Musings about War in Spindowners, Part I

What will war be like in a society where people are effectively immortal? Where corporate armies are better funded and outfitted than government militaries? Where technology has progressed to the point that it resembles the modern conception of magic?

Human brains are encapsulated in a symbiotic skull made of an organic metal. A person could fall into a star, and the skull would continue to protect the brain, skimming along the surface, gathering energy and matter, and eventually create a sail to propel it back into space. When in an environment more suitable, it would reform its body, and continue life.

War, however, continues to be a political tool. Nearly every star, asteroid, rock, or patch of vacuum in the galaxy is owned by someone or some corporation, and even that brain skimming a star would have to pay someone for the plasma it used to escape again. Even the protective skull is a tool of some corporation or government, which no one owns outright.

War, then, comes in many flavors and for many reasons. One variety is old fashioned expansion. The people in one star system have overcrowded their home, and need more space. The solution is to try to take more space by force. It becomes more complex, because they can't simply kill the people in the new place. But there are new solutions, such as virtual enslavement. 'Brain groves' are created, where the defeated skulls are attached, only the voluntary detach commands normally built into them are disabled, so that the attached brains are forced into a slavery that can last centuries or millenia (until some greater power is able to rescue them -- this practice is illegal throughout the Empire).

Then there's colonial expansion, which on the surface seems related to expansion by reason of overpopulation. Although the results are usually the same, the reasons are not because of overcrowding, but because of a combination of great wealth, greed, and avarice. The wealth and technology of some sectors of the galaxy are greater than ever seen in the history of the universe. But these great deeds come at great expense of labor. Someone has to pay for it. And that usually comes from an oppressed people who not only do not enjoy the same benefits as their occupiers, but who also find themselves if not in a form of enslavement, then in a legally coersive arrangement where their only options involve manual labor or unending years attached to a brain grove.

Corporate espionage and outright warfare is a development common in the new landscape of galactic economics. Here there is usually a prize involved; a trade secret, a lucrative market, or even an overproductive or especially creative brain grove (giving a new meaning to headhunting). Although this style of warfare falls under various gray areas of law, it can be just as violent and devestating as other types of war, although it is usually underreported, considering that the media is influenced, controlled, and/or owned by these same corporations.

When one party actively or pre-emptively resists the oppressive results of losing to another type of warfare, this often takes a similar violent form. However, as there is usually less of a legal sanction for this, it is generally frowned upon, discouraged, and punished by not only the controlling governments, but even by distant governments and corporations who fear the idea of people taking matters into their own hands. Governmental or corporate warfare is considered par for the course, and couched in terms of 'defense', 'security', 'freedom-fighting', and 'peace-making'. Privatized or popular warfare is called 'resistance', 'rebellion', 'guerilla warfare', and 'terrorism'. It brings into question the many assumptions that allow governments and corporations to retain their power and economic strangle of the galaxy.

Those are the common reasons why war. Come back soon to read about how war. We know that's much more interesting reading. Political analysis is for armchair warriors. Weekend warriors are far more intrigued by the gadgets and gizmos that have been developed over the millenia.