This is a very weird and very interesting idea. I like it.
I imagine that technology trading would become _very_ important, and whoever expanded the fastest would have a major advantage. But if only one player was lucky enough to score astrophysics and then a couple of levels of stellar manipulation in a row, I'm sure he could buy all the "mundane" techs he needed to make himself more well-rounded. Or he could just revel in being the only player in the game who can blow up planets, making it a sort of "racial" tech.
Getting enough levels of Applied Intelligence to steal technology would be a killer advantage. Considering the counterintelligence bug in 1.41, you might want to disable intelligence for this one.