From ARS Technica, we are presented of what the future of war in space will be. Link. Okay, what the actual fuck?
Yeah, we get it, the United States of America, and Russia, India, Pakistan, France, China and some others are apparently preparing to go to war in space. What’s the point of going to war in space? It’s hard enough to go to war on the land and the ocean and under the ocean, and in a dark basement somewhere in Frankfurt trying to hack into Lisa Cutter’s website just because you’ve been in Germany for most of your life, working for those goddamn slave drivers at the hacker’s organization that employs you, and woman, it would just be really nice to just just ride your board for a while at Steamboat, chill with a Haitian Sunrise, talk about the later works of Franz Kafka, maybe make a few bucks a week pulling weeds around town in the summer, maybe picking up a little hacking work on the side.
The point is, it’s hard enough going to war anywhere where a war needs to supposedly happen since they are inhabited by people who don’t own credit cards. But in space? Man, what’s the point of that? Yeah, I’ve no doubt there is some square-jawed asshole warning someone somewhere about the directed microwave-enshrouded beta particle beams from space that are going to penetrate the tinfoil on his skull and bake his brains like a can of hobo beans. But as a general rule, there are about 7 billion people on the surface of the earth, that could sufficiently manage the ten million of so psychopathic assholes who seek to enslave us because oppression for some reason makes them feel like they’re coming into a jar of marshmallow fluff. Fair enough, we do tend to let them do it quite often in the short recorded history of our planet. (I read that after the Haitian revolution, the leader outlawed the use of whips on the former slaves, so the bosses switched to some kind of locally-grown whip, made of organically-grown material rather than leather. Zouk la ce sel médicament nou ni!) But things are changing to a degree, over the last couple hundred years we seem to have reached some evolutionary epoch where us humans can process both emotions and logic at the same time, and recognize that just because we don’t necessarily lose sleep over a hundred thousand millionaires who unfortunately died at the too-young age of 98, we can be bothered rather intensely by a Haitian child who dreams of being a professional baseball players someday, and will statistically end up in fact dying of diarrhea if he gets it once too often. We have become better humans to a degree. And it’s not because of social media, or computers, or electric cars, or a package delivery service that rhymes with Mamazon who is unwittingly trying to privatize the people-owned United States Postal Service. The assholes don’t get to claim credit for this change, they were part of the problem, who somehow managed not to get in our way long enough to get this shit done, son. It’s just because time marches forward, as times tends to do, and cultures mature just as people mature. Cultures die as people die, and we just happen to be alive at a moment when the short history of human culture has coincided with a reasonably banal time in the Short History of Temporary Explosions. We happen to be alive at a time when the slaves revolted again, and by some weird fluke, we managed to hold the shit together without letting too many of the ten-million assholes out of their cages to victimize us.
(Odd the irony of that “cage” isn’t it? When a violent criminal who is poor is captured by us, we lock them in a metal box, and subject them to search for humanity in the confines of that hell. When a violent criminal who is wealthy is captured by us, we lock them in a computer, and subject them to search for their own kind in the confines of that heaven. It’s tempting to conclude that the wealthy ones have it better, they certainly are more likely to live to the too-young age of 98 when the unstoppable juggernaut of the disease-du-jour finally finds a way to put them into the box. But it’s a nonsensical discussion. We put them in a box of comfort because their power allows them that comfort. We put the powerless into a box of discomfort because we aren’t really as evolved as we would like to think ourselves.)
Time marches forward, we’re gradually fixing what is fucked up, we’re actually making progress in trying to keep that baseball-dreaming kid in Haiti from dying of diarrhea, so that he can grow up to most likely be some working asshole like the rest of us, but actually pretty fucking happy with a few bucks in his pocket, his kids in school, and his wife able to turn a spigot in the kitchen to get water for the new baby rather than have to walk two miles with it from the only certified safe well-draw, like his mom had to do it to keep him from dying of diarrhea when he was a kid and used to dream of playing shortstop for Miguel Sano and the Twins. Life doesn’t really need to be complicated or wonderful to be okay. Sometimes the bill collectors can be after your ass, the tooth your were trying to save could have just been knocked out of your skull by falling off the ladder while trying to clear The Widow Anderson’s rain gutters, and without even a buck in your pocket to afford a beer, you have half of cigarette left that you found outside the Albertsons, and if you break off the filter, you should be able to smoke it without worrying about catching Hepatitis from whomever had it before you … and yeah, life is still pretty damned beautiful. Life is still worth living, even when they’re trying to explode your brain with that directed microwave-shrouded beta-particle beam from space.
Eventually, the few remaining uncaged psychopaths will get the message that we’re done with war, for the most part. We’re dealing with too much shit in our heads to want to kill anyone. So once we finish up the remaining wars on the surface, and then figure out a way to get all the children with nice fat bellies, and keep them alive long enough for them to realize that real life is even better than daydreams and Hollywood, then why in the actual fuck would we want to start waging war in friggen space?
There’s an unlimited supply of it, and the planets that are down there are generally far more inhospitable to us than the actual space. Assuming we can gather enough energy from above the ground-state to convert Bosons to Fermions, we won’t really need the course matter of asteroids and rocks. The true currency of the universe is energy, not mass. Mass is an odd, temporary state of energy, gradually decaying from Fermions back to Bosons as the critical radius decreases sufficiently that the intermolecular forces no longer dominate, and the interatomic decay both above and below the mass defect can predominate. And if we can’t reduce the entropy of Bosonic systems, then there is no point in even going into space, because there is nothing for us there, and we’ll never be able to go anywhere anyway, nor would we particularly want to go anywhere. So if in a few hundred years, we still haven’t found a way to affordably reduce the entropy of Boson clusters in a motor at least as efficient as a Fuji 488, 2-stroke, 2-cylinder, 2-carb, valve-free engine, then okay, let’s just give up, let the criminals and psychopaths destroy our lives here, because what’s the point then anyway, if we’re all stock on this rock like a prison. But assuming we can do what seems obvious, we should just do that, and then Space Force 7 can field our line of family-fun space boats, and hell, we might even allow political pundits to consume Uncle Donnie’s Natural Bar Snacks while onboard.
Time moves forward, and we’re likely just less fucked up as a collection of people just because we hit the temporal lottery, and we happen to be fortunate enough to live in an era where a boot doesn’t smash our face every morning at 5:34 A.M sharp.
We’re not going to go to war in space, sir. Sorry, we’re going to chill in space, and we’re going to listen to Barry White and drink some excellent cocktails, and we’re going to get laid sometimes, with great effort, but we’re going to get laid nonetheless.