Shouldn’t be a problem for a doper.
I was told there would be no math…
in crocodile dundee voice
THATS NOT MATH
This is math
The premise of the story was that supposedly there was a (literally) incredibly easy way to do anti-gravity and FTL: bronze age species could do it; but just somehow humans never stumbled onto it, or if they did the knowledge was lost. Until they come to Earth, the conquistadores of the story are considered the terror of the galaxy because they actually have matchlock arquebuses.
Where humans quickly disabused them of that silly notion.
Of course until we broke the anti-grav / FTL code they could withdraw at will. And quarantine our system while they tried to advance their military arts from whatever of our gear they’d captured.
Which itself raises an interesting meta-question.
Humans are the apex predator on this planet. Damn good bet any intelligent species is the same on their home planet.
Humans are warlike and ambitious and will, time permitting, develop whatever interplanetary and interstellar transport is possible within real-world physics. Any intelligent ambitious aliens will likewise, time permitting, develop whatever interplanetary and interstellar transport is possible within real-world physics.
Which sets the stage for my question:
Are humans likely to be especially warlike and effective as combat forces, conquering all they survey, or will we get our asses handed to us by species who sheer attitudinal ferocity and skill at general fighting dwarfs our own?
Note this isn’t about tech level. Clearly a society like that in Star Wars would utterly dominate the Earth when it was at the Star Trek:Enterprise levels of tech & power. Even if we were at our most aggressive assholic-ness and they were all peace-loving space hippies. But that’s not my question.
This also isn’t about whether they’re 20 feet long, able to lift a couple tons or more and have huge claws and teeth to supplement their fighting tech. Or whether they’re the size of shrews. The bio-mechanics aren’t the point either.
We’re the baddest bad-asses on the Earth. How do we stack up in the galaxy? Why do you think that?
Absolutely now way to know.
I remember a book I read many years ago, called The High Crusade by Poul Anderson, when aliens landed in England in the Middle Ages and, not knowing anything much about warfare, were killed and their ship taken by English Knights preparing to go on Crusade. The last chapter was a lovely bit of irony, IIRC.
Press on.
This presupposes that evolution on the alien homeworld favors predation in its apex life forms. Any given world could have a scenario like the Minervans from Hogan’s Inherit the Stars trilogy, where predatory behavior came to an evolutionary dead end in the deep sea, and land-dwelling animal life was exclusively herbivorous. The apex life form there developed intelligence around avoiding accidental injuries, but could also develop around planning for long-term food supplies or other factors. Advantage versus humans: patient, long-term planning with the aim of crowding us out in preference to actual fighting.
Come to that, while we have also positioned ourselves at the apex of the predation chart, we’re omnivores. It’s possible that an alien world might feature a highly effective omnivorous scavenger as its most intelligent life form, and the one that eventually develops space flight. Advantage versus humans: sheer sneakiness, hit-and-run tactics, stealing resources and disabling matériel needed to fight back.
Now that I’m done fighting the hypothetical, I’ll address it: humans versus an apex predatory race, with your conditions that the alien predators have no overwhelming tech or biological advantages. I think this would be an odd conflict, characterized by probing attacks, followed by swift retreats and long periods of minimal activity. Predators really don’t like things that fight back, and as soon as they take substantial harm–which they’re pretty much guaranteed to do, given the conditions you set forth–I expect a strong GTFO response. Then you’d get them cautiously watching us and poking at us every now and then to see if we’re still dangerous. All-out war would be unlikely unless they were somehow pushed into a corner. If it did come to that, the outcome would likely depend on which side could maneuver the other into fighting on its terms, and the biggest advantage humans have isn’t ferocity, it’s adaptability. Consequently, I could see us repeatedly sucker-punching them when they think they finally have an advantage until they get sick of it and go home.
You’ve just described humans. Without all our fancy weapons, we’d just be scavangers.
Not precisely. While humans are certainly scavengers, the extent to which we evolved as obligate scavengers and how we went about scavenging are still up for debate. That is to say, our ancestors may have exploited scavenging, hunting, and foraging in parallel, and it’s hard to pinpoint how much they relied on each approach at any given phase of our history. Further, their scavenging likely featured confrontational scavenging, which entails driving predators away from kills in order to claim them–rather different from the sneaky, non-confrontational scavenger race I posited as an asymmetrical foe for humans.
Overall, however, point taken–if humans may be said to be “apex” anything, we’re apex opportunists.
@Balance: Great work. Thank you!
The part of war (or predation) any attacker (or defender) most hates is the uncertainty about enemy disposition and capabilities before battle is joined. So I agree after first contact there’s going to be maneuvering and hemming and hawing since each side knows literally nothing about the other’s capabilities, intentions, or ranges of behavior.
Imagine a polar bear and an African lion meeting in the Dakota badlands for the first time. Both are thinking: “I’m seriously fierce and usually kill whatever I encounter. That other weird critter is also obviously well-armed and therefore dangerous. What now?”
Eventually somebody will get the confidence that they know the enemy well enough to either attack in force or disengage for all they’re worth. Obviously for the species fighting on/near their home planet the disengage/retreat option is mostly foreclosed. Far better to show up unannounced in an alien star system than to have them do the same to you. If you’re badly overmatched then in one scenario you lose a ship or fleet and in the other you lose your planet. Ouch!
That in itself would be an interesting experiment. Do they naturally see the other as a threat? Or is there a lot of confused sniffing and poking?
If they’re both hungry, they both see the other as potential lunch. That was mostly where I was going. Or if a handy gazelle or seal is nearby there’ll be a competition between them to eat that much more defenseless lunch.
By and large predators, and especially apex- and near-apex predators, don’t do much inter-predator fighting. They’ll fight conspecifics for mating rights, and they’ll fight scavengers for access to kills, but after that the only reason to fight something is to eat it after you win.
What was more thought provoking as I set up the scenario was trying, a la Star Trek: TOS - Arena, to pick an environment equally unfamiliar and hostile to both. I don’t know that I particularly succeeded, but one of my other goals was to pick something immediately recognizable & evocative to our audience here. I think I got that part right.
Ok, I think we might do OK. Reason: I think there’s a maximum point where hostile, war like tendencies become a problem. That is, without an outside enemy, any warrior race (might? will?) turn on itself, just because of natural tendencies to see that every problem must be solved with combat. They are all apex hammers, and everything, including others of their own kind, are nails.
Perhaps humans are right at that line. We can and do turn on each other, but it isn’t the first reaction. Maybe we’re equal fighters to our hypothetical Klingons/Kzinti, but in their downtime they’re going to be fighting each other and we wouldn’t be.
Does either of them have a chainsaw?
This is where most interplanetary war scenarios run into trouble, IMHO. You have to posit that, for some reason, the only “lunch” available is down at the bottom of a deep well with sheer walls and angry piranhas in the water. That is to say, there’s not much available on planets that a spacefaring race couldn’t obtain with equal or greater ease without dealing with a gravity well and angry natives. I’m currently playing with two scenarios in which it could make practical sense.
One is a case in which an extremely rare phenomenon takes place on a specific planet that is key to leverage far beyond that planet; the two dominant interstellar powers each have control of one planet on which the phenomenon occurs, and a third party is trying to quietly seize control of a newly discovered third such planet (Earth, naturally) before the larger powers become aware of it. The trick, of course, is thinking of what such a phenomenon could be.
The other case is a conflict over spaceborne resources, with planetary conflict as somewhere between an afterthought and a last resort. Essentially, an “Old West in Space” milieu, with fights breaking out over mining claims in asteroid belts and planetary rings. “We need this to fix/resupply our ships!” versus “This is our system, and we need it to build habitats!”
I agree that gravity wells are an obstacle. For the toddler stage of spacefaring just around your own stellar system of origin, the populace and much of economic activity might well migrate outwards to the low-gravity small bodies and out to the shallower parts of the stellar gravity well too. But I will suggest that once a society masters economically useful interstellar travel I expect planetary-scale gravity wells (even of giant planets) to be about as much of an obstacle as Earth foothills are to freeways.
Unrelated to the above …
Assuming overall similar levels of tech, the competition could be much more about business. A lot like the competing colonies the Europeans established in the relatively primitive Americas, Africa, and Oceana in the 1400s - 1600s.
So maybe we’re playing the Spanish conquistadores out near Arcturus when we bump into the aliens hailing from Sirius who play the role of the Dutch or Portuguese explorers / conquerors. So we’re pitted against one another in a semi-equal fight for whatever / whoever is out there.
Perhaps less happily for us, consider this one:
Here we Earthers sit, still confined to our home stellar system playing the role of the e.g. Aztecs when folks from two competing commerce blocs show up, kinda like the Spanish, Portuguese, or Dutch colonizers. They both hate each other, and don’t much care about us except as they can exploit us. Or we end up playing the subcontinental Indians to the alien’s English East India Company.
They’re not so much here for our resources as they are for us as customers or as a place to build a factory.
Here’s a third also mostly unrelated thought:
Yes, the galaxy is huge and contains a virtual infinitude of resources. Which devalues any one stellar system; just one more grain of sand on the big beach.
But so much of the galaxy is empty and everything is so far apart that if someone does stumble on a system, or is hopscotching their way from one to the next nearby, they’re hardly going to pass it by unexploited. In an analogy, when gas stations are on every street corner you patronize few of them on a long drive. But if they’re 250 miles apart, you stop and fill up at every single one of them. The galaxy is much more the latter case. Anybody nearby is going to stop in if they have any interest in whatever might be found there. And if they have no interest, why are they expending resources wandering around the galaxy in the first place?
Would you settle for a rudimentary lathe?
I think the tangent that lead us here revolved around interstellar-capable civilizations with tech that was otherwise equal to or even behind Earth’s in other regards. I don’t think we can broadly assume that large-scale interstellar travel means that gravity wells are negligible. You only have to beat your own homeworld’s gravity well enough to establish an industrial base in space, then you can just go around them.
Now, in any given scenario, the starfaring civilization might be able to ignore the gravity wells themselves–if they stumbled across easy gravity manipulation early in their tech tree, for instance–but you still have the consideration that one particular well has piranhas in it, and others nearby that have the same resources do not. If you want, say, water, then Earth has a lot of it…but Ceres likely has more, and it has no prickly, unpredictable savages using it.
In my opinion, it still comes back to some variation on either “there’s a unique/super-rare resource on that planet” or “one side is specifically looking for a fight for their own cultural reasons.”