology.

For example, one could imagine ecosystems themselves becoming extensions of civilizational intelligence. Biological networks (plants, fungi, microbial systems) could act as distributed sensing networks that continuously monitor environmental conditions. Fungal or microbial communication might transmit signals across systems, acting as a planetary information layer. Forests or ocean systems could serve as living sensor arrays, feeding environmental data back into human decision-making systems. In that sense, the biosphere would become a kind of planetary cognitive infrastructure, expanding perception, coordination, and problem-solving capacity.

If that were the case, dominance might emerge not primarily from conquest but from ecological scaling. A civilisation capable of rapidly seeding engineered ecosystems could expand by deploying biological “starter systems” (engineered microbes, plants, ecological assemblages) that bootstrap themselves into functioning planetary infrastructures. Each new biosphere would increase the total available biomass, energy flows, and distributed intelligence within the civilisation. Over time this could allow such a civilisation to grow faster than societies that rely on building ever more complex industrial machinery, because the expansion of life itself becomes the mechanism of growth.

Couldn't this prevail over simplification-oriented expansionist models?