How Often Do Humans Legitimately Win?

[Drashner1]

The comparison of humans with animals and transaps with modos is a common one in the setting/project and in some circumstances it is a reasonably useful analogy.

I personally disagree because animals lack distinct intelligence as we intend it for humans. It's quite possible that transap are beyond intelligence itself rather than being "mere" superintelligences but I doubt that the gap is at the same level between an human and an animal.

For this to be usefully discussed we'd need a clear definition of what 'intelligence' is.

That said - what makes you think that humans possess 'distinct intelligence' as transapients intend it?

As far as the gap - I would argue that it's vastly larger than between a human and an animal. Humans and animals generally have the same number and kind of senses (there are some exceptions) and can effectively focus their attention on one thing at a time. Compare that with even an S1 as described HERE - which includes senses humans don't possess at all and abilities relating to senses, manipulating their environment, and modes of thought that humans either lack or only possess in miniscule measure in comparison.

And that's only for an S1. By the time you get to S3 (where you kind of topped out here) you have a brain that outmasses the entire Biosphere of the Earth and a mind that can model every human being on Earth (meaning it could effectively run our entire civilization) 'single handedly' with only a tiny fraction of its attention. Are you really going to argue that such a being is really just a human being with super powers?

I once read a saying to the effect that when a process or technology is made 10x better it is revolutionary - and when it is made 100x better it is no longer the same process (no one thinks of jet airliners as horses that are 100x faster). Even low transapients exceed the 100x threshold by a huge degree - and by S3 the gap is so large that it seems more likely that any elements of their minds that look anything like ours are tiny and coincidental - or being temporarily purposed to that task for some reason.

Regarding damagind/killing a transap I presume that below the ample use magmatter and plasma processor, I'd say below S4, anything can be killed by the right amount of antimatter/nuclear or heavy kinetic bombardment, which is avaiable even at S0 in the setting. Mass to energy is no trivial joke at any of those levels.
That should take care of any kind of armor like diamondoid or Ultimate Muscle. I assume that the average Moon Brain can't absolutely produce enough magmatter to coat itself with a magmatter infused armor.
The problem is scoring an hit against an hyperaware being with sensor array that probably outclass yours

This is kind of like saying that a single human armed with a sling can defeat the United States in a war because technically the sling could kill a single soldier.

While a lot of SF is hugely enamored of reducing conflict down to a simplistic punching match of guns against armor or 'shields' (which conveniently decrease in strength as the plot requires it), actual warfare is much more involved. And is going to be vastly more involved when transapients are involved, especially S3.

Put another way - that 'hyper-awareness' means that the S3 is going to know what the humans are up to long before they can martial the resources to threat it's physical structure in any way. And there are any number of things it can (and will) do before they have launched so much as a single ship. Think Batman levels of crazy prepared multiplied by quadrillions. The would be attackers could suddenly have their nanoimmune systems malfunction and kill them all. Or turn off their eyes. Or Rewrite their minds such that they all become willing slaves of the transapient. Or all turn on each other and wipe themselves out. Or their weapons could all turn on them. Or their culture could undergo some number of changes that result in them no longer having any desire to attack the transapient.

Even if the humans manage to launch their weapons - the S3 can field vastly more energy than they can. It can shoot down their weapons - likely before they've done more than barely launch. Or detonate the local star and habs. Or detect the weapons via gravity wave interferometers and use conversion powered lasers to destroy them. Note also that hitting even a planet size object is extremely hard at near c due to Lorentz contraction and related issues. But most likely the S3 would stop the attack before it ever started. So it would still win. And the inherent inferiority of mere humans (sacks of dirty water with an overinflated sense of their own value) would be proven once again . 

More editorially, any such conflict would fall under our intertoposophic conflict guidelines - LINK

An exception to this could be wormholes: we have a group of modos, I think, blowing a mouth of a wormhole in a system during the Version War and severely damaging a Transap in another system. They had their whole clade wiped out by hunter killer ISOs, but that is another story

Link to the article/story in question,please?

Per our current Canon this is basically impossible and the article likely needs to be modified.

Anyway, for the setting stories, articles and blog posts I'd say that taking down a being a S level above you is so difficult that is usually a remarkable event. Still, it's possible.
Regarding humans taking down an S1 in a conflict  I'd say that is possible that a large amount of enanched human forming a military oriented tribemind with enough processing power to match an S1, I'm not sure if that was ever discussed in details. After that, as I wrote above, you have quite a lot of tools to deal horrific damage if you can strike even a single hit.
In time of peace there is no way an angelnet would allow any modos to go around with large amount of explosives.

See above, both in general and re intertoposophic conflict. The odds of this ever happening are astronomically low. Re a tribemind vs an S1 - a tribemind is only a slightly more clever animal compared to even an S1. And if it has as much processing power as an S1 then it will either ascend to become an S1 - in which case it is no longer a case of modos beating a transap or (much more likely) it will crash or go insane or become a blight or perversion. For the first options it's not winning and for the last it's again a case of S1 vs S1 at that point.

Todd