In Robert Heinlein's Future History, technological advances, including interplanetary travel, are followed by a theocratic dictatorship.
In Poul Anderson's Satan's World, an alien called Gahood commands a heavily armed robotic space fleet yet flies into rages and throws tantrums.
It is to be hoped that any technologically advanced civilization will either have destroyed itself very early or will have resolved any internal causes of conflict and aggression.
4 comments:
Exceedingly unlikely, if they have politics at all. Some species might not, of course.
Gahood's species didn't create the technology they used, of course. They're the result of a mutation that spread in the aftermath of a cataclysmic disaster and proved more suitable to a world with greatly reduced resources.
THE WAR IN THE AIR is prescient, but like many early analysis of air warfare proved a bit unduly pessimistic. Wells underestimated (like Douhet and other professionals) the difficulty of -hitting- things from the air, and the resilience of both human beings and their societies.
But there is a breaking point.
WWII achieved it, both with conventional and nuclear weapons; the Tokyo firestorm raids and Hiroshima both killed around 100,000 people in a single night, by using techniques (firestorm-inducing incendiaries, fission bombs) that overcame the accuracy problem by using weapons that were area-destructive and didn't need to be precise.
More recently, weapons that can hit within a few feet of a known target even if launched from great altitude and high speed have been developed.
The BLACK CHAMBER alt-histories make Wells more prescient by the earlier development of a weapon (nerve gas) that can achieve nuclear levels of lethality without requiring huge tonnages (as the firestorm raids did).
That way, you can get near-nuclear results with 1920's levels of aircraft.
It could have happened.
It might have happened early in WWII; during the Blitz on London in 1940-41, the Germans had nerve gas available in quantity and nobody else did... but the Germans didn't know that. They thought the other Great Powers had it, and so didn't use it.
The tonnages they did manage to land on London, if switched from high explosives to Sarin, would have killed hundreds of thousands -- thus bearing out the pessimistic predictions common in the 1930's and probably knocking Britain out of the war.
Technological progress just makes us better at doing the things we've always done; procure food, prevent diseases, kill our enemies.
Technology changes, and so changes the limiting range of human actions, but it doesn't change -humans-.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for comments longer than the post.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Ditot, what you said about Stirling's comments here. And, as so often, his objections to your comments matches mine, and in ways more precise and detailed than I wold have achieved.
If other intelligent races exist, friendly or not, then they too will very likely have their own politics and destructive wars. It's simply the way to bet.
Ad astra! Sean
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