Logicality of a sci-fi space war.

[SunlitZelkova]

I am creating my own series of worlds, combined in a multiverse. I originally did not plan to have each world meet, but am considering it now. My multiverse is religious in nature rather than scientific.

A number of the worlds are controlled by fascist regimes.

But would it make sense for a war to break out between universes? In other words, is a space war logical when interstellar travel is possible?

Why would anyone fight if they could just go some place else and get resources? Does it make sense to fight over planets?

One reason I could say yes is because by the time a method of traveling to other universes has been discovered in my world, interstellar travel is limited to slow generation ships. So in effect, people are limited to the solar system as there is no viable means of transporting resources from other star systems quickly. Eventually the solar system will become overpopulated and begin running out of resources, so the only way out would be to exterminate the populace of other solar systems and colonize them.

On the other hand, there is nothing stopping these worlds from working together to try and conquer the field of FTL travel or something. Quite a few of them are worlds that united after a century long Space Race and thus already have a tradition of cooperation.

Thoughts? I’m interested in what more seasoned veterans of science fiction reading will have to say.

[Kerbart]

1 hour ago, SunlitZelkova said:

But would it make sense for a war to break out between universes? In other words, is a space war logical when interstellar travel is possible?

Why would anyone fight if they could just go some place else and get resources? Does it make sense to fight over planets?

I find it inconceivable that a civilization capable of interstellar travel cannot build Von Neumann machines. Infact, it's more likely a civilization bui,ds them before gaining the abiity to travel between stars. So, if you don't want your neighbors to strip-mine their corner of the galaxy and then start with yours, you work on exterminating them. I'm not saying you'd have to, or that it's ethical, but it is certainly a motivation.

[KSK]

Unless we’re talking about a very densely populated setting with no vacant star systems within reach (either by interstellar travel or inter-universe travel, I don’t see why running out of resources in one star system automatically implies the extermination of another star system.

More generally, I don’t believe a war in your setting is logical but sadly wars aren’t always started for logical reasons. A very quick search found eight main causes of war:

Economic Gain.

Territorial Gain.

Religion.

Nationalism.

Revenge.

Civil War.

Revolutionary War.

Defensive War.

We can discard defensive war, since that would seem to be a response to a declaration of war rather than a reason to start a war.  Economic and territorial gain could go either way depending on how your multiverse is set up although I personally don’t think they make much sense as reasons for interstellar wars.

Religion, nationalism and revenge would certainly seem to be reasons for war in your setting though.

 

[SunlitZelkova]

12 minutes ago, KSK said:

Religion, nationalism and revenge would certainly seem to be reasons for war in your setting though.

This creates some questions about human behavior. Insofar as humans are social animals, would we rather interact with each other in a negative manner than go out separate ways for gain? I.e. does a human’s social nature make him seek out the rival tribe, even if it means war, rather than go to the mountains in peace?

Perhaps we just might not be able to help ourselves. Empty star systems are boring, take the occupied ones instead.

[Spacescifi]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

This creates some questions about human behavior. Insofar as humans are social animals, would we rather interact with each other in a negative manner than go out separate ways for gain? I.e. does a human’s social nature make him seek out the rival tribe, even if it means war, rather than go to the mountains in peace?

Perhaps we just might not be able to help ourselves. Empty star systems are boring, take the occupied ones instead.

 

Let's look at this as a microcosm shall we?

At work there are people we tolerate only because we have to, and people we actually like.

War in nature with animals is often about dominance, who gets to have control over this or or access over that. For animals and humans the two great drivers are a desire for food and the desire to reproduce to continue the species (pretty nifty that we are made to enjoy the very thing that keeps us around and not extinct).

Yet humans are more complex and have wars of dominance simply to decide who is on top.

Even at work we face this... new guy on the job does well and as all of a sudden is trying to show dominance to guys who have been there before him by trying to make them obey or follow his lead.

Me? I don't follow anyone unless it makes sense to me... and I don't care if they whine and get annoyed at me in the process of failing to dominate me.

I may not be on friendly terms with coworkers who would love to dominate me instead, but I am no one's lapdog nor doormat and if they have a problem with that so be it.

War is like that. On a macro scale.

Bring. It. On.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Spacescifi

[Just Jim]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

My multiverse is religious in nature rather than scientific.

A number of the worlds are controlled by fascist regimes.

Right there is all the reason you need.  
How many wars on Earth were started over ideology?

"Convert or die!!!"  

 

[Strawberry]

I think you can have a war over resources/territory and it still make sense in an interstellar setting. The more crowded space is, the cheaper interstellar travel is, and the lower technology your average civilization possesses, the easier it gets to provide such justification. The key thing is to provide some sort of relatively rare resource that every civilization heavily benefits by. This does not need to be heavily consistent with what would likely be the case in real life, it just needs to be consistent with the rest of the story.

For territory, you could have an active setting to where not all of the active players aren't to the level of technology to where they can't fully terraform planets, and semi habitable planets (ie has volatiles on it, and good gravity) are super valuable as you can toss one trillion people on them and have the economic output of such. This has a few implications, that being that lives are very valuable. This implies that AI is either not sufficient enough or not safe enough to replace all of labor. This also implies that living in space/on non habitable planets is more expensive then living on a hiveworld, this would mean that most of the people in space are either there for specific jobs that need to be done there, or are rich enough to afford it.

It's hard to imagine an interstellar civilization fighting over elements that support life, light elements are pretty common, and are relatively easy to generate with fusion in a worst case scenario. Not to mention, you'd likely lose more light elements just transporting the stuff interstellar. Heavy metals are really the only thing that makes sense here, as they're rare enough to where they could be worthwhile to transport, and with stars having different metallicity (plus some of those possessing especially lucrative metallic chthonian planets), some stars would be much better at mining heavy metals then others. This would very likely be more energy intensive then mining the trace amounts in whatever solar system you live in, so throughput would likely be the priority here. You'd need to have something that drives up the demand for these metals, be it exponentially expanding fleets of ships or a massive race to make matrioshka brains. I'd err against making every faction heavily expansionist, but having a few that are can definitely drive some conflict.

[kerbiloid]

We can upgrade the SETI equipment to send them messages.

Not those stupid childish pictures, of course, but serious literature.

Spoiler

Thus we'll explain them that capitalists exploit their proletarians, and this is very wrong,
Their proletarians will rise, defeat the exploiters, and join the Communist Union of the Multiverse.

[SunlitZelkova]

5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Let's look at this as a microcosm shall we?

At work there are people we tolerate only because we have to, and people we actually like.

War in nature with animals is often about dominance, who gets to have control over this or or access over that. For animals and humans the two great drivers are a desire for food and the desire to reproduce to continue the species (pretty nifty that we are made to enjoy the very thing that keeps us around and not extinct).

Yet humans are more complex and have wars of dominance simply to decide who is on top.

Even at work we face this... new guy on the job does well and as all of a sudden is trying to show dominance to guys who have been there before him by trying to make them obey or follow his lead.

Me? I don't follow anyone unless it makes sense to me... and I don't care if they whine and get annoyed at me in the process of failing to dominate me.

I may not be on friendly terms with coworkers who would love to dominate me instead, but I am no one's lapdog nor doormat and if they have a problem with that so be it.

War is like that. On a macro scale.

Bring. It. On.

The question is though, will the age of interstellar be like work, where you have to see people you don't like, or like a day off, where you can ignore or leave people you don't like?

4 hours ago, Just Jim said:

Right there is all the reason you need.  
How many wars on Earth were started over ideology?

"Convert or die!!!"  

 

Indeed. Not to be too grim, but another mindset that might overtake an authoritarian regime that has existed for a thousand years is one akin to germaphobia. Can't have those inferior peoples of other worlds stinking up existence, need to eliminate them for hygiene purposes.

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

We can upgrade the SETI equipment to send them messages.

Not those stupid childish pictures, of course, but serious literature.

  Reveal hidden contents

Thus we'll explain them that capitalists exploit their proletarians, and this is very wrong,
Their proletarians will rise, defeat the exploiters, and join the Communist Union of the Multiverse.

A couple of the worlds are ones where communism become the dominant ideology of the world. It's going to be wild writing how they interact with the ones where the capitalists won.

[KSK]

8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

This creates some questions about human behavior. Insofar as humans are social animals, would we rather interact with each other in a negative manner than go out separate ways for gain? I.e. does a human’s social nature make him seek out the rival tribe, even if it means war, rather than go to the mountains in peace?

Perhaps we just might not be able to help ourselves. Empty star systems are boring, take the occupied ones instead.

Personally, I would hope that space is big enough that if you really can't abide your neighbours for whatever ideological reason, you could simply move to an empty star system and never see them again. Sadly, I suspect this will not be the case in practice. Humans are cussed enough that the mere fact of knowing that there are people out there who don't agree with you will be justification to go out, bring them into line and convert them to the One True Ideology.

[Scotius]

One interesting idea I've read once was a herbivorous, gregarious prey species. They evolved to be dominant life form on their world... and in the process exterminated pretty much everything else in their biosphere, leaving only edible plants in heavily modified and controlled environment. See, other animal species and insects were seen as a potential threat or competitors, while plants had to go to make space for agriculture keeping their incredibly xenophobic civilization going.

And then they went to space.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, Just Jim said:

How many wars on Earth were started over ideology?

None.

The adepts of the book above call it "base and superstructure" (and it's the case when this is not wrong).
The "base" is economical and manufacturing basement of society, the "superstructure" is its ideological/religious/etc. wrapper.
One can't have an ideology/religion/etc. which is not supported by the available resource base. One can declare it, but it will get deformed and turn into something corresponding to the technological reality.
You can declare "for everything good, against everything bad", but if there is only one well in a desert, hardly sufficient even for your family, this will be an empty declaration.

A war is based on the economical  base, the ideological superstructure is a wrapper for it.

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

A couple of the worlds are ones where communism become the dominant ideology of the world. It's going to be wild writing how they interact with the ones where the capitalists won.

We'll SETI them, too, and their closest Union members will help them.

P.S.
The key principle is dividing into "we" and "not we".
"Are they enough we, to treat what they own as being already ours, and care about them as about ourselves?"

The ideological superstructure just provides the distinction criteria.

Edited July 1, 2023 by kerbiloid

[steve9728]

Sorry, I couldn't help but think of this lol

14 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

But would it make sense for a war to break out between universes? In other words, is a space war logical when interstellar travel is possible?

Why would anyone fight if they could just go some place else and get resources? Does it make sense to fight over planets?

Dark Forest Hypothesis

[Scotius]

Dark Forest is so incredibly USA-centric it makes my European heart clench with sadness. While I know crime is a thing and murderers are everywhere, I do not fear every stranger I pass on the street. Nor am I afraid to enter a bank, cafe or restaurant. I don't feel the need to carry a weapon with me either.

Projecting our human faults on entire Universe seems very excessive.

[Spacescifi]

10 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The question is though, will the age of interstellar be like work, where you have to see people you don't like, or like a day off, where you can ignore or leave people you don't like?

 

Well... I don't have to work.. I could live on the streets and eat out of garbage cans... but I don't want to.

I work because the benefits outweigh any conflicts or dumpster fires I have to deal with around abrasive personalities at work.

In the same way, the benefits of being connected to the greater galactic community must outweigh the unevitable conflicts that arise from simply being connected to a wide range of personalities and interests.

You see... the poor are at the mercy of the wealthy... that is why they beg so often.

The way I see it, life is made of the haves and the have nots, and it is always better to have than not.

Some aspire to work to have what they want legally, others want to take it by force.

 

[steve9728]

1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Dark Forest is so incredibly USA-centric it makes my European heart clench with sadness. While I know crime is a thing and murderers are everywhere, I do not fear every stranger I pass on the street. Nor am I afraid to enter a bank, cafe or restaurant. I don't feel the need to carry a weapon with me either.

Projecting our human faults on entire Universe seems very excessive.

"There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars into members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path."

Quoted from the afterword of the version of Liu Cixin's Three Bodies that was released in the US. Without discussing matters of morality and imagination, there is one thing I think that must be borne in mind: One should never intend to do harm to others, but should always guard against the harm others might do to him.

[wumpus]

On 6/30/2023 at 5:01 PM, Kerbart said:

I find it inconceivable that a civilization capable of interstellar travel cannot build Von Neumann machines. Infact, it's more likely a civilization bui,ds them before gaining the abiity to travel between stars. So, if you don't want your neighbors to strip-mine their corner of the galaxy and then start with yours, you work on exterminating them. I'm not saying you'd have to, or that it's ethical, but it is certainly a motivation.

One of my favorite games (largely thanks to working on outdated equipment I had lying around).  http://www.deltatao.com/ho/

A 4X game pruned to the very limit.  Just start with a planet with the understanding that "this here galaxy only has room for one player's people".  Alas it has been removed from Google play, limiting my access to it.

[DDE]

On 7/1/2023 at 8:14 PM, steve9728 said:

There’s a strange contradiction revealed by the naïveté and kindness demonstrated by humanity when faced with the universe: On Earth, humankind can step onto another continent, and without a thought, destroy the kindred civilizations found there through warfare and disease. But when they gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligence exists, they must be civilizations bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct.

And this serves as a good segue into my take on the topic, which is, as predicted:

On 7/1/2023 at 3:59 AM, Just Jim said:

Right there is all the reason you need.  
How many wars on Earth were started over ideology?

"Convert or die!!!"  

But it's not just any ideology. Specifically, the the ultimate cause for conflict would be the style of universalist (internationalist / globalist) ideologies that proclaim that they alone have the answer to all the mysteries of the universe. The kind that cannot mind their own business, that cannot tolerate something or someone beyond their control existing anywhere in the universe - let alone a different group.

And the reason they would start wars is exclusively because alternative starfaring societies exist. The existence of an alternative peer society undermines their entire premise. If more "primitive" cultures existed, there wouldn't be as much of a problem, heck, they would be useful to show what fate befalls any unbelievers, but it's rather hard to dismiss a starfaring rival as primitive - although they will try, of course. All their tech is stolen, their spies are everywhere, herpderpderp *cough* China *cough* Eventually this will all give way to declaring this rival the root of all evil, and launching a crusade.

The view critiqued by Liu Cixin is precisely the product of this universalist view. Sci-fi with heterogenous civilizations is often the result of a transplant of a historical era into a sci-fi setting, whereas people who work on an organic narrative of the space era tend to impose their understanding of the required levels of development - including economic, societal, and political - as a minimum requirement, thus locking out any alternative system. Id est an American writer can set out to worldbuild a Galactic Empire with a God-King and then strech some fluff to explain its evolution, but absent a set end goal, working from the bottom up, they are overwhelmingly likely to end up with a Space America or a Space European social democracy, depending on their preferred political animal, and it wouldn't even be an act of conscious soapboxing.

For a drastic example, consider the Fourth International (Posadist), a splinter Trotskyist group; they spell out in official doctrine that UFOs are spacecraft of alien communists that would help them conduct a global revolution - because only (their one true branch of) Communism can achieve interstellar flight. Soviet sci-fi operates under broadly similar assumptions - once you go beyond near-future stories with their German/Japanese/Angloamerican/global capitalist villains, you find planet-wide Earth governments with post-nation, quasi-post-scarcity societies with small and efficient democratic governments implying achievement of Communist Nirvana. Conflict comes from occasional internal renegades, from untamed natural threats, from primitive or hyperadvanced alien socities (often the aliens are human for no good reason), but never from a peer faction. At least, IIRC.

Edited July 10, 2023 by DDE

[kerbiloid]

UC! It works! Let's start broadcasting Das Kapital with SETI antennas, and the comrade E.T. will join us!

P.S.
There is always a good reason for the human-like aliens: teenager dreams about space chicks, because school girls are too stupid The Precursors.

The developed civilisation of mysterious Precursors was hijacking people from this rare habitable planet, and planting them everywhere where they can survive.
(Or they cannot, then we get the ruins of the old wise human-like civilisation, which is fine, too).

A interesting fact. The very term "precursors" perfectly matches this purpose in any sense of the term.

Edited July 11, 2023 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

UC! It works! Let's start broadcasting Das Kapital with SETI antennas, and the comrade E.T. will join us!

Today's Marxists are often quite recognizably Fourierists.

Quote

Do not sacrifice the good of the present to the good of the future; enjoy the moment, avoid any marriage or other union that does not satisfy your passions right now. Why should you work for the sake of the future good? After all, this good will surpass your innermost desires anyway, and in the combined system you face only one trouble: the inability to double the duration of your life in order to exhaust the huge circle of upcoming pleasures for you.

 

[darthgently]

Civilization is based on trust but verify.  Trust is earned among people as deeds match words and agreements are kept.  Trust typically erodes as power centralizes and agreements are unilaterally broken under the cover of "for good of the many" with the centralized power deciding what is "good" and who gets to be in the elite group designated "the many" no matter how few they are.  This failure mode exists in all "isms" but more in some than others (easily determined by the amount of unnecessary centralization).

Some centralized way to verify trust is necessary and justified:  a defended legal system for arbitration and adherence to the scientific method for examples.

Fourierism implies far too much centralization to avoid rampant corruption in my view

[DDE]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

Trust typically erodes as power centralizes and agreements are unilaterally broken under the cover of "for good of the many" with the centralized power deciding what is "good" and who gets to be in the elite group designated "the many" no matter how few they are.

We're starting to drift off-topic, but this concerned a holy cow of mine, so here goes.

Counterexample: many highly stratified societies made so much of vows and promises, in particular a gentleman's word.

So I think you're conflating two phenomena - stratification and (self-)dehumanization. You can have a stratified society with high levels of trust because everyone upholds an individual standard of behavior within their station, however alien it may be - the highest lord is still expected to honor their word to the lowest lice-ridden serf.  And you can have a flat (or, as often in these cases, ostensibly flat) society where the concept of an individual with a conscience is methodically suppressed, sometimes proudly so - a cog in the machine has no shame, no conscience, no interest in the outcome of their work or even the continuation of their family (if they are allowed to have a family, that is). For regimes sufficiently distant in time, both the empire of the Great Inca and the Jesuit quasi-state in Paraguay that consciously emulated it both found themselves struggling with productivity and, rather starkly for an agrarian society, plummeting birthrate.

I believe the above theory was inspired by the childish, immature, irresponsible, petty and spiteful conduct of many violent revolutionaries, and not just failed ones - they were pretty bad people, and were attracted to ideologies that excused them behaving like swine instead of people. At least one of the Medieval pseudo-Christian sects went further and claimed that its upper ranks had ascended to outright Godhood, explicitly more so than Jesus Christ himself, therefore by definition all of their actions were God's will - for some odd reason, God immediately willed them to flaunt this ascended status by committing acts considered by "the false Church and unenlightened masses" to be sinful and lewd.

[DDE]

So yeah, it's a slightly unconventional political compass.

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Counterexample: many highly stratified societies made so much of vows and promises, in particular a gentleman's word.

I hardly think this had as much to do with the high stratification as the framework of ethics involved where abusing truth was very much frowned upon and mutual respect, no matter station, was encouraged.  Also, centrally coerced order and civilization are not the necessarily same thing

Edited July 11, 2023 by darthgently