Taking Space Wars Seriously

February 2024

It’s often unclear how much to be concerned about something. And if that thing hasn’t happened yet, it’s often unclear when to start. Space wars looks like one of these things.

It’s 1903 and you’re watching the Wright Brothers’ first flight. The machine accelerates down the runway, its wheels clear the ground, and you marvel at this new paradigm in our technological evolution. Then someone nearby cautions you: these flying machines are primed to change the nature of warfare – from surveilling the battlefield, to dogfighting, to bombing campaigns. You might dismiss this pessimist, but that’d be naive. Because just over ten years later this was all reality. And now, humanity is gearing-up to fight in space.

How concerned we should be about full-blown space wars is an open question. I think part of the challenge is that the idea itself can seem fundamentally difficult to fathom.¹ At least three reasons come to mind. 

One is short-termism. We have a tendency to focus on shorter-term time horizons and neglect the longer-term ones. This isn't too surprising. Life is short and election cycles even shorter. When we say we can't imagine a certain thing happening, we often mean we can't imagine it happening in a time horizon that's relevant to our own lives. Or, at a stretch, to the lives of the next generation. This also applies to space wars.

When someone expresses disbelief that space wars justify serious concern, the response should start by asking what timeframe they're working from. We can all agree it's probably not something that’s going to happen in the next ten years. But in the next one hundred years? That timeline starts to paint a different picture. Given the rapid pace of technological development (including space-based), humankind's propensity for conflict, and the strategic advantages in space dominance, space wars might happen a lot sooner than that.

The second reason why the idea of space wars is difficult to fathom is lack of imagination. We marvel at our expansion into outer space and the Earthly benefits this brings. But we can't quite make the leap to space wars. While the power of imagination is what gave birth to the panoply of science fictions set in outer space, a corresponding lack of imagination is what keeps us from considering how fiction might become reality. We also tend to forget that science fictions, especially the good ones, often draw upon past and present reality as a basis for imagining the future. 

Lack of imagination also partly drives the third reason. Even if we can imagine the idea of space wars taking place in principle, we still think it’s just so unlikely. This is an issue for two reasons. 

First, there’s little basis for this belief. Quite the opposite. Every domain of human activity has become a domain of conflict. Riding horseback was central to land warfare for generations; waterborne transportation enabled naval warfare; the Wright Brothers’ flying machine enabled the modern airforce; the internet gave us cyberwarfare; and talking about the militarisation and weaponisation of space is essentially old news. 

Second, dwelling on the supposed unlikeliness of space wars confuses likelihood with risk. Thinking in terms of risk is crucial when thinking about future challenges. We don’t know what the future holds. But we can use our experience, expertise, and (yes) imagination to come up with some plausible things it might hold. This is why risk is a product of likelihood multiplied by impact. We need to consider the likelihood that something might happen as a separate variable from its impact if it does happen. Risk is the thing we really want to focus on, not just likelihood and not just impact. Believing an outcome to be unlikely isn’t a reason to discount it – it’s just an inherent part of risk management. Especially if the impact of that risk, were it to actually occur, could be massive. Like a war in space, perhaps.

Short-termism, lack of imagination, and an unfounded belief in unlikeliness – three reasons why the idea of wars in space can seem difficult to fathom. What can we do to address these?

To start, one antidote to a short-term perspective is to adopt a long-term one. 

It seems obvious that the problems of today should, all else being equal, get more attention than the problems of tomorrow. Problems that will manifest sooner should typically be tackled before those that will manifest later. That said, a problem that appears closer to the present isn’t necessarily more important than one that appears to be further away. Some problems that will manifest down the line might need to be tackled before those that will manifest sooner, because of how quickly the window of opportunity for influencing them might close. If we care about protecting the future, then a long-term perspective is a useful orientating principle.

One way to resolve an unwarranted belief in the unlikeliness of space wars is simple: look at the history of conflict and what drives wars. As stressed above, every domain of human activity has become a domain of human conflict. Unless something fundamental about the human social experience changes, there’s little reason to believe that wars in space won’t happen. 

Then there’s the problem of lack of imagination. There are many tools and techniques to cultivate creative thinking in imagining the future, and there’s little reason why most (if not all) couldn’t be applied here. One of these techniques can illustrate the point.

The intelligence community does something called backcasting. This helps bypass our “surely it couldn’t happen” mindset and forces us to assume the future has already happened. From that starting point, we then work backwards to unpack its causes. To put it another way, we generate some possible futures (imagination is still required) and identify the prior conditions that would have needed to be true in order for each future to manifest. Then, we can try to determine the critical junctures at which each future would have become dramatically more or less likely. This can give us some sense of what we could do to nudge the world closer to the future(s) we want and away from the ones we don't. 

Try it for yourself. Imagine you’re an historian in 2070, and you're writing an historical account of the recent large-scale war in outer space. What events and developments in the decades and years prior to the war would you be writing about? What primary and secondary drivers would you be analysing? Who would be the main players in this account, and who the supporting cast? Was there a gradual confluence of things that led inexorably to the outbreak of war, or was there a sudden flashpoint that acted as the catalyst? Or was it some combination? A similar exercise can be run for the “no war” future. What factors prevented the outbreak of war in space? Who were the key players preserving the peace? And so on.

This approach has the benefit of acting as a mechanism for integrating long-term concerns within a prevailing short-term orientation. Because although the futures we're trying to achieve or avoid might be beyond our own lifetimes, the critical junctures for influencing them might be squarely within. This matters a lot if you want to nudge things in the right direction to build a good future. 

The broader issue here is one that permeates human life in general – knowing when it’ll be the right time to take the right actions to shape the future favourably. Central to this is determining the critical junctures after which the ability to influence the future plummets. 

There probably isn’t an abundance of time left before we need to start taking the prospect of all-out space wars seriously. If we want to chart a course towards a stable future in outer space, this’ll have to involve appraising the full range of levers at our disposal and the milestones we’ll need to move through. And that’s a topic for another essay.

Notes

[1] It’s a similar situation with AI. We struggle to make the leap from using Large Language Models (LLMs) to imagining the potential for human subservience to artificial super-intelligence.