It’s such a cool idea, I can’t wait to see it happen.
Haha right? You think the dragons of today are bad? Wait until they live 1,000 times longer, have 1,000,000 time more wealth, and have lived across the span of multiple entire civilizations with whatever form of digital dementia the Gen Ones couldn’t predict
Luckily capitalism is too unstable and self-limiting to lead to galactic god-emperors. We’re a long way from that kinda tech, if it’s even possible given our material conditions, and it certainly won’t be capitalism that squeezes through that great filter
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that capitalism can’t achieve spacefaring civilisations. They’ll be horrible and bloody civilisations wracked by regular collapses, but IMO the same forces that kept the Cold War cold could help the capitalists manage this. Obviously mass death or even species extinction are horribly likely scenarios for such polities (and for our own) but they’re not inevitable. We might actually get unstable space opera/cyberpunk dystopias!
