The Discovery Enterprise: The High Road to the Moon

There will almost certainly be organized violence, and threat of
violence. But it's not clear to me what sort of institutions there
will be, how closely analogous the violence and threat will be to war
as we have known it. Or will it be more like cold war, or something
as novel to us as the Cold War was to the world when it began?

It depends partly on the technology. Will habitats be vulnerable to
beam weapons, for example? From how far away?

Then there's the question of what there will be to fight over, at
what times. My guess is that interstellar war will never be
feasible. While resources are abundant, they won't be worth fighting
over. If large groups of people can just take their fusion-powered
habitats and head into interstellar space as generation ships with
the ability to live well until their descendants reach a new solar
system, that may take a lot of pressure off of cultural conflicts.

Of course, exponential growth can reach any resource constraint
fairly soon in historical terms. Even if you start a sphere
expanding at the speed of light now, and allow population to expand
exponentially with no other constraint than that people have a
density of about one gram per cubic centimeter and an average mass of
at least fifty kilograms, it's only a historical length of time until
the sphere of total human volume exceeds the speed-of-light sphere.
(A couple thousand years, if I remember right, depending obviously on
the rate of growth.)

--- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Joe Strout wrote:
>
> On Mar 29, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Alex Michael Bonnici wrote:
> > All this has got me thinking. No matter how much we want to see
the
> > peaceful use of space there will always be military utilization.
> >
> We can certainly hope so. Anywhere humans live or reap economic
> value, there is military utilization. Conversely, the only way
space
> would remain forever "peaceful" is if it never becomes a home for
> humanity.
>
> I consider myself a pacifist, but let's be realistic -- someday
the