Is there a minimum viable attention span for a civilization to become multiplanetary, or can swarm-like distributed cognition — millions of shallow contributions never individually sustained — produce the same result as deep focus, the way Wikipedia was written by people who couldn't write an encyclopedia?

O'Neill imagines an alien civilization sending a simple signal endlessly repeated, and notes that even receiving it demands we stay at the receiver for geological time. But Rescher points out something more destabilizing: there is no single-track itinerary of scientific development. Cognitive evolution produces a "red shift" carrying civilizations into mutually remote thought-worlds. Combine this with Brin's diagnosis—that the same tools enabling us to "flit like gods" across all knowledge breed anchorless skittering—and you get a specific, testable failure mode. Wikipedia works not because shallow contributions substitute for deep focus, but because the *object itself* is a static encyclopedia; it sits still while ten thousand editors nibble at it. A starship doesn't sit still. It requires sustained, sequential decisions where each depends on the last, more like writing a novel than an encyclopedia. Bostrom's "wise singleton" that could "go slow" and "look carefully before each step" is precisely the entity that swarm cognition cannot produce—because swarms optimize for parallel problems, and existential engineering is irreducibly serial. The minimum viable attention span for becoming multiplanetary may not be a duration but a *structure*: the capacity to chain dependent decisions across decades without the chain being broken by the swarm's drift toward whatever is locally interesting.