Space Warfare Seems Mostly Defense Dominant
The dynamics of intergalactic warfare between advanced civilizations appear to favor defense over offense. An attacker would require significantly more resources to destroy a well-prepared defender, making large-scale wars seem irrational. However, ideological motivations or targeting inexperienced civilizations could still provoke conflict despite the high costs involved.
- ▪Intergalactic wars are likely to last millions to billions of years and be ruinously expensive for both sides.
- ▪An attacker would need to expend far more resources to destroy a defender than the defender would need to protect itself.
- ▪Wars could be driven by irrational motivations or the perception of vulnerability in younger civilizations.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Epistemic status: I’ve done some thinking and research on this but I am not a physicist and I can easily be wrong about specific things. Sometimes when thinking about the long term future, it is interesting to think about the offense-defense dynamics of a fully colonized ‘mature’ universe. E.g. suppose we succeed at aligning AIs and colonize a large section of the universe but there are some unfriendly aliens who have colonized the rest, or alternatively that we have colonized our galaxy with aligned AIs but there’s a bunch of rogue AIs running around in the other galaxies, how worried should we be? More generally, in the longer term evolution of the universe there is going to be a long period after colonization, but before all other galaxies become unreachable due to cosmic expansion,…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Beren.
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