General > Off Topic
Ecumenopolis
Numsgil:
--- Quote ---a war waged purely for the sake of destroying the other race. I know no examples of that sort of war.
--- End quote ---
I take it you're not religous then? The Israelites swarmed out of Egypt and (well, okay 40 years later) utterly decimated not one, but several cities. They were commanded to do even more but didn't.
Remember Jericho? The city was totalled. It's inhabitants butchered.
There's an instance of Alexander the Great detsroying an island city that refused to submit to him. He built a land bridge out to something like half a mile and invaded the city without a navy. Most of the inhabitants were destroyed. All the elite definately were. I think a few temple workers survived.
It's only in relatively modern wars that the idea of 'civilian non-combatants' has been established. In the past cripplling a nation by laying seige to a city and then destroying its population was a comman tactic (if not a bit crude).
shvarz:
Yep, "Carthage must be destroyed!"
Throughout the ages it was common practice to completely eliminate your enemy - slaughtering everyone, including women and children. That is why in many societies women often fought alongside men during seiges - it was all or nothing war. In Russia, Mogol hordes killed all men and boys, reasoning that if there are no men around, then there is no one to fight and revenge later.
Only with time people invented more sophisticated ways to keep enemies suppressed (Romans invented slavery).
PurpleYouko:
I wouldn't really have said that the atomic bombs dropped onto Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed to gain territory.
This was a threat of more to come. The US flexed their military muscle and said, surrender now or we will utterly wipe out your civilization.
If the Japanese hadn't surrendered I have no doubt that the entire country would still be a smoking wasteland and we would all be using Texas Instrument computers today.
:D PY :D
MightyPenguin:
This is what happens when you leave an argument half finished. :rolleyes: And when you phrase things as certanties. What I meant to say was that wars for the the sake of death and destruction are one in a trillion.
--- Quote ---As far as jacking in, I think it will become an option but it will never entirely replace real life. Everyone always thinks in extremes. When have we ever known one thing to entirely replace another?
--- End quote ---
Are you serious?
Bronze as a construction material has been entirely superceeded as a construction material by steel. As has flint. The domination of electric light is almost as complete. The telegraph is dead, or just about. The gun has surpassed the sword. The battleship has been made obselete by the aircraft carrier. Video killed the radio star (joke).
And not a single one of these will be as addictive or as insidious as VR.
Imagine; you live a completely controlled enviroment, with complete freedom to do whatever you wish. Sex, drugs, food, beauty; all on tap. And if you get bored? Ask the computer to challenge you.
By your own argument;
--- Quote ---So we'll all live in the environment in which we find the most beautiful.
--- End quote ---
VR will kill humankind; it's the stopping point.
--- Quote ---Real life allows has some advantages over any simulation.
--- End quote ---
Name one.
--- Quote ---People will always want children. The decline of childbirth in industrial countries doesn't mean people don't want children. It means they want children later in life and much fewer. Most people want 1 - 3 children. You'll always see families, no matter how advanced society becomes. It's hard wired into our minds. To deny this would mean society would eventually collapse.
--- End quote ---
I don't want children. None of my friends want children. Remember Solaria. You seem to be labouring under the misapphrehension that everyone on the face of the planet is the same as you, thinks the same as you, feels the same as you.
Take me as an example;
--- Quote ---people used to have lots knowing that some of them wouldn't make it to adulthood, its playing the probability game
--- End quote ---
I can't understand this at all. Not the spelling errors; why would anyone feel so obliged to have children that they had as many as possible so that some would survive? I can't make any sense of it. It makes no sense. But I accept it is one of the many factors that influence the demographic divide between rich and poor.
Look at this.
Fit that to your argument.
--- Quote ---This means that centralized authoity figures for a war are impractical, so you end up with individual generals commanding the forces in a single system. It certainly doesn't mean that you can't have a military.
Rome was quite effective even when its generals had to wait months for messages from Rome. There was nothing about their system that would make an even longer wait less effective.
--- End quote ---
You're still making assumptions. Like; this race would have to wait perhaps sixty to seventy years to even know if their invasion was successful. Assuming they lived in a system close to ours, which is statistically unlikely. That is an unbearably long time to wait for a turnaround on a fully equipped warfleet for any species with a timescale similar to ours. Anything that thinks slow enough to think that a reasonable timeframe is going to be easily out fought unless they have AI controlled or fairly intelligent automated ships.
The effort of outfitting a war expedition and conquering another species makes it a highly unlikely proposition when the species in question could just as easily colonise an uninhabited system.
A military commander seventy years away from any overarching control system is a danger. That far from effective control you may as well declare him rogue as a precaution. And any system he conquered, assuming he stayed loyal and managed to win the war, would be to all intents and purposes a seperate state with the time delay, which makes this doubly pointless.
--- Quote ---The decentralized people would have an easy time of it. Lay seige on the urban world and within a few years you have entirely crippled your enemy. The remaining rural worlds are easy to take. The urban world is empty, ready to bring in your own people.
--- End quote ---
Wrong. The decentralised people would be unable to gather strength into a point, would be unable to coordinate military action for lack of a centralised control and would interfere with each other's strategies for the same reason.
The more organised nation would be able to build up military strength quickly (assuming they didn't already have any :rolleyes: ) and surgically strike at the independant worlds in the other nation's territory, who would be inefficient at gathering a defence and unable to hole together a common military taskforce, assuming they managed to gather one, when the components of such are having their homeworlds nuked from orbit.
--- Quote ---The economies of scale, also, simply have a limit before their effectiveness becomes choked by beurocracy. Planet wide specialization is impractical.
--- End quote ---
AI.
MightyPenguin:
--- Quote ---I take it you're not religous then? The Israelites swarmed out of Egypt and (well, okay 40 years later) utterly decimated not one, but several cities. They were commanded to do even more but didn't.
--- End quote ---
You're talking about a people that had no home. They had been wandering around in the desert for those 40 years.
It was a war of territory.
I think, anyway- I've never ead the bible and I don't have one to hand to check.
--- Quote ---There's an instance of Alexander the Great detsroying an island city that refused to submit to him. He built a land bridge out to something like half a mile and invaded the city without a navy. Most of the inhabitants were destroyed. All the elite definately were. I think a few temple workers survived.
--- End quote ---
Iksander was a nut, to be honest. However, that's still not a war and the power differential is huge. A very specific case and I can't see it being extrapolatable. Does that word exist? Adjective from extrapolate.
--- Quote ---"Carthage must be destroyed!"
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---When Agathocles died in 288 BC, a large company of mercenaries who had previously been held in his service found themselves suddenly without employment. Rather than leave Sicily, they seized the city of Messana. Naming themselves Mamertines (or "sons of Mars"), they became a law unto themselves, terrorizing the surrounding countryside.
The Mamertines became a growing threat to Carthaginian and Syracusan alike. In 265 BC, Hiero II, the new Tyrant of Syracuse, took action against the Mamertines. Faced with a vastly superior force, the Mamertines divided into two factions, one advising surrender to Carthage, the other preferring to seek aid from Rome. As a result, embassies were sent to both cities.
While the Roman Senate debated the best course of action, the Carthaginians eagerly agreed to send a garrison to Messana. A Carthaginian garrison was admitted to the city, and a Carthaginian fleet sailed into the Messanan harbor. However, soon afterwards they began negotiating with Hiero II; alarmed, the Mamertines sent another embassy to Rome asking them to expel the Carthaginians.
This action had placed Carthage's military forces directly across a narrow channel of water from Italy. Moreover, the presence of the Carthaginian fleet gave them effective control over the Straits of Messana, and demonstrated a clear and present danger to nearby Rome and her interests.
As a result, the Roman Assembly, although reluctant to ally with a band of mercenaries, sent an expeditionary force to return control of Messana to the Mamertines.
--- End quote ---
The Romans attacked Carthage on behalf of another nation. The Greeks fought them because Carthage wanted to expand into Greek territory.
The eventual slaughter and obliteration of Carthage by the Romans was brought about by the fact thatCarthage didn't know when to quit; they fought six wars, three agsainst the Greeks and three against the Romans, and they lost all six- and all but one of those was complete.
Wars are stopped by attacking civilians; not started to enable tha act of such.
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