Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by proc0 | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting thoughts but I feel it is the wrong level of analysis. Maybe we will reach some sci-fi utopia but personally I see war as a kind of law of nature.

Think about a petri dish and how bacteria grow on it until they saturate the entire surface area and then the resources run out, unless half of the bacteria destroy the other half, and then they can survive longer. War is the result of humans fighting over the metaphorical petri dish of land, resources, and also power. From this high level perspective, humans go through periods of growth, tension, war, and then the winner gets to continue surviving, only to repeat the cycle eventually.

Unless we discover infinite energy and resources somehow, we are going to be forced to clash in this way, and the ultimate way to resolve these conflicts is war. That said, we can have long periods without it because we discover new technologies that alleviate these tensions for some time, but I think a great war will be inevitable, the question is how long will our current peace streak last?

> War is the result of humans fighting over the metaphorical petri dish of land, resources, and also power.

People do all of that in modern economies without resorting to physically eliminating each other.

To get millions of individuals to coordinate over long times, mobilizing massive resources etc. in order to exterminate other millions (to grab their resources, subjugated them or whatever) is not "natural" or biological in any sense.

War is a cultural adaptation that worked for aeons because it did not threaten the survival of the species. In a technologically advanced civilization this is no longer assured. Vannevar Bush was simply a century or so ahead of his time. In the arc of human history this is just a blip.

I think it's more about our resource growth outpacing our resource demand, because if that happens we bypass the resource competition that drives most conflict.

This has a lot of pathways, tech efficiency, slower population growth, more resource acquisition (asteroid mining etc). It's definitely possible in the large scope, but I suspect there will be periods of spiking demand that still cause lots of short term conflicts.

Famines and mass migration are very likely with climate change going the way it is. Over the course of 100 years I suspect the resource problem will alleviate but until then there will be a lot of conflict.

The only real long term trick is creating larger and larger gulfs between the resource demand and availability, buffers that can withstand the smaller scale changes. But, unfortunately, our current dominant systems of power view buffers like that as either weakness or opportunity that are antithetical to progress.

Came here to say the same. We've evolved on a finite planet, so war is in our DNA.

But... Game theory says we'll be ok in the end.

https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM

>war is in our DNA.

That's very promising since some of the most undesirable characteristics can be bred out within a few generations. Actually that might have been what happened to some isolated cultures (even if nomadic) where they had nothing to fight over for thousands of years.

While other isolated or marching cultures bred out any non-violent tendencies in the opposite way themselves.

Maybe not so promising after all.

See my reply to my comment - I kind of feel a bit more optimistic, as I finally watched the Veritasium video I've tucked away in my Watch Later the past few weeks.

> That's very promising since some of the most undesirable characteristics can be bred out within a few generations.

One can hope :)

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