Can We Imagine Wars in Space?

The first depiction of space warfare I remember was from Star Wars.

For most people, reality is now grounded in what they learn from fiction.

It’s pretty sweet that we’ve achieved enough material wealth to allow us to survive for this.

Before mass media, it’s true that you would have learned much of life from what elders said in their stories. Those stories tended to be grounded. Everyday experiences of their survival. The movements of rivers, stars, clouds, etc.

So when someone thinks ‘space warfare’, they probably go to scifi movies.

As any nerd might tell you, the space warfare in Star Wars is grounded in images from World War I.

Look at the distances.

The ranges. How X-wings move like aircraft. As if there is an atmosphere above the death star.

So what can even say about space warfare?

I could argue that it’s already happened. The global positioning system runs on satellites, after all. Though you might say that’s just orbital.

And it’s used as a tool terrestrially.

The point of GPS is to navigate on a planet.

What does that have to do with space? Why would we even care? We can say it’s about information.

Violence compresses our perception of time.

So it’s easier to predict something by how it is expressed in war. It’s easier to learn from war than it is from peace. Which is why most of our innovations have been born of war.

Life fights to live.

In a previous post about seeds, we talked about Robin Hanson’s prediction of a Rapacious, Hard-Scrapple Frontier.

We know that life competes to spread.

And it spreads to compete.

Energy that is used for life is scarce.

So we’ll fight to claim pieces of it as we spread. This will put demands on the cultures that have to do that work. The environment constrains subsistence.

Subsistence constrains culture.

Ibn Khaldun said the savages of the desert had a culture that the settled peoples could not compete with, except by educating their children.

Making them soft with literacy.

Britain was a sea power. Sparta was a land power. The Afghans, Pathans, and Dagestanis were all noted for mountain power. The many nomad empires relied on steppe power.

The United States of America rose with air power.

So what might space powers look like?

Movies may not have a viable answer, but a video game does. Zane Mankowksi scrubbed his brain looking for answers, and he came up with a simulator to help him out.

Using physics models based on theoretically possible hardware, he gave us Children of a Dead Earth.

We can now say some things about space warfare.

• Space is big.

• Thermal signatures are almost impossible to hide.

• Moving toward and away from the gravitational pulls of various bodies will play a big part in maneuver.

• It’s all about Delta-v. How much mass it takes for a spacecraft to change its velocity.

• Explosions are weak without atmosphere.

He extrapolates that stealth will be negligible, and spacecraft built for fighting will need to have pilots (whether AI or human) due to the lag in remote controls.

There are parallels here, from both the age of sail and steppe nomads.

Running out your enemy’s ability to maneuver.

Hell, even 20th century air combat involved this tactic. Any combat sport would quickly have this as a meta if there were no time limits and rounds. It’s also what the Vietnamese used against the United States.

So what can we say about the kind of culture that will be necessary to excel in space warfare?

It will have to make precision and patience prestigious.

It will prize prioritization and tradeoffs. Aggressive creation and capitalization of opportunity.

And a relentless view of the long-term. Thinking in centuries, rather than weeks.

Without the distances of space, we might expect a return to raiding culture. The primacy of Delta-V, after all, looks like the primacy of horses on the steppe or wind at sea in the time of sail. And those

But the lack of stealth and vast distances encourage a wider scale.

Which doesn’t mean that there won’t be any deception.

In Muay Thai, for example, deception is often deception about time. You know what his strong kick is. You know exactly what the shape of it is. And you know it’s coming.

But do you know when?