Many science fiction books and films deal with interstellar wars, often between different alien species. Wars on earth are primarily predicated on the acquisition of resources, land grabs, mineral wealth etc. If the human race got to the point where it could comfortably and efficiently project its population and power into neighbouring star systems (and further afield) and encountered an alien race of similar technological development I am curious what would be a likely reason for combat. Pure xenophobia perhaps, cultural misunderstandings maybe, but a land grab doesn’t really make much sense to me in the vastness of the galaxy. What do you think?
The most likely reason to me seems to be xenophobia, paranoia; fear and hatred of some kind. I’d expect wars driven by that to be of the “sweep in and nuke the habitats” variety.
A highly expansionistic culture might want a system’s resources; but not to steal and ship back home, that’s much too expensive. I’d expect such a culture to do something like send some self replicating machines to consume and rebuild the system into whatever they like. Or, if they are ideologically/religiously driven for the machines to convert a bunch of asteroids into a robot war fleet and robot army, then conquer the local planet and announce that the locals are now part of the Holy Z’Grul Empire and will now follow the One True Way.
The scenario from the book Footfall makes some sense; they aliens were fleeing their bioweapon-contaminated planet looking for a new one.
The common factor is, given the difficulty and extreme expense of shipping anything between stars, a war would have to have motivations that don’t involve that. And it would most likely be very one sided; an advanced culture against a far more primitive one, since that same expense means the defender is going to have a huge advantage.
You could dream up almost any reason at all. Most common I think would be xeonphobia and competition for the same resource.
Some more fun ideas are:
The Prime (from Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton): The species is not so much xeonphobic as it just will not tolerate anything except itself to co-exist (including other members of its own species). Essentially a genetically paranoid creature that views everything else as a potential threat to be eliminated.
The Borg (of Star Trek fame): They simply exist to consume and expand. No hatred or anything. Just the ultimate consumer species.
The Far Side Version (The Far Side cartoon): Cannot find it online but the cartoon is something like “Norbert inadvertently dooms the earth to destruction”. The picture is of some aliens with heads that look like human hands being shaken by the doofus Norbert as he greets them.
Intergalactic bypass?
Oooh! Yeah!
Can’t believe I forgot that one! :smack:
I presume that the OP was asking about realistic reasons.
Reasons ? How about “they’re sitting on some prime real estate” ? That’s just a colony waiting to happen.
Hell, knowning mankind, “They exist” would be more than sufficient.
A novel one (at least, one I haven’t seen often in fiction) would be : they don’t believe in God. Astral Crusade, baby !
Pretty much the same things that lead to war on Earth?
Competition for real estate.
Religon
Xenophobia
If the people at war can “nuke it from orbit” home come they never do and send in landing troops.
My point is that if you get to the level of technology where you can travel out into other star systems “easily” then real estate is no longer much of an issue. We would be sufficiently advanced to find nice real estate anywhere we wanted, and also to change environments in places to suit our needs.
Maybe.
See the Fermi Paradox.
Depending on your assumptions even a “slow” colonization of space (via sublight ships slow boating all over) it is estimated to take 5-50 million years to colonize the Milky Way Galaxy…all of it. Sounds like a lot but on a cosmological timescale not much at all.
Presumably, then, we’d be bumping into others at some point as real estate becomes scarce.
Unless FTL ships can be developed it is hard to see colonizing other galaxies from ours but even if you can you run into the same problem again.
You assume that if we can get to any habitable planets we can get to all of them.
What would cause wars would depend a lot on how extra stellar travel works, how rare usable planets are, and if there are other rare resources out there.
Assume that an FTL drive is invented. What if in the first 500 years of extra stellar travel we only reach about 30 planets that we can colonize and all of them are starting to get crowded. We push out in the most likely direction to find more habitable planets and we meet another race in the same situation pushing out in our direction.
Things would be worse without FTL. If you commit a generation ship to colonizing a planet, you can’t just turn around and go home or move on to the next most likely candidate. If an alien race is already there (either native or colony) when you arrive, what do you do? What if they refuse to share resources and your ship is failing so your only choices are fight or die?
Jonathan
Not necessarily. There might be quite a lot of stars out there, and quite a number of rocks orbiting them (this understatement brought to you by the United Kingdom’s Cultural Association).
But how many of those are Earth-like ? How many of those that are Earth-like are within range of our starships ? And if all those Earth-like planets are already housing alien crowds, what’s the cost of colonizing X podunk uninhabitable planets as pit stops so that our starships can reach the nearest uninhabited Earth-like planet ? How does that cost compare with that of a war of annihilation against the aliens ? Even if we do have the tech for in-depth terraforming (which is much more advanced than mere space traval), how much faster and how expensive would it be, as opposed to seizing an already neat planet ?
4X space video games (Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations…) tend to answer all these questions with : raid the fuckers. Quick, before they have enough of a tech advantage to raid you.
Space might be infinite in potentia, but resources will always be finite in actu.
They’re sitting on the unobtanium! DUH!
Either we’re gonna wanna screw their women or they’re gonna wanna screw our women. It’s rarely both.
If I only get to pick one bet, my money is on cultural misunderstanding, such as the gun ports open/gun ports closed thing that caused the Earth-Minbari War in Babylon 5.
Actually it was the “Zathrus for president” bummer sticker that started it all.
“OG hates you, Infidel Humans! You have one eye too many. Or 3 too few, our Holy Book of Fish is not too clear on thaty point. However…DIIEEEEEE!”
Until you’ve established the rules for interstallar travel, you can’t rule this out. Maybe for some reason their tesseract will only drop them at certain stars at a certain distance from the sun. At that point, clearing out that bit of rubble that keeps getting in the way might be worth the effort.
(Though obviously if they have the capability to correct that problem, the “war” is likely to be pretty short.)
Of course, it could happen because of a canceled TV show.