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Land exploration lead to having many different kingdoms, which scaled wars up from inter-tribal wars to inter-kingdom wars. Later, world wars. Space exploratio
by Peaker 15y ago
Land exploration lead to having many different kingdoms, which scaled wars up from inter-tribal wars to inter-kingdom wars. Later, world wars.
Space exploration will scale wars up from inter-continental world wars, to inter-world wars, which are much more massive.
- PedroCandeias 15y agoRight now I'm sitting in Portugal, Europe, typing this on a laptop which was designed in America and manufactured in China. And we're not at war with one another at the moment. I believe there may have been a few consequences to exploration that were far nicer than war, trade chief among them.
- koolkelso 15y agoNot only that, if we've become advanced enough to finally decide we should genuinely spend our efforts on exploring space, by then perhaps a humanistic consciousness could have emerged rendering war irrelevant.
- Peaker 15y agoSure, there are times of peace, and there are times of war. But history tells us there likely will be wars.
- geon 15y agoInterplanetary warfare would be extremely resource intensive. You can't very easily occupy a planet.
- tsotha 15y agoJust getting an army from one planet to another would be ruinously expensive. Also, without some big leap in propulsion technology it's going to take something like a year for the invasion force to arrive. That gives the defender a whole lot of time to think about how he's going to respond and prepare accordingly.
- cpeterso 15y agoGood point: The attacker loses the element of surprise and must maintain very long supply lines!