What are the chances of a third world war? [pdf]

In the desert, a cup of water is a treasure. In space, even rocks are very useful as radiation shielding.

And I'll say it again, it sounds like you're engaging in this ridiculous fantasy not because you genuinely think the moon is a treasure chest

Lots of people have studied and thought about this. In relation to the environment, it is a treasure chest. It has the right materials to build the bulk of solar power satellites, much more economically than importing those materials from Earth. Again, with enough energy, even dumb rocks become ore. There is a lot more energy available in space.

You know how you get dumb wars? That's how you get dumb wars.

Here's a challenge: Name a dumb war that wasn't at least peripherally about the control of resources, especially energy. The recent ones have been at least peripherally about oil.

This will be hundreds, if not thousands of years from now.

I don't think there will be no resources of value on the moon, but I'm not an expert in the field, so I won't die on that hill. Sadly, even if there was nothing of value there aside from the land itself, we'd probably still fight over it.

Even just as a source of materials in a much smaller gravity well it could be instrumental to future human space industry and exploration.

By the time we have large scale industry on the moon, is this going to be the case? Probably not. Also, not all lunar resources are distributed evenly.

Maybe you're right, which would actually be a very good thing for the human race.

But given enough time, would it not be likely? The present lack of people there has no predictive value about the far future.

Now, work out the economics of using Earth rocks to build power satellites. Compare that to the economics of using material from the Moon. The difference is orders of magnitude. Will that take a lot of energy? Yes, but there too, the difference is orders of magnitude.

You're making a key mistake here. You're using terrestrial standards to judge something which can grow exponentially to many times what's possible to do on Earth. If the planners of major powers recognize this exponential expansion in an early phase, wars can be fought over who gets to plant the seeds and harvest the result.

The military power embodied in the kind of energy harvesting we're talking about here, greatly dwarfs the same possible on Earth. If the great powers realize this, they will fight over it, with more ferocity than they do over access to the oceans.

The Nazis wanted the fertile lands in Eastern Europe and Russia for their own supposedly superior people. In fact, one of their most popular slogans was about "Lebensraum im Osten"("space to live in the East"), which, now that I think about it, has a similarity in sound to the slogan of "Manifest Destiny" in the US.

The first step of the "Lebensraum im Osten" plan was to invade Poland. Hitler split it with the Soviets in order to keep the Eastern border calm, since he needed all his forces on the Western front, to handle the backlash by the UK and France over the invasion of Poland. His original plan was to take on the Soviet Union only after having won the war on the Western front.

However, he backtracked on that strategy and invaded the Soviets in 1942 because the war in the West took longer than expected. Several key campaigns on the Eastern front, including the infamous Battle for Stalingrad, were specifically about securing resources like steel and oil (and, conversely, cutting off the Soviets from those supplies).

Disclaimer: I'm not a historian. All this is going off of what I would consider common knowledge as a German.

The biggest wars the US fought are WWII, WWI, and the Civ

In other threads, I've been decrying the degradation in History education in the US and across the western world. It's gotten so that the current generations in the work force only have a "Flintstones" understanding of how the current world got to where it is now, and what lessons can be learned from history.