Our civilization has reached a point where it's possible to completely destroy ourselves in case of war.
If we want to explore other planets around other stars, we need the kind of energy to can destroy our world, if badly used.

that is a good point, the more energy you can produce the more powerful your weapons. . . in order to travel light years in a reasonable amount of time, the weapons possible would be umimaginable.

although with every weapons thers usually a counter weapon. we have just been slow to develope a counter weapon to the nuke. and I guess anyone who does is somehow evil according to some.

Any spacefaring civilization has survived this destruction urge (as it still exists), meaning it has understood how dangerous it is to wage war and doesn't do that anymore.


I think this is a bad way to look at it. A civilisation is not an entity itself, and a civilisation cannot comprehend anything. As civilisation exsists now there has to be free thinking individuals and in any group of free thinking individuals, and whenever you have that you have the possibility of a looney gaining power.

War is definitly a constant, all you need is somethimg someone else wants and thinks they can getby force without bad repurcussions.

The problem we face as is that our weapons have become destructinve enough to wipe our our world. Solutinon? make our world bigger. If our world was just a city, and we hadn't invented technology necessary for an advanced fire department, fire would be a pretty effective weapon of mass destruction. But our world is pretty big, and it has taken a while for technology to get to the point that we have a suitable destructive weapon that can take our worl out. We have always lived on the earth and its size hasn't changed. our technology has caught up to the point to where we can devastate its surface, becasue we simply have not gone out off this planet. Nuclear weapons start to pale when your world encompases a solar system. If entire nations encompased a planet. if entire nations encompase solar systems. . . . etc. . .

heres a good way ot look at it: range is a one dimesional quantity. Our range is directly dependent upon our capability for producing the energy needed to get from point a to point b in a resonable amount of time. So our range is entirely dependent on energy we would put into travel by a factor of one (tiems one half, energy to accelerate there energy to decelerate). With every adnace in energy, with every advance in range, the wolrd we can inhabit and explore increases with range times 3/4PI3. Assuming destructive power is related directly and one dimensionaly to energy we would resonalby put in to weapons, which I think it evidently is, our world will dwarf our destuctive ability.

-Justin Kelly