Interplanetary War

enjoyed it. So we got the opportunity to work together with them and do an episode on their universe, basically taking a look at war and what is the cause of war and human history, but also looking toward the future and basically saying, what's it gonna look like? Yeah, what would interplanetary war be like? Uh? Yeah, this is

an awesome opportunity. I was already a fan of the show, and it was actually reading the first book by James S. A. Corey when the opportunity presented it itself, and we said, yeah, because we've done this sort of thing before without any kind of advertising support for properties such as Dune, uh, the Let's see what else we rain? Yeah, and the ant Man One Man, and none of those people work

together with us, but we did it. Because we're fans, and I think I think we might have done something like this eventually this year, because once I finally got a chance to watch it on Amazon Prime, I just fell in love with this show. It is fantastic. Yeah, yeah, it's very well put together show. Uh. I would say that the best pure science fiction show on television right now. Yeah. So, as Robert mentioned, it's based on a series of novels by James Essay Corey Now that's a pen name actually

for Daniel Abraham and Tai Frank. They serve as writers and producers on the show as well. And the first uh season of the show is based on the book that Robert mentioned, Leviathan Wakes, and that book was nominated for both a Hugo Award and a Locust Award. We're gonna try not to really spoil the show for you

at all if you haven't seen it. We're gonna be mainly talking about the the mythos that it exists in, right like the universe that they've built for this this show, in this series of novels, um the real basic plot and this isn't really getting you much past. Like I would say, the first episode is that it's an ensemble of characters that are scattered around the Solar System. They're trying to unravel a conspiracy that threatens to begin a war between Earth, Mars and colonies that are within the

Asteroid Belt. Yeah, and the really cool thing to keep in mind, and certainly something we're gonna discuss at length here, is that all of this is crafted with with science in the forefront um. The authors and the show runners put a lot of effort into making sure that everything lines up. Not only were their entertainment expectations and our our political intrigue fascination, but but just like, what what is our current understanding of science and our current understanding

of the universe. What kind of a future does that possibly present for us? And to that end, another thing we're really excited about is that we are going to have an interview at the end of this episode with the executive producer on the expanse Naren Shankar. He's also one of the show's writers. He's their science advisor as well.

He has a background in engineering in physics, and so we're gonna ask him questions about how the show treats the realities of space, because that really is I think it's one of the selling points for me is that Space is as much a character as any of the other characters, and it's not just a setting. Right. Yeah, Space is dangerous and big and hostile, uh in this show,

as it should be. So before we get into the meat of this show, we want to establish, you know, what this episode isn't going to be, because we don't want you to be, you know, disappointed in what we cover and what we don't. This is a huge topic. This isn't gonna be us looking at military science really

or delving into too much about future weapons technology. We talk a little bit about that, but for the most part, we're sticking to what causes war, what motivates war, and and really the ultimate end goal of the studies like this which have been going on for a long time is how to keep peace. Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna look at past models of war and how they apply in trying to figure out the future of war. But yeah, we're not going to do a detail breakdown of individual

weapons systems. So we of course have covered some of those in the past and may cover them in the future, such as our episode from Life Believe the past year about the rods from God's the kinetic weapons system proposal, and that came up independently in their research. It wasn't something that like we were like, well, we're familiar with this,

we'll bring this in it. Actually, that's something that a lot of people who speculate on what the future warfare is gonna look like once we're out in space, kinetic weapons immediately came up. So we'll we'll touch on that again too, and if you're in and also, one thing this this podcast is not going to be is you know, we're gonna talk about the Expanse a little bit in it, but we're gonna talk at at length about uh, just the future of war, war and what war is in general.

So if you're not into the Expanse, if you're if you're just across the board not interested, well I fear not, because we're gonna we're gonna talk about a very grounded issues here. Okay, so why don't we get into it. And then what we'll do is basically, as we go along and we're talking about these various theoretical examples or historical examples, will maybe apply it to the expanse. But again we're not going to be very spoilery about the show in terms of like things that happened in the

plot or with the characters. It's just mainly going to be about like what the setup is for the universe there and what it's like two years in the future. Yeah, and uh, well you know, I guess we should. Do you want to mention any of the characters before we move on or yeah, well, I think more so than the characters, what I mentioned is just like the three factions I suppose, and so set that up for people, which is that Earth is Earth still exists, there's a

human population on it. It's a single planetary government though from what United Nations governed planet. Yeah. And then Mars has broken off from Earth. Mars is populated by human colonists, but they have a more technologically advanced colony I guess. So they have like a pretty intensely powerful military. They have like stealth ships things like that. Uh, And that they Mars and Earth are kind of teetering on the brink of a it's like a Cold war basically. And

then the last faction is the Asteroid Belt. Uh. They refer to themselves as Belters. Uh. And that basically serves as like many colonies scattered throughout the Asteroid Belt of basically blue collar workers who are out there mining resources like air and water. In some type cases it's like ice, Like they're they're mining ice and outer space so that they can then bring it back and turn it into water basically for the survivability of everybody, whether they're on

Mars or Asteroid Belt. Although Earth pretty much has access to all of the resources, we still have. Yeah. I mean, if you play fast and loose with the the parallels, you can basically look at at Earth. Earth is Is is the European planet, Mars is the New World, and then the Asteroid Belt is just the the outskirts though, the wild, the utter frontier and there, and there's a there's a cultural splintering that has occurred really across all

three domains, right. Yeah. And and the the other thing too, I forgot to mention is that the Belt is governed by Earth technically, I think like they have oversight, but there's also like uh corruption within the Belts government system. And then also what would you call it, like a

grassroots insurgency happening. Yeah, the opcuh quasi terrorists or outright terrorist organization depending on how you look at it, because there's a large there's a lot of disenfranchisement that goes on in the Belts in in the expanse, right, the Belters don't seem to have the same rights. Um. Yeah, it's a major plot point, all right. So at this point, let's go ahead and get into the first big question here.

What is war? What is war itself as a thing that humans do, that humans most humans hate and despise and fear, and yet we absolutely have not stopped doing it. Yeah, we conducted constantly and you know, I had no idea going into this research. I mean I had some idea, but but not how deep it goes. I mean, there are entire departments of study devoted to this. And so if you're out there listening and you have some familiarity with this, you may go, why didn't you mention this

particular theoretical concept about war? You know? Uh, this because we really we would have to do an entire podcast that's just about for for years just about this topic in order to cover everything. So we're gonna try to boil it down to some of the major categories of of what is war and what causes it gonna read three quick quotes here that that that I feel set the stage. Uh. The first one comes from a corn Karthie's Blood Meridian or the evening Redness in the West.

And this is These are the words of Judge Holden, who has a major character in that book, quasi supernatural villain. He says, it makes no difference what men think of war. War endures as well, asked men what they think of stone. War was always here before man was. War waited for him, the ultimate trade, awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be that way and not

some other way. And then in Daniel Quinn's Ishmael and Adventurer of the Mind and Spirit, Uh, Ishmael, who's a talking gorilla in the book, if you're not familiar with it, says the following, my name is Ishmael. Yeah. Is. This law defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities. But you may not hunt down your competiti gers or

destroy their food, or denied them access to food. In other words, you may compete, but you may not wage war. Now there are a couple of major resources that we look to to really ground ourselves here, and the first was that apparently the International Association for Political Science Students has as a really well written piece that that sums up war and its causes. Now, the person who authored that,

Jan Tudovic. Uh, there's a quote from her that I'd like to use to start us off here, and she says, if we want to understand or explain how peace can be achieved, we have to understand war and its causation. And so, uh, this led me to another piece which is by a guy named Jack S. Levy, and it's called The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace and it's really pretty good review of all the literature

on this topic. And I think it was written in the nineties, so there may even be like a whole John More that wasn't covered in this from the last decade or so. We pulled other resources to kind of tap into that those ideas, but Levy basically looked at everything and just threw it into one paper. It's interesting though, like, at this point, without even getting into the idea, is like the three quotes we looked at, the judge would hold that war is this thing that like permeates us

and and and and pre exists. It's our nature. Yeah, Whereas Daniel Quinn would and Ishmael rather would argue that that war is this this corruption that we've inflicted on

the world, and perhaps something we can take back. These are of course, both you know, kind of simplistic views of it or boiled down views, uh, and that we're getting into them the more complex take on the question, So Levy establishes, first of all, there's no consensus on what causes war, Like, there's a lot of disagreement in the academic community about this much less just between us

human beings. In fact, he says, some people argue it maybe such a complex topic that it's it's actually impossible to generalize in any manner, but they try. Um and that the general definition of war is this quote, a large scale organized violence between political units. So if you want to differentiate it from other violence, the categorization is essentially a minimum of a thousand battle related fatalities have to be counted as a metric, and peace is subsequently

identified as the absence of war. Now, the people who study this really deeply, they seem to distinguish between international war, civil war, and interstate wars to separate them from what I what are referred to as non state actors. I think today most people would just say terrorism. Um but but violence that's not conducted by a state actor. Right. So, to this end, the study of war is actually moved

more toward what they called low intensity wars. And this has been since the end of the Cold War, so it's less focused on total annihilation. We're going to talk about that for sure. Um Levy also says it's really difficult to trace the causes of war because there's so many variations on them. Right, So if you think you have one theory and you try to apply it to every single instance of war, there's gonna be a variation in there that just stands out, right, So that makes

it even more difficult. Um Subsequently, he says he he doesn't really buy into the whole human nature argument because of that, because there's so many variables, it's not constant enough. And Steady says, political scientists seem to be turning to h explaining war in peace, while philosophers, psychologists, and biologists ask why war war occurs at all in the first place. Right,

um So that's really just the the general setup. Okay, so we've now we've establed is like what war is that the ground rules essentially in terms of how academics are looking at it, how it's studied. Now what based on that? What are the causes? Human nature is socio cultural? What are what are all these theories for its motivation?

The first place that I'd like to point out is there is an annual report that's put together by the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research every year and it examines broadly what what leads to the current conflicts that exist in our modern society and they call it a Conflict Barometer. Now the edition focused on the following causes for war and they have uh that's the latest report

that's been published because they haven't finished the one yet. Uh. They categorize the the intensity of these conflicts, but they basically break it down by whether it's a territorial war, a war of secession, de colonization, a war over autonomy, sys the system in place, or the ideology national power, subnational predominance, international power. So that those three kind of fall back into that what I was talking about earlier in terms of state actors, and then resources, which brings

us back to our Ishmael quote. And then the last one is the other. Paul Goodman has also put together a short explanation of this. It's kind of like the listical BuzzFeed version. I'm not saying that in like a derogatory way. On the causes of war. It's on this site called OWL caation and that's a website that's run by educators about their academic areas of expertise. And that's O w l C A t. Iowan trying to figure

that out, an OWL on vacation um. And so his we're gonna use his list, the Heidelberg list and levies huge combination of theories as sort of like a grounding point for us as we moved through all of these. And the first one is really the psychology the human nature. So do we have war because of our innate inner rage? Is it because of the fears of mankind? Are we inherently violent? Or maybe ideology is inherent to the human brain.

This is kind of the the Dawn of of Man two thousand one of Space Odyssey idea that the ape is inherently violent, maybe pushed a little by the monolith. But it all goes back to some some pretty human homedy bashing and some creatures skull and realizing this is the way, this is the this is the path to ascension. Yeah, exactly, and Goodman lumps under this causes like that a lot of you are probably thinking they were the first in

my mind, religion or nationalism or revenge even right. We could also potentially play civil wars and revolutionary wars here, as they're often motivated by differing ideologies. But when you look back at that Heidelberg one, you know, those could fall under autonomy or de colonization, secession, things like that, so they break it out a little bit more finely. Yeah. Now, one one thought that that came to mind as I was looking through this is of course, that you're talking

about fears of mankind and and these different motivations. I think it's important to note that that the fear of the other is always a key motivator, be it a racial, cultural, or linguistic other. The hurdles to our ability to to do this continue to pose one of the leading threats to peace. That we we inevitably have this just ingrained in us, This this barrier to seeing individuals in another group as being like us, is having the same values as us, Is it indeed being part of us? Yeah?

You know my favorite example of this, and this isn't like an endorsement of the show, I know a lot of people have issues with it, but Lost they straight up had a group of characters called the Others on the Island. That was that really uh demonstrated this in a good way and that it was like, Okay, they are other from us. We think of them as being outside of us and a threat, right and and almost not even human in some cases. Uh, And it was it was a it was a nice analogy for what

you're talking about there. Um, if you put it another way. There's a guy named Kenneth Walts who's an international relations theorist, and he talks about it as the individual is the first category of the cause of war. And he says, yeah, maybe human nature is the locus of the causes of war.

We can find it in the behavior of mankind. But we're essentially talking about things like selfishness, misdirected, aggressive impulses, and and and while these are Waltz his terms, stupidity, and he says, look uplifting and enlightening men may lead to the elimination of war. So that's why we have to study this, we need to scrutinize it um and

we're gonna keep coming back to that. And I would say, I don't know, I don't want to put like words in the author's not but I would assume that part of the project with the expense, is to enlighten people to what causes war so that in real life were less likely to just engage in that aggression. I mean, we have so many different media representations of war is just this noble and like even today we see these, uh,

these these examples of it as this noble enterprise. And in our video games, like when we were talking about PTSD in the previous so we talked about how like so much of the so many of these games are just they just glorify, uh, the violent details of war

and turn it into pure entertainment. And occasionally you'll have a game, I forget the name of the game in particular that a number of our listeners said, oh, well, this one really focuses on PTSD a bit, but of course no. But basically nobody wanted to play that game because it it did not offer the the glorious vision

of warfare that we've come to expect from entertainment. Yeah, and and also I think we would be out of line if we didn't at least give this some acknowledgment that in Waltz and in other referrals to war, and they referred to it very specifically as mankind and men. And you may be saying, well, why why are we

using those terms instead of humankind. Well, there's actually a whole set of feminist theories around the causes of war that argue that due to the gendered nature of states and cultures, that this contributes to the persistence of war in our world politics. So for me, like oddly enough, the best fictional example I can think of what this would be Wonder Woman, um, which is about to be pretty popularized, I think, even more than she already is

in American consciousness. But there's a big movie about to come up this somewhere. Um. But you know, she comes from this nation of women that live in peace away from men, but they're also a warlike culture, and they're capable of mass destruction. Like they they're they're amazons, you know, they're literally they're referred to um, so if men invade their territory, they're they're like this incredibly powerful military force, but but on their own they live in total peace.

Um Levy argues though, that feminist theories treat gender systems as a constant. Again like this is his like argument against human nature as being capable of explaining war because of all the variations, and so he says, look that that also can't explain these variations in war. It's worth having as part of our sort of set of tools to look at war with. But he doesn't think that's the single answer. Well, and it's I've I've studied some of this, but before the question, well what have what

have we had? Matriarchal cultures they engage in the same level of war, And you kind of see arguments on both sides. Some people say, oh, yes, we would, uh, a female lead society would be just as likely to engage in warfare as a male lead society. But I mean, basically it comes down to the fact we have so few models to actually look to on that that we

we did, we're essentially starting from zero. Yeah, and and that is connected to We're gonna talk about hegemony in a little bit here, but I think to like again, because we don't have examples that we can really look to as that say, like one way or the other, whether it's gendered or not, as the main cause, it's difficult to parse out because we don't have a language for understanding it any other way. Um, So that I mean, obviously, like I said, there's a lot more to the human

nature argument. Well, we've in and out of that, but that's essentially the human nature psychological component. And then we come to the economic argument. This is tied into the the Ishmael quote that we had earlier, and this, I would say, is where the expanse really seems to fall in terms of like what's causing war in the in the in storyline, Uh, we're essentially talking here about a competition for natural resources and wealth. There's national and international

and in this case interplanetary power and resources. Now, these resources could be precious materials, or they could be livestock or natural resources like like oil or minerals. And some people believe that as the world's population increases, there's going to be an increase in the amount of wars that we have because we're gonna be fighting over fundamental essentials such as water and food, and this is this is kind of what we see playing out on an interplanetary

level in the expanse right. Oh yeah, I mean especially water. The the need for water and among among the Belters is one of the key plot points that comes up again an Yeah, and Mars too, I think, because like they had this amazing technology, but they're on Mars and there's you know, there's there's not enough. If there's water there in this future, there's not enough to to serve the population that's there. And they keep talking about how

they're under like domed cities and everything. They don't breathe natural air um and so yeah, and then air of course as well would be a commodity um, depending on how they generate it. Yeah. And then if you want whiskey then and you're in the belt, you're gonna have to depend on that moss whiskey. You know, I gotta say I I would that. That's the thing. I was the most surprised by him saying, like, where are they

getting all this booze from? Yeah? Yeah, he comes out more in the books, but but there's there are a lot of discussions, uh with the Thomas James's character where he's talking about drinking moss whiskey, and at one point he's eating a meal where he has some there's some real beans in there, but they're also some that grown beans. So there's there's there's so many details that are thrown out there and in the books but also incorporated into the show. Give you this this idea of the the

the economics of the world, you're you're immersing yourself in. Well, Thomas James's character is pretty much constantly drinking, which is one of my you know, amusements of his character. But that that was definitely something I was like, Okay, this fits the like noir detective thing with his character. But yeah, that's his character's name. Um man, Yeah, he's he's great in this. I'm I'm a Thomas Jane fan. Anyways, as you'll probably be able to tell from the ad reads,

takes dance in this. But but yeah, he's really good in it. And yeahs I was immediately thinking probably two three episodes and I was like, wait a minute, where is he just getting all of this booze from He's just constantly doing it. Yeah, So okay, the economic argument falls under Kenneth Waltz his second explanation for war, and again, like we come back to like various explanations, right, is it is it um human nature? Is it economic? And he says, yeah, economic, but it's more about the state.

And he argues that the social and political institutions that we create for ourselves, they should be seen as a factor in creating war. And if human nature can be changed through institutions, which is I would say, essentially like the basis of our of our society, right, like the idea that like we can live, we can coexist peacefully under institutions. Uh that, then those institutions should be our focus for stopping war. Yeah, because of course humans have

always competed for resources, just as all species do. I mean, it goes back to that that Ishmael quote. Uh we and we even wiped out such competing intelligent hominid species as the Neanderthals in this very way. I mean, if you ever want a model for how humans would coexist with another intelligent species, that is sadly our best, our

best example. It makes me think of and we've we've talked about this on the show a bit lately, But like the Prometheus myth, like you know, fire was given to us by the gods but ultimately ends up causing problems, and war is one of those. Yeah, but you know, when it comes to the Neanderthals, you can you can look back and there are different arguments about how all this actually played out. But exterminating a species just by out competing them sort of accidental genocide, I guess, is

one thing. But to actively wage war over the resources, to say I will wipe you out, to get into that that sort of you know, that Hellenistic model of destroy your enemy city and the dissault the earth, that's a that's another thing entirely. Well, why don't we take a break and when we come back, we're going to continue on with these causes of war. All right, we're back, So I know we have a number of fallout fans

out there. So that quote, famous quote generally uh, narrated by Ron Perlman is probably bouncing around in your brain. War never changes. But that's that's what you get read to you at the beginning of the game. Is your your characters walking away with a dog? Yeah, And uh. The thing about that quote is that, yes, on one hand, the horror of war remains the death of innocence remains one of its central tenants. Uh mutual assured destruction being

the perhaps the purest modern version of this. When you're talking about nuclear strikes between superpowers, you're talking about megadeaths of civilians. Nice metal reference there, Dave Mustan would be, Yeah, that's where they gotta leave. That's where the Yeah. Megadeath is a U is basically a way to to measure the death that would occur during a large scale nuclear war. But even on on like lower levels, there's just horror

at every level. At two thousand and ten b MJ published study pointed out that quote the use of rape as a weapon of war has assumed strategic importance unquote in in the in the wake of the Second World War. So war is is and has always been nothing short of just an obscenity. There's your gendered nature of it again. And yet to to you know, we can say, all right, Ron,

you're you're right for the most part. But on the other hand, weapons and tactics evolve, as does the shape of war, the exact definition of the thing, the ethical boundaries of war. We invoke modern laws of war even as we've been to break them. UH. The and even the laws of war are ancient. Two. We can find examples of them in the Mahabarata, the Hindu epic. We

find them in the Torah. And much discussion continues even to this day on the idea of just war theory, the idea that you know, if you if you fall, if you follow certain parameters both in the execution and the reason for war, then there is a just use of it. People are still divided on that. Yeah, right, interesting, Yeah, you see some of that throughout these theoretical UH applications.

But also just like the scholars that are struggling with this are like trying to come to grips with not only like how this works in the grand scheme of humanity, but then like in the present tense, right, like like how do I apply this to the situation of maybe the nation state that I exist in that's currently at war. Now, we've already discussed a number of different theories for for why we have war, how war works, where it came from. Various theories have covered this one that I always thought

had a nice ring to it. Uh. And again this is probably an overly simplistic model there, but there are those who are that basically need a few things to come together for warfare to be practical. You need surplus resources to to necessitate high risk raids and high speed mounts to make this sort of long distant strike feasible. Yeah, very much. Again, in an economic sense, comes down to a risk reward. So there's there's some out there who

have said but basically comes down to the horse. Before individuals had horses, you just weren't able to really wage something that was that was war as we think of

it today. Not everyone agrees with that, but like I said that, the basic economic nut of that, I think is is very interesting to think about, and as we're gonna look to toward the end of this episode, but also in the context of the expanse, I mean, once we once we invent interplanetary space travel and we have you know, that's that's the next horse essentially, right, although I would argue, like the airplane, probably the car and then the airplane, right because as we're going to discuss,

all of these things can be used as weapons on their own without even having weapons attached to them. Yeah, and when you end up having states and empire, the rise of states and empires in human civilization. This changes war as well, so they're waging war for resources but also for plunder for slave labor. Uh. As William M. Dugger pointed out in as a piece online Evolution Theory Social Sciences, Volume three, you need the slaves to work the natural world into things that you you needed from

the countryside. And you also needed the slaves to keep your cities running. Well. Uh, the places and these are the places where you grew and maintain the military required to power this sort of awful war based convection of empire. Yeah, and and that is definitely like one road empire studies are like imperial studies. But all of this leads us to the question of whether or not the causes of war derived from either international systems, national systems, or individual

decision makers. Right, So we get back to is it is it just one person who's leading us to this or is there something fundamentally flawed with the institutions that we've created for ourselves. And I would say maybe it's all three, right, and I probably a lot of these studies would too, But possibly it's just one given the various scenarios. Right, So, key actors in world politics, they're currently seen as sovereign states that are quote acting rationally

to advance their own security, power, and wealth. That's essentially again like the risk reward model, right, Like, all they want to do is make sure that their people are secure, they have power over at least their own destinies and the wealth to lead I guess, happy lifestyles. Now, the basics of this are what's referred to as the realist theory of war, and that is basically that the distribution of power is the primary factor in shaping international outcomes.

And it's it's complicated. It gets even more complicated by making assumptions about foreign policy choices in the outcomes of various nation states. I mean, we see this playing out in the news every day, actually, right like Like so an example right now would be like the Russian hacking scandal, right, and we see that and it's always in the papers referred to as Russia did X or Russia is thought to have done why. Right, it's not Russia, it's not

all of Russia's citizens. It's people within the institutions. If that's the case, right, But then you have to ask yourself, is it their institution that's flawed or is it again like some people say, oh, it's a key actor, it's Putin. Putin is the one that's influencing the institution negatively, right, who knows. I mean, it's really difficult, like super con

complex too to dive into, especially on a current events scale. Right, you need like years away from stuff like this and many more facts than we have to be able to make a decision one way or the other. Yeah. I think it was David Simon who made the comparison between our modern world and the world of of of ancient myth. In the ancient myth, you had heroes and you had gods, and both both exerted a tremendous amount of power. Um more so with the gods, but the heroes could really

turn the tide as well. And today instead of God's we have systems and uh, but we still have a place for the individual, and the individual can still be tremendously influential or can just be crushed under the heels of said god like system. Man, you and I have been circling around this topic for a while now and I hadn't even realized it. We did the hero episode recently or heroism, but then the Wicked Problems episode definitely ties into this as well, like it certainly war as

a wicked problem. Yeah, I mean anytime we cover the human condition, I mean essentially we're going to be dealing it's on some level with with war. And I gotta say David Simon, but my go to guy for quotes pretty much always trust trust him with what he's saying. I follow him on Twitter and I find insights from him almost every day. The guy is crazy smart and has just really um if you're not, I guess I

should say who. David Simon is author Homicide, Life on the Streets and uh and later of course The Wire May Uh so various other projects he's been involved with. Those are probably the two big ones recent. Yeah. Yeah, so that's how more particularly did a war based when Yeah, that's called Generation Kill and is is excellent, maybe the

best depiction of modern war that I've ever seen in entertainment. Okay, So out of these arguments that we're talking about comes these capitalist economic systems, and they're seen actually as being

the best guaranteers of peace. So basically it goes like this, that the state has trade and that generates economic advantages for state parties, and that the anticipation of war would disrupt trade, right, so it would also reduce the welfare of the people who were living within these nations states. So some argue that this is what led to the sort of current model of what's referred to as neoliberalism

that we in the United States existent. Um, but you're basically looking at like the the argument is that, like, as long as we keep free market trade going on between international or in the case of the experience, interplanetary states, then that's like a deterrent for war. It's also this is the point where I think we should address hegemony.

Although man hegemony is a really tough topic to dive into, I I gotta say, just from me personally, it is such a difficult concept that it's still being ironed out in many academic circles. But I studied it in graduate school and it left my head spinning after every class. Uh. In fact, the most difficult book I've ever read is

called Hegemony and Socialist Strategy by ERNESTO. Leclow and chantel Moof uh, that book, it was like, you know, any any like a piece of literature that people say is like really difficult, like Thomas Pension or David Foster Wallace or something like that, or James Joyce, like, this thing was so much harder than any time I've tried to tackle stuff like that. But let's try to take a

stab here. It's just a short definition of hegemony so we can line it up because I think it works within the parameters of the expense and what we're talking about now. This is from the Salem Press Encyclopedia entry, and the term hegemony is used to refer to a group, state, or other entity that exhibits political or cultural dominance over another group. And it's used in political science to refer to usually countries or states that exert powers over one another.

But the ancient Greeks actually developed the term uh, and they used it to describe the interaction of their city states, which were called polis polus is uh with nearby territory, so how those city states interacted with their neighbors. Essentially today, though it really refers to the domineering behavior of one group over another, it may not even necessarily be national actors. Now, the power that's wielded by one group over another in this case could be military and nature, which you know

leads to war. But more often it comes due to financial or technological superiority, which is backed by military authority. We see that in the expanse, certainly with with Earth and then how it's connected to the Belt right like Earth has you know, they're not like at war with the Belt, but they are dominant over the belt and they're they're backing that both with their trade of things

like water, but also with their military authority. The United States, for instance, is understood to rise to hegemonic status partly because of petroleum production and the rise of the automobile. Another example in the expense would be that Mars has the this like superior technology, but Earth has access to resources like air and water. That's what puts them in dominance. Usually a hegemonic power encourages cooperation before they resort to force.

So it's not it's not necessarily always militaristic and warlike uh. And in fact, more often than not it's it's seen as being ideological. Yeah, but of course it's always worth remembering that that war is always in the background. War enforce is always in the background of any kind of of law and enforcement of law, and even when it comes down to paying your taxes, there's a there's a long line of things that happen if you don't pay your taxes, but the end result can be an official

showing up at your door armed. So right, it's it's always there in the background. I mean you could tie that into the the Heidelberg variations and like secessionists or

autonomous war movements. Um. Now, last bit about hegemony here the modern thought modern studies on it were heavily influenced by a guy named Antonio gramsc and gram She argued that ideology and ways of thinking also acted hegemonically, and he wrote these ideas while he was imprisoned as a communist during the rise of Mussolini and fascism in Italy. So he basically had I think it was like forty something like little notebooks that he filled with these ideas

that were published later. And he thought that hegemony meant that the dominant group maintains its control through consent. So to your taxes. Example, I consent to paying these taxes, right, Um, that that that's basically how it's maintained. But there's always possibility of force behind it. This included social classes and not just national actors. So in addition, the dominant group doesn't necessarily control all of the areas of a subordinated culture.

So this is why we have such a heavy amount of subcultural theory and studies in universities now entire ideological systems like democracy, those can be seen as hegemonic. Gram She even argued that such concepts are dominant because they seem common and they seem natural to those of us. But that's because we exist within them, right. So for example, the common common example used to illustrate current hegemony would be like the idea that America is a Christian nation

even though it's got a broad diversity of religious beliefs. Um, this stuff is really difficult to talk about, as I mentioned earlier, because and gram She and other theorists have argued this since then, the very language we use in society is formed by whatever the dominant ideology is. Subsequently, that makes it difficult to talk about anything that would

be close to change. So basically, the the hegemonic idea here is sort of overlaid on top of all of these causes of war alright, So it's war plays on, and the the culture of war plays on and undoubtedly becomes an enterprise that moves cultures, religions, trade routes, customs, all manner of human creations and humans too, across vast distances. And it also advances technologies. It serves as the driving energy behind human endeavors and mega projects. Uh So, for many,

War is highly profitable. And that that means if you're the head of an industry, if you're a CEO. But also it means if you're just at some point down the chain, you're benefiting from the technology. UM you know, the very a lot a lot of times you can think of like the very small, uh everyday technologies that came out of the Space Race, which of course was was part of the Cold War, part of this competition between um two superpowers. Yeah, and we see that in

the expanse as well too. They they did. I kind of suspect that the people who work on this show, and maybe we'll get something from Duran Shankar about this, that they have done their homework like you and and before they sat down and they executed this massive project. Yeah, I feel like the show lines up with with pretty much everything we we found in research for this episode. Now, War of course also unifies. It has a way of distracting individuals from domestic woes, in large part by invoking

and exploiting the threat of the other. And studies to have shown that the horrors of war hardened group bonds, and so we end up with just war beginning more war. Yeah. In fact, Levy he mentions this is what is referred to as the rally round the flag effect, which always makes me think of that the page against the machine,

so rally around the flag. But basically the idea here is that leaders anticipate popular support during war, and so sometimes it's tempting for them to undertake risky foreign ventures or policy simply to bolster their own support. So that's something to keep in mind. That is a that is a terrifying statement, I think for for everyone to hear it right now. But yeah, it's quite scary and not the scariest thing that we're going to talk about in

the podcast today. But um, sometimes this is referred to in the literature as diversionary theory of war, but sometimes it's also done through scapegoating connected to ethno nationalism. So not only are you sort of connecting the leader is connecting the nation state to community and power, but ethnicity to the nation as well, very dangerous stuff as we've

seen in the past. Now in the expanse, this maybe what's going on with both Earth and the Belt as they are arguing for war UH to possibly solidify their own political power, right like the like the terrorist organization and the Belt, like they're basically arguing for autonomy so they can solidify their own power, right but like likewise, Earth wants to solidify their power by keeping the Belt under their control so that they have UH an organization that's out in space that can can match or at

least keep them up to date on what's going on with Mars and A. According to Levy, democratic leaders who initiate wars like this what I was talking about, where they're they're scapegoating or where they do the rally around the flag effect that's usually unsuccessful and they're more likely to be thrown out of power than non democratic ones.

So that's I suppose encouraging at least. The personal cost though, can be much greater to authoritarian leaders, So that makes sense, right, Like, if you're an authoritarian leader and you you end up taking your nation to war, like if the results are poor, either your people are going to overthrow you and probably kill you, or you're going to be killed in the war that you've conducted. So then this leads to another

like section of war theory, which is essentially demographic in nature. Uh. The idea here being that population growth leads to scarce resources, which we mentioned earlier. The ethno nationalism ties into this, but also something that's called youth bulge theory, and it's I don't think it's what you're thinking of. Yeah, there's actually an older episode of Stuff to Blow your mind

and went into this a little bit. I believe it was the teenage Brain, Okay, and it talks about In that episode, we explored how the teenage brain is different from an adult brain, that there's there are different priorities, like biological priority, priorities to break away from your essentially your tribe, to find a new tribe, to find a mate. Thing, issues, threats all feel that much more immediate. You know, it's

that you're young. You feel like you can change the world or you should change the world, kind of vibe. You and I have established previously on the show that the human brain doesn't finish even of all until age. Yeah, it's kind of one way to think of the teenager. Think of the teenager is like a winged ant that's supposed to fly and found a new colony. That's essentially the idea. So that ties into youth bullge theory. Uh, the idea that it depends on how many young people

you have around. And I know this kind of sounds like blame the young people for everybody everything, blame millennials or whatever. But I mean, these are the stats. About eight of the world's civil con flick since the nineteen seventies have occurred in countries with young, fast growing populations. And this is all according to analysis by the nonprofit

Population Action International. So youth boom contributed to the rise of the Nazis in nineteen thirties too, also contributed to Japan's military ambitions in the Pacific, Imperial Japan, UH Tenement Square protests in China sixties seventies, countercultural revolution in the West. Afghanistan experiencing youth bulge in the years following the two thousand one US invasion. So you know, all this is not to say that youth bulge leads directly to war

or unrest. In fact, I mean in the counterculture revolution, I think you can you can look to the opposite. You can see like a youth bulge movement for for for peace however, um, it just provides ample kindling still for so for it for social spark of religious or ethnic friction, friction, political rivalry, economic disparages, uh, food shortages, what have you? Like? It there, the young people were there, they have the numbers, they're they're ready to do something.

What is going to be the thing that animates them? Yeah? And what is going to be that? What is going to be the methodology they employed? You know, this is interesting. I don't have notes about this in front of me. This is pure speculation, But I wonder how youth bulge theory ties into planning what the draft ages for a nation's military, if it has a draft. I mean, I've always understood it as being like, well, of course, like

the draft ages, what's twenty five here in the United States? Something? Oh my god, is it the same thing as when your brain stops evolving? No? Surely not the cut off? Yeah,

what's the cut off age? I'm not sure about the cut off, but I guess what I'm getting at is like I'd always thought that the draft age was was connected to you know, youthfulness being that like you're at the peak of your physical acumen, right, like you you would be the most efficient at war, whereas like you and me at a current age would be okay, but like we're probably better off hanging back in the offices

and doing strategy and podcasts. But you know, yeah, part of it would seem to be that the mind is perfect, right, that, like the mind is prepared for war and malleable. Yeah, okay, So now the last bit in terms of causes that I just want to add in here is referred to as rationalism, uh, in terms of whether or not you know, we're talking about territorial gain or maybe a community slash nation expanding in nature. Kenneth walt calls this the third

and final cause for war. He locates it as being a description of an international system that has the authority to stop states from forcefully pursuing their own interests. So ideally this is what the United Nations would be for us, right, but it's possible we live in a condition of what Waltz refers to as international anarchy. Uh. In that he says, well, do we actually have a supreme authority that can just

stop war? In its tracks, he says without basically, international anarchy under his terms, is a permissive or underlying cause of war. And we have too many limitations on the cooperation between states in our current international system, because, unlike in the expanse, at least is how it's been portrayed so far on the TV show, Earth is like a

unified planet that the United Nations actually runs. Presumably there aren't, although we do know that there are sort of like militia movements, right, um, because one of the main characters it was like raised in like a militia sort of cult kind of um. But but more so just that like they don't seem to be dealing with international war, right They're more concerned about what's going on with Mars. They seem to have a sub star Trek level of

control over their plans. Yeah, that's a good example. I was thinking about Star Truck as well in terms of, like, uh, what the United Nations is ideally supposed to do, right, I guess the United Federation of Planets in that case. All right, we're gonna take another quick break and when we come back, we're going to take everything we've been talking about here. What we know about war in the present, and we're gonna extrapolate that into the interplanetary future. Okay,

we're back. So now it's time where we get into the I don't want to say fun stuff, but the science fiction stuff, uh, and taking these theories that we've set up in the beginning half of the show and kind of extrapolate them outward. How's this going to look on an interplanetary scale. Well, fortunately, we have so many wonderful and not so wonderful sci fi examples to look

to when it comes to interplanetary war. But but let's stop to consider just the notion of interplanetary war within our solar system versus that of interstellar war war between between planets and planet terry civilizations that are in separate star systems. Okay. One of the issues here, of course, is just the very nature of science fiction. Science fiction dreams of the future, but it's often about the present,

or or even about the past. It's an extrapolation of our current concerns and anxieties technological, political, spiritual, social, etcetera. Taking all of this and then gazing into the future. Every science fiction property speaks from a particular vantage point. Yeah, absolutely, I think that is what makes science fiction so compelling, and especially something like the expense. I mean, when I watch the expanse, it is not lost on me, like here are some lessons or commentary that we can take

insights away from based on our current situation. Clearly, it's obvious that it was written in a post nine eleven world exactly, and so when we envision the future. When we're trying to envision war in the future, well we can only take what we have now and extrapolated. In the case of larger scale hot wars between major nation states, we're thankfully forced to contemplate older models of warfare, the world Wars and all of their their horror and and

truly globe spanning industry. I think we always have to remember that the Second World War was truly a global affair. Virtually no part of the world remained untouched by it, if not by the actual combat, then at least by the economic models of it. Uh. We touched on this a bit in our Cargo Cults episode. Likewise, we often tend to fall back on our own colonial history, complete with its wars and genocides, in order to envision the founding of off world colonies and the possible splintering of

planet based states. So let's let's consider that um ran across A nice source on this. Astrophysicist Michael H. Hart wrote about the matter in the book Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, this being a collection of essays by different individuals, and he pointed out a few key things to keep in mind when applying Earth affairs to an interplanetary or interstellar setting. So, first of all, space is huge.

While technology is drastically reduced terrestrial travel to a matter of hours, quote, there is no reasonable hope that future technology will ever succeed in reducing interstellar travel times two months. So, in other words, we were simply contained in this via the confines of special relativity, bearing some amazing, miraculous breakthrough. We can't beat a beam of light in a drag dice, right, Yeah.

I think that this is an important point to to just like throw in like we're talking about you know, the realities of it, but also like the fictional popularity of it, and of course, like what is the biggest fictional especially science fictional property right now that everybody knows and loves Star Wars, right, but like when you look at that there it's interstellar. And I mean, i'd say, other than the prequels, it's not necessarily about actual war, right, Yeah,

I mean it isn't. It isn't, but not in the way that we're talking about here. It's more about like a group of characters. Yeah, because the reality is that, based on our understanding of special relativity, a star to star travel would likely work out to at least a fifty year journey. And that's the Kessel run, right, Yeah, And this is not again, this is this is based on what we know conceivable future known technologies and and foreseeable technologies. This is the limit. This is like a

hard reality limit, hard argues. So based on this galactic colonization, Yeah, it would be possible you could have this sort of uh you know, Ian in Banks culture universe, Star Wars, Dune,

what have you. But it would require two million years of human endeavor, and during that time we would change drastically, so century by century you'd have genetic advances, you'd have bimillennial cultural change, like you know, like two different major changes every millennium, major genetic engineering events occurring every ten thousand years, and natural evolution producing marked changes every million years. So basically, the human race that would be able to

travel from one star to another would be indistinct. They wouldn't look like us like we wouldn't be able to tell that they were. You would see change and splintering

occurring at various levels. So, given the time frame, given the distances involved and the limits of travel, we're looking at a completely colonized galaxy in two million years, but one consisting of splintered civilizations and cultures, and even you could even say special uh to the turn of to the tune of a few hundred billion that to match

the number of stars. Now. As a side note, Heart also throws out there that since two million years is a drop in the bucket compared to the Milky Way galaxies ten billion year history, it means that any other emergence civilization out there would have had the same odds, since nothing has seeming expanded throughout the Milky Way Galaxy in the previous two million year increment, He says, quote, we might reasonably infer that we are the first colonizing

civilization in our galaxy, and for the moment, probably the only species with an advanced technology. If this is so, it will be our descendants, who are the who are

likely to colonize and populate the entire galaxy. Yeah, so all these distances that we've been talking about, these issues would make it difficult, if not impossible, for a centralized power or emperor to maintain control over a year one hundred light year radius area, much less anything larger and uh and he Heart points to a quote by the late great author c Arthur C. Clark here, author of two thousand and one Space Odyssey, who said, all the

starborn colonies of the future will be independent. Their liberty will be inviolably protected by time as well as space. Now. Heart also goes on to point out that various other factors contribute to the idea that war isn't going away anytime soon. If we move out into into other star systems. Uh. He says that most of the Milky Way Galaxy will become populated by more aggressive civilizations and species, and the long range forecast is for continued aggression, war, and change.

There is a small silver lining here in Heart's prediction of a of a human populated galaxy that still has war. He says that that he believes that interstellar war would be rare, far more rarity than it is on Earth. Again, distance and travel have to be factored in. He says there might be a war every fifty thousand years in his estimation. Okay, and I think we're gonna get into

a little bit of why that is. But that that calls into question, you know, when we look at these fictional examples, the expanse, you know that's about two d years from now. The idea I think that Heart is working from is that like, as we technologically and and biologically evolve, that we will become less of a warlike species.

So he's working from I think the human nature composed well and just the limits because they're basically saying that as you're doing with such distances here, that the type of governments you see in Star Wars, Dune or Fireflies another example, Uh, these would just be fantastic. How would you possibly maintain dominance and rule over these vast distances? Now?

Star Wars, Dune and Firefly they all work because you have, essentially because you have a magical faster than light travel system that pops up something that you know that the author doesn't have to really explain all that much, but it's there, and it makes this this super fast travel possible. Uh, it makes it comparable to the short travel times we

experience now on Earth due to advanced technology. Yeah. I always wonder, like in Star Wars, especially in the newer ones, when I've been watching them in the theaters, like like how long is it actually taking them when they're like jumping into hyperspace? You know, like is it is it like what we see on the screen It like three minutes or like a couple of days, and we just you know, the director left some of that on the

on the floor. They cut out, like the three days of them sitting around in the back of the Millennium Falcon playing that game with Yeah, that I wish someone would make that into a video game. That would be about now. It's worth knowing. On the Expanse, we do not they do not require such a leap of faith. The Expanse does not in the plot in that world does not involve a faster than a light uh speed

travel system. They do have something that's called the Epstein drive, which is a major, a majorly important factor in that world, but it's not faster than a light. Faster than light travel remains impossible for humans in the expanse and therefore lines up with a lot of what Hart is saying here. Yeah, and I think that that's why we're able to see such realistic depictions of what's leading up to war on the expense as well. There's another theorist and author of

nano medicine named Robert A. Free Tis Junior. I believe is how it's pronounced um, and he's often brought up along with Heart because he wrote in the nineteen eighties about coming up with a more cost effective search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and he did so by using the cardasche of scale, which you've probably heard us mentioned here before Robert and previous hosts on the show. I've actually covered it. There's I believe two episodes, right, it's a two parter.

I think I want it's been a while videos and I've written stuff with the side about it. Yeah. If if you're unfamiliar with it, though, I'm going to give you a real brief breakdown. But if you want to go back, we have previous content about that. Uh. Cardaschef scale is a theoretical scale that was created in the nineteen sixties by astrophysicist Nikolai Kardaschev, and it describes the level of advancement of a civilization based on its ability

to harness the energy of its surrounding environment. He has three types. The first is Type one, masters of planetary energy. Type two are the masters of solar system or star our energy, and Type three are masters of galactic scale energy. So I think we're basically talking about gods at that point. Um. But Freightis argues that since only type two and three could realistically afford star probe technology, basically interstellar travel, that

interstellar warfare would be trivial to civilizations like this. The energy expenditure of like what we would think of as their warships would be minimal compared to the resources that they have, So they wouldn't have the economic uh battles over you know, what resources they have for their ships or for their survival like water and air and food

and oil or whatever what have you. Um, And so it's interesting, wouldn't war over economics be less likely than well in the expanse, it's arguable, I think there's still a Type one civilization, right, so that this line ends up with what Heart's talking about here. They they've only conquered the planetary resources, the energies of one planet. I haven't really gotten out of the Solar System as far as I can tell. Yeah, and of course here in

the actual modern world we're still level zero. So fumbling for that for the first rung on the ladder. It really, you know, thought exercises like this really make you consider and realize that we aren't all that in terms of like how we like to think that we're so far evolved along the line of human history. But it's like, well, in terms of what this guy imagined and was able to sort of quantify with this theoretical scale, we're still zero now. I also turned to a great thread that

was on Cora about how interplanetary war would be fought. Normally, I don't do this for our podcast episodes or for research that we do here at how stuff works, but we're getting into pretty speculative territory. So I wanted to see what crowdsourcing the question brought up there were. Turned out, there are a lot of smart people that contributed to this thread, and the two things I wanted to mention

in particular. The top post was by somebody named Micaal Danilac, and he argued that interplanetary war would be all about who had the best technology to destroy their enemies, and we see that playing out in the expanse right because the stealth tech for ships, in the discovery of something I don't want to mention it because of spoilers and plot points, there's something that's discovered, basically on a scientific

level that can turn the tide of war. Danaec argues there's four possible results for interplanetary war mutually assured destruction, which brings us back to what we were talking about with the butter war in our episode. But the butter battle um a race to get the best technology first. So then the person who has that technology or the sorry not the person, but the entity I guess the planet in this case, would be the winner that takes

everything uh intervention by a more powerful civilization. So I think he's essentially talking about aliens here, that like aliens would come in an intervene in an interplanetary war and be like WHOA, Like we're we're Kardashiev type three halt you know, or uh total war, which unfortunately, a lot of the examples that we found seemed to indicate that even like preliminary beginnings of an interplanetary war would lead to what we see today as just being all out destruction.

Another poster named Chris Rapier argued that the mass movement of troops and equipment that were used to in warfare, it just isn't feasible in space, regardless of whether it's interstellar or interplanetary. So it probably wouldn't involve us like having vast fleets that moved through space because it's too expensive,

and the fleets would be like huge targets. They'd be super vulnerable, right, So, like again like Star Wars, like I'm thinking of like the stuff, the Clone Wars stuff right where they've got these like big ships that are dropping all these clones stormtroopers on planets and they're then they're entered, they're engaging in these massive battles, right Like those ships would just be like huge targets from so far away because the theoretically the planet's technology would be

able to detect them and shoot them down. Yeah, Like this is a classic example of the Star Wars. What you have essentially is World War two in space. Like it's a it's a futuristic take on that level of warfare. And warfare technology, and that leads us to possibly the most disturbing study I've read in all of my time on stuff to blow your mind, the lethality of interplanetary warfare. That's right now to set up, let's talk just a

minute about colonialism. So, in order for planetary expansion to take place, something very much like colonialism has to occur. We can think, I think we're all on board with this concept. Right, you have to discover, you have to explore, you have to settle, then you colonized and the colony grows. But then we know what comes next. Rice, Right, in the case of of so many colonies here on Earth,

there's this there's a more gradual easement of ties. You know, there's a there's a there's a long process, a a long divorce that occurs between colonial master and colony. But especially since we're Americans, it's impossible to avoid the American Revolutionary war model. And this, of course is when the former British colonies waged war against the British Crown in order to gain independence. So autonomy. Yeah, so we might logically look to the possibility of the colonized Mars for

ideas on how this might go down. And in the expanse, we go into the book, uh, into the books, into the TV series with an independent Martian state that's ruled by the Martian Congressional Republic and uh. In the back story here, there was an attempt to succeed by the Martians and it nearly came to war. But then the Martian forces, the forces developed the Epstein Drive that already mentioned. They had to. They developed it first, and they game

technological superiority. So suddenly they had the advantage over Earth. With this technology, they could travel faster, uh, not as fast as White but like the they had the fastest ships in the Solar System. So then they reached out to the U N and they said, hey, you need this technology too, Why don't we just trade. You give us our and our independence and you can have the

steam drive as well. This is why when the show begins, basically like when we see like these super fast like fighter kind of ships in outer space, people just automatically assume, oh, it's got to be the Martians because they're known for having both the fast technology and stealth technology. They took an unprecedented technological leap, like nothing god like, but enough

to where it prevented outright war. Now, one of the big areas too of consideration here when we are comparing the Revolutionary War to any of these sci fi Martian examples, is that the Revolutionary War and entailed late eighteenth century military technology, and at the time it took four to five weeks for a vessel to reach the United States from England. So that brings us to this paper. Robert really sets us up because colonialism is important to the

argument that's presented here. The authors their names Crawford and Baxter Ian A. Crawford and Stephen Baxter. Baxter or some of you may be familiar with he is a British

hard sci fi author. They basically argue that because of the confinement necessary for life supporting facilities in space, any kind of revolution against a governing body like what we you know, we think of with the American Revolution, or like what is sort of set up as the preface for the Expanse, it would be hazardous and basically impossible because of the energies wielded by interplanetary cultures. Any war like this would be just absolutely catastrophic and it could

threaten the entire human species. Yes, so the the intensity of the weapons has changed. But one area where revolutionary war on Earth versus on Mars uh one area where it lines up kind of nicely is that that issue of distance. Because you think about about the distance between Earth and Mars um it varies. We have these things called Mars oppositions. Uh So Mars and Earth, the distance

between the two it's it's constantly changing. The maximum distance between the two planets is a colossal two hundred and fifty million miles with the Sun between us. The average distance is more like one hundred forty million miles. But the closest popular possible distance is a tantalizing thirty three point nine million miles. So the closest we've come to that window in in recent history was two thousand threes Mars opposition of thirty four point eight million miles, but

in July. But on July two thousand and eighteen, coming up, that will give us thirty five point eight which which ain't ain't bad at all. Were get going, yeah, and we won't see anything like that again until and then only by four hundred thousand miles. So I know these are big numbers to throw around, but the basic idea here is that that even in the future, there is still an enormous Atlantic Ocean between colonial Master and Colony, and it's an Atlantic ocean that shrinks and expands depending

on on planetary rotation. And think about the resources that you would need not only to uh have such a venture take off, but also to accommodate such a venture on such a long journey. Yeah, so, and it was basically Atlantic ocean and the Earth to Mars void wouldn't be that different. A hundred and fifty to three hundred days to travel to Mars based on current in your

future propulsion. But again that's that weaponry, as you mentioned, that's where it's going to be different because we live in a world of the w m d s and most terrifyingly of all, we have that mutually assured destruction. Nuclear weapons alone put an entirely different spin on the possibilities for interplanetary war. And we should mention that in the Expanse, it's established in the first episode that they

have nuclear weapons and they use them in space. Yes, Now that that paper we're talking about by Crawford and Baxter they point to, So it's a really cool paper. If you get a chance to to read it look it up. They point to several different sci fi examples, but they they mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars novel because it highlights that an un terraformed Martian civilization would

be highly susceptible to attack. So all you have to do is crack the dome, damage the environmental support system. There's a part in the novel where high oxygen levels are introduced into a dome enclosure so that they can flash burn everything without damaging the infrastructure too much like total recall. Yeah, yeah, and uh and the yeah total recall I think provides a nice hostile um view of what Mars colony could, in broad strokes be. Uh, it

would be vulnerable to attack. All you'd have to do is just attack the infrastructure, and that it includes not only any domes or cities on the ground or under the ground, but also orbital space elevators other things that are key to maintain this umbilical core between a planet that is that only has like just a small amount of life on it and the the life sustaining home planet.

So again, like not only would the ships that would be necessary for warfare between planets be crazy vulnerable, but then like the actual systems that keep us alive out there would also be incredibly vulnerable. So you're just looking at like, you know, total destruction. And to call back to our Rods from God's episode, um, kinetic weapons alone would prove devastatingly effective against the planets surface, So you wouldn't even need nuclear weapons in this scenario. Yeah, and

so let's just touch on this real quick. But Robert and I had an episode last year on this that again was very disturbing, but it is essentially about the idea of uh to dropping huge items. In this case, I think they were metal, metal telephone pole sized beams from outer space on targets on Earth that would have the yield of a nuclear weapon in terms of like

how much energy is exacted upon their target. Now, space weapons and vehicles are already being developed in the United States and other nations so that we can establish supremacy and outer space. Right. Much of this we know this. It came from the Cold War and the need for a missile defense system in space. Uh and and that's where sort of the Rods from God idea came from. If you go back to that episode, we talked about um. I believe his name was Pornell. He was the one

who sort of pitched this theory. And again he was a science fiction writer who essentially ended up working for the United States government. So when you see stuff like the expanse, it's not all that uh, it's it's not all that unfeasible that you know, these guys might be coming up with ideas that are used in future incursions.

So Crawford and Baxter in their paper, they bring this to the front of their argument, beginning with the War of Worlds and the idea that in that the Martians could have just totally destroyed Victorian England with simple kinetic energy bombardment from outer space. The only reason they didn't is because they wanted to colonize the planet. They wanted

something left over. Yeah, I mean because one of the things about Rods from Gods that we that we that we covered in the episode was that the reason it wasn't a feasible um weapon system for modern humans is that you have to get that stuff into orbit. You have to have orbital dominance to then drop these weapons. But if you're a space faring civiliza, if you're just an interplanetary civilization leaving Earth going to Mars, you already

have orbital a dominance exactly. Just having the ability to travel in space at an interplanetary level allows you or others to subvert space travel technology and turn it into kinetic weapons. And this is where it gets super disturbing for me. This proposal is exactly what was done with

airplanes on September a leventh in two thousand one. So, for example, the kinetic energy of our current International Space Station's orbit that is equivalent to three keylow tons of t n T, and that is nothing compared to the energies of inner planetary craft that we may have in our future. By Crawford and Baxter's estimation, the kinds of ships that we see flying around in the Expanse, they would have the kinetic energy equivalent of the energy release

in an all out nuclear war. It really, really that's super scary. The idea that like anybody, whether it's the civilization that possesses that technology or maybe like a in in the case of it could happen in the expanse world, right like a terrorist organization takes over some of that technology just flies a ship into a planet. It would utterly annihilate the human civilization that's there really makes you

think a little bit more. On that episode that we it on the cases against Space and like all the arguments about why we shouldn't travel into space, I don't remember this being one of them. Like just the simple fact of us creating the technology that would allow us to travel between planets could be subverted to destroy humanity. Yeah, Like there's a proportional scale for a technological creation. So

an automobile is also a murder weapon. An airliner is also a weapon of mass destruction, and therefore you can extrapolate that and just say that, Yeah, spaceship is a weapon of genocide. Totally have used in that direction. Yeah, I never even thought about that before. I mean Star Wars. Just think about Star Wars. What if Han Sola just like flew the Millennium Falcon at warp speed into the Death Star? Yeah? Well, I mean isn't that how the

President deft the Aliens and Independence Day? That need just fly? Yeah? Yeah, not a spaceship. I think it was like an and And I also never saw the sequel that came out last year, so I don't know he's in it, but I think how he and he died. No no, no, no, no, maybe Randy Quaid. It was Randy Queen flew it up. Uh we we so quickly forget the sacrifices of Randy Quaid. Um, this all comes back to real basic like strate strategy in terms of warfare. Right, So, a higher location has

always been strategically important in war. It provides an advantage to whichever side has it. Uh, Robert and I and those of you who are dn D player whos would understand this is simple dn D mechanics, Right, You get a plus two to your role if you're above your opponent and they are prone. So, thinking about it on a larger scale, if you're in outer space and the

planet is below you. You know, even though we've been talking about how vulnerable those ships would potentially be if they're on a suicide run though, or or even if there's nobody in it there just you know, remotely flying this thing into a planet, it's absolutely devastated. I think that in modern D and D rules you would get an advantage on your role fifth edition. Yeah, that's true. Um. As such satellites have become really valuable just in terms

of our modern warfare. For deploying troops. Right, this is where we got GPS from. We all have GPS on our phones now and it's the greatest thing ever, right, But it came out of determining what soldiers bearings were using a constellation of satellites, and satellites can also be used as weapons to shoot down terrestrial missiles. This is the whole idea of the other Star Wars, the one that Ronald Reagan in the United States established the Strategic

Defense Initiative. Yeah, the one I remember as a kid getting they would have My parents would have the news on and they would be mentioned a Star Wars and like it's happening. They're talking about Star Wars on TV and they're like, no, not something different. The same thing happened to me. I imagine like our parents generation was incredibly frustrated by that branding effort. Uh. It's developing basically

as enterprises try to take commercial advantage of outer space. Right, Like, like in our business, Robert and I are constantly reading press release is about what Elon Musk and other people are doing in terms of like sending commercial ships up into outer space. But likewise, it would be really easy to disrupt the economic advantage of a nation by attacking its enterprises in space with things like lasers or particle beams or space planes, which has all been proposed in

actual warfare here on Earth. This isn't science fiction. And remember, as we've talked about in previous episodes, we talked about it a lot in our Star Trek episode. We are currently operating under the Outer Space Treaty of nineteen sixty seven. This is an international agreement that we won't put weapons of mass destruction in orbit, nor will we build military bases on celestial bodies like the moon. But it's vague enough in its language that the area that's just above

Earth but not in outer space is accessible. So how do you then? The other question too is how do you define what a weapon of mass destruction is when you're placing it up there and that that sliver right if anything like it doesn't we've we've presented here. It doesn't have to be a nuclear device. It can just be a It can be the satellite itself, so it can be a bunch of telephone poles. So Crawford and

Baxter they sum it up like this. Here, I have a couple of quotes from the paper, They say, quote, the huge energy is routinely deployed by a culture capable of interplanetary travel on a large scale would make war potentially hugely damaging. The kinetic energy of a Mars transport craft would be equivalent to a one megaton nuclear weapon or and presumably would be capable of inflicting great damage on a surface colony or a world like the Moon

or Mars. A craft capable of fast transport to the outer planets would acquire a kinetic energy comparable to a major nuclear war or to a significant asteroid strike that could inflict global damage. So the closert civilization comes to that first rung of the Kardashian scale, the more technologically

trivial extinction level offense becomes. Crawford and Baxter uh tell Us quote Our conclusion is that he is that human affairs in an extraterrestrial context cannot be conducted through warfare, which is more likely to destroy the contending cultures and perhaps extinguish mankind altogether, than to lead to any desirable

political outcome. And their end argument is that before we start cruising around in space, we need to establish a political framework that guarantees colonial liberty without recourse to conflict.

This is what really what it comes down to. And almost all of these studies that we've talked about in this episode, when you're looking at war, whether it's how war was conducted, how it is conducted, or how it might be conducted, the essential reason for it is what can we do to keep peace to make sure that this doesn't result in the district auction of our species. So we've been talking about war, We've been talking about

the interplanetary war. Let's let's come back to the Expanse and discuss just how the Expanse stacks up to these various ideas and predictions and commentaries. I think, by and large, based on what I've read, what I've seen on the show, I've I've I've gotten to see the premiere episode for season two and it's and it's really good. I think that the Expanse sticks to most of these ideas exceedingly well.

Remember in the show that the Mars Earth conflict almost resulted in a war, but that martianal leap and technology with the Epstein Drive that ceased open hostilities. The resulting Cold War threatens to go hot again, but the more rational players in the game realize that such an open

armed conflict would likely prove catastrophic to both sides. There's even a conversation between two Martian characters in the premier episode of season two that explores this very notion, and the Expanse also limits the conflict to our soldar system and an acceptable realm of influence for one power such

as un Governed Earth UH to play a major roll in. Now, while the the UN doesn't exercise such absolute power in the show, we can see where it conceivably could, But we can also see how crazy it would be to expect them to control anything more than they already exert control over like they're already they've already lost Mars and are struggling to maintain the belters UH. You know, it's it's inconceivable that they would be able to control anything

beyond that. And on that note, we now are really lucky because we have an opportunity to talk to Nuren Shankar, who is the executive producer on The Expanse. He's one of the show's writers, and like I mentioned at the top, he is also a science advisory as a background in engineering and physics. So we're gonna see what he thinks about these effects of war, and we're also going to take the opportunity to talk to him about how science

is portrayed in the expanse. Can you start by telling our audience about your science background before you got into the entertainment business. My understanding is you have a PhD in engineering and physics. Mm hmm, that's right. Um. Yeah, I had kind of a weird trajectory coming into the

entertainment business. I started at Cornell University as a as a liberal arts student, and a couple of years in I was I was studying like medieval studies and French literature, and a couple of years in I decided to transfer into the engineering school, which most people transfer out of UM, because I, you know, I always loved science and math and and frankly, you know, the job prospects of a medieval studies major work were somewhat um limited and uh,

and so so I transferred into applied to engineering physics at Cornell, and I actually stay all the way through to U through graduate school to get my my PhD. And what started happening though, as I was in the process of doing my dissertation, I started just taking tons of courses in history and literature again because I missed it.

And I and there was a moment when I was actually I was leaving this amazing lecture and taking a great course in the history of American foreign policy, and I walked out of the hall and and I was heading back to my lab. I was just like, man, I don't know if I can go back to this, and you know, it's a It was just a weird circle for me. So I kind of came back to what I had originally wanted to do. But I finished

my thesis and um. When I was done, I almost got a job at Apple, which I would have probably taken. Um and UM. And I had a couple of friends who were out in in Los Angeles lists that I've got to college with, and they were breaking into the entertainment industry and always done a lot of creative writing, um,

you know, through the years. And I said, come out to l A and b a screenwriter, And I said, sounds great, and I just kind of threw some some suitcases in my current I drove out to l A. Well, I'm sure that all the research that you've done though with history and especially in medieval studies played into the screenwriting right absolutely. And and it's what's interesting is that people, you know, I I tell the story to people and they go, boy, here you know where your parents upset

that you know were you were? You upset that you know you wasted your education. And I go like, well, you know what, if you get educated properly, Um, it's not a waste because it allows you to approach really complex projects like you know, especially you know when you're a physical sciences major, really digest material, know how to do research. It's like all of those things come into play, um in what I do now. It's it's it's a

complex business making its television show. And you're right, all of those things that the history and the literature, they inform everything that we always do. And um so I think I sort of weirdly or just fortunately kind of landed in the thing that I'm suited for. Um So, uh, it's a it's a it's a very enjoyable business for me. I get to exercise the technical engineering side of my brain and then the purely creative side of my brain. So it's it's it's kind of a nice happy medium

for me. Well, it definitely shows in the Expanse. I know that you've worked on a lot of television shows before this, but you were talking about those complex projects, and it really seems like the Expanse takes the realities of physics in space seriously for far more than most science fiction television shows. I think our audience would be

interested into how your team treats those realities. And you know, how does the writer's manage that, How much research goes into you guys choreographing scenes where ships or characters are are operating in zero or low gravity. Well, you know, I think you know that really the credit for that is it's baked into the books because you know Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham, who are collectively James say Query who wrote the Expanse novels. That was that was the

approach that they took. They wanted to write something that that had, you know, at least approached the reality of what life would be like in space, and so they thought these things through extremely deeply. Um. I think what happened was when when I was brought in to run the show. Part part of what attracted me to the project was that approach, because you know, I worked on Star Trek the Next Generation. I've done plenty of science

fiction over the years. You typically run away from things because they're too hard to does, or you think that people think that they're boring, or the shows are not really about spaceships and and and living in space their metaphors for other things, and so people apply you know, I mean, like let's let's ta battle starts Galactic for example, I show that I absolutely adore. I think it's a masterpiece.

But the space, the way they use space in that show was classically World War Two engagements in the Pacific. That's how the whole show is made. That's a because in the episode we were talking about Star Wars is being very similar that they use is I mean, I mean Ron even run more even you know, he he wanted that sort of newsreel footage realism and it was applied to to you know, extremely good effect in that show.

But the show is about other things. And what when I came at the experience, the thing that I thought would be interesting is embrace the concept of space, says a character, because I hadn't seen that done before. Embrace zero gravity, Embrace thrust gravity, Embrace all of these things. Because it distinguished it from other you know, other uh you know, attempts to do that sort of other other science, which that just completely ignored it because they were too

complicated to understand or too weird or too difficult to produce. UM. And and I think it gave us, It has given the show a really unique quality, and everybody seems to respond to it, um because it kind of feels real, you know, and it just and and we don't comment on it. It's not like it's not a um you know, it's not piled with jargon, but it feels like it's it's a more realistic depiction of the environment than people

have typically seen. Um. You know. And with regard to how the writers treated I mean, what ty Thy, Frank and Daniel, you know a ton of science and Tie in particular has thought out the battle and the technology to an incredible extent. So he's a you know, those guys are walking encyclopedias in the writer's room. They're part of your absolutely, yeah, and that's a very unusual thing as well. But you know the rest of the writers, they're not about science. Mark Mark Ferguson, Hawk Gosby, who

wrote who wrote the pilot. Um, they're not They're not science guys at all. But I feel like writing, putting together a writing staff is is like casting the show. You find the right balance, and we haven't. We had a very very unusual writers room. We had Robin Visz who was on Madmen for many years. We have dand No Racks, who was on The Killing for many years.

We have all these people who have never done science fiction before, and and then just trying Daniel who written the novels but they've never really worked in television before. And then there's me, And so that balance has I think hopefully pulled the best out of all of those people from those different different places and put it all into the show and made something I think is actually

quite unusual and special. Yeah, we actually in the episode itself address this, just saying how much we like the show and that not only is it you know, as as people who do a show like ours our podcast is it is it really interesting on a scientific level, but also that just like the craft of writing of story,

of plot of character is all there and just really strong. Um. And from my part, I have to say, like, even though I do a podcast like this, I always really enjoy this ship maneuvering because it's it just seems like an intuitive level, it's working the right way, Like there's something about it for me, the way that the ships are moving. It feels so real and I it connects me to the the alex character a little bit more to like, Oh, look at what a great pilot this

guy is. He's so casually just like steering this behemoth around. You know, Well, we have a we have a great scene coming up in uh late in season two where we were it's it's not in the books really, but it's some alex Is is hiding behind a moon of Jupiter while the rest of the gang is on Ganymede station and and he has to get down to them, but there's patrols all over the place. So what he does is he plots a a swing shot de orbital trajectory from where he is and just whips around a

bunch of moons. Now it's super fun to look at when you actually we actually look at the distances involved in the time it would take to do it, it's ridiculous, which is larger the seas and a ridiculously long time. So it's like, you know, it would take him like, you know, six months but that doesn't quite working at all.

Was a joke, but conceptually we're totally on point. Um, so I we we've got a lot of you know, we end up doing that a lot, but where it feels real, you know, And then I think that's that is really the key test at any of these things, where you know what, there's a moment. There's a moment in in the pilot where I wanted a particular shot. It was when, um, remember when the little the little spaceship the Nights that the guys took from the Canterbury

they go to find the derelict ship there is. Yeah, so we're looking at the visual effects of those, you know, and I was kind of and it was like it's kind of boring, and I said, you know what, why don't we why don't we have that ship flip, you know, flipping in into like just that last bit of the deceleration burn and the engine plume kind of lights up

the ship. That's that there's and it is so beautiful when you see these little maneuvering trusters fire and these ships kind of turned slowly, and and then you know,

it's like I find it very beautiful. I mean, all of the ship movements and all of that stuff is really you know, we spend a lot of time, you know, talking about you know, the specifics of how they're gonna look, how the shots are gonna be, you know, how we're going to convey scale, and how we're going to deal with you know, relative speed that's like, and just how the camera needs to move. It's it's it's a whole the whole thing is really it's really fascinating. Um. You

don't get into these conversations a lot in in other shows. Yeah, well I think it again, like I think it shows definitely and it's yeah, I mean, I'm just I'm always impressed by it. Yeah, and I'm thinking back to the scene you're talking about too, and just like it's like ballet and space with ships. That's that's what it was. And it's really you know them It's funny when you go back, like you know, in the history of movies to to look at shows that have treated this kind

of stuff. Is you know, the one guy who got it right was Kubrick in two thousand and one. We bring we bring up two thousand and one in the episode as well. Yeah, it's like, well, and and yet in popular culture people remember like movies like you know, Outlander where somebody's helmet you know, gets peers in their head explodes and so so you know, so we've actually, you know, any time there's a moment that we can do this sort of stuff to sort of show real space,

I try to take advantage of it. There was a moment on I think an episode sixth last season where the rock Hoppers are out of the belt and the guy's having a problem with his helmet and he just flips open the visor and he brings out and you like pulled the wire up and he closes it. It's like, yeah, you can survive in a vacuum. These guys would that that's not a big deal for them, and it was just and I was talking in the room, was like

like what don't there they had explodes? Like no, and but but anyways, it's like some things like that, I think are the touches that are really really fun and m I remember when I was first reading a Vibe and wait, the moment I realized I want to do this show. Is that scene in that compartment where Chet's head gets blown off. Yeah, it was like I was, like, I've never seen that before, and that's that's pretty close to what's in the book actually, almost like sort of

beat for beat. Now, speaking of the books and the various scientific details, and the authors do a terrific job of working all of these, not not only the big scientific ideas, but they're just the casual science grounding and all the minor details and flourishes, like particularly I think of the moss whiskey, the that grown beans, and the

various workplace a pails that are encountered. Um, I can see where was Certainly all the having all these elements at your disposal are helpful and bringing the world to life on the screen. But is it ever I mean, is it ever challenging? You have just all sorts of references that you wish you had time to fit in. Yeah, we we do, actually, and we create so many more

than you see. Sometimes it's like we would, you know, we don't, like you know, ads that are playing on TV screens for that grown beef and barbecues and like all of this stuff and moss whiskey, and you know, we do as much as we possibly can. All of that stuff is there in the books and so we try to pull it out as much as possible because I think that those things give real texture to the environment.

UM and and all of those details and aggregate when when you keep touching on them, when you don't comment on them, it just makes you feel like you're in a different place. It's like when Miller, you know, kind of pours a little whiskey, but he's so used to Coreo list that he just kind of throws it at an angle and it just kind of drops into a

glass and in a little spiral. It's like, yeah, we never shows never do that, and it's an expensive little effect and like, but to me, those are the touches that distinguish, and those are the things that really take

the show to a different place. And people always notice now thematically speaking, um getting into into the books versus the TV Leviathan Wakes published almost seven years ago, and the series we've seen, I mean, basically the first season in the second season come out on on either side of of a rather pivotal political election here in the United States. We're currently looking at so much international political

change as well, so much tension and anxiety. What has it been like to help manage the expression of this particular sci fi vision during the midst of all of this. Well, you know, let's see, I'm trying to think when we started, when we started development of season one, I think in so that was like, um, yeah, I think like April is when we started, and and so yeah, I mean, you know, the politics of that they have been cooking underneath it ever since. Um. I don't know if it

was so much you know, directly influenced it. But there's a theme in the books that we have been very conscious of since the very beginning, and that's about tribalization, and that certainly seems to be you know, something that is extraordinarily relevant right now is that this notion now the moment people start identifying another group of people as the other, as defined by different beliefs or skin color or shape or size or whatever, that that's when problems

start happening all about human history. When you can say we're like this, they're not like us, therefore we don't have to like them. That's how Wars begin. And and it's definitely, um a kind of a deep theme in the show because one of the one of the things that we've tried to do is you know, we've kind of mixed people up, um Tie and Daniel always said, like, you know, the people who go out into space not just going to be you know, Caucasian, you know, Cornfred Nebraska,

boys from from the United States. It's gonna be Indian and Chinese and everybody. And the show has done that. And yet the Belters are identifying as different than Birthers, who are definitely defining themselves as different from the Martians, and the same kinds of problems are happening. So even though we've gotten out into space, we've colonized portions of the Solar System once again, we're back at that place where human beings are tribalizing and seeing each other as different,

and that way leads the conflict. Nurine, It's like you read our notes for the episode before we called you up here, because we we literally mentioned other ing in the episode as one of the main causes. Yeah, yeah, and and and the diversity in the show and showing that, you know, how colonization would work out as something we speak to as well. Um. Our episode is focused on the concept of interplanetary war, and then we use the

universe of the expanses like a reference point. But in that universe, you know, uh, what are the causes leading humanity to these wars? You know, we what we've seen so far, at least in season one, it seems to be mainly economic in nature. But but like you were just talking about, it seems that there's also a theme here that human nature leads to war no matter where we are. I think the truth of the matter is it's both of those things that when they happen simultaneously,

that's when starts to blow up. I mean, you know, human nature is human nature. You're always going to have it. But if you you know, if you have bad feelings and bad ideas occurring in times of economic stress or deprivation or you know, resource constriction, that is a that is a recipe for disaster historically, and you can you know, we have talked, we talk a lot about history in that room. Tie is like he's gotta you know, he's

got an encyclopedia knowledge of Roman history. We've also talked a lot about you know, when I first sat now went with the stuff, I talked a lot about The Guns of August, which is which is Barbara Tuckman's book about the beginnings of world War one, and it was like this these you know, these little domino is that just kept knocking into each other, tiny events that led to a cataclysmic event. And we took that approach um through season one and into season two. Is you know,

we're building to war. It hasn't quite come yet um in the show, but it's coming. It's like all of these little things, misunderstandings, misapprehensions, information that doesn't get communicated properly or gets misinterpreted in an odd way that makes somebody look bad that I think that's how war has happened. Um. And you know, I'll it take to somebody pushing a button or pulling a trigger. Um. And and so we've we've adopted that concept in our story time. Well it's yeah,

it's compelling for sure. Yeah, I guess this. Thanks thanks once again for taking the time out of your day to chat with us and uh and for your work on what has been a very entertaining and thought provoking science fiction television series. Well, thank you guys so much. It's really our pleasure. And now we we're we we love the show. Everybody involvement loves the show. We want you know, we're we are just want people to get

out there and see it. It was an interesting trajectory overseason one that, you know, the little further we got along and now we're on Amazon Prime streaming and we're on Netflix internationally. It's like people are discovering it now and it's great to see that because you know, it seems across the board people are really responding to it, and I think they're going to be blown away by season two. It's uh, it's it's got some amazing stuff coming down the pike. So people know we're on the

air of February one, all right, So there you have it. Yeah, The Expanse is a really really cool show, really cool book series. Uh. I highly recommend it. I think they play remarkably well with real science, with real cultural and political concerns in a way that entertains you but also keeps you thinking. Yeah, on top of like everything we've mentioned,

it has great characters and the storytelling is smart. It's I've binge watched the first season with my wife in less than a week, and I'm very excited about the second season. And if you're if you find yourself though more concerned then entertained by some of the more depressing subject matter in this episode, I'd like to highlight a group that we've highlighted before, and that is the Arms Control Association. You'll find them at arms control dot org.

They're founded in nine and it's a national, nonpartisan membership organization dedicated to promoting public understanding of and support for effective arms control policies. Through its public education and media programs and its magazine Arms Control Today. They provide policymakers, the press, and the interested public with authoritative information, analysis, and commentary on arms control proposals, negotiations and aggrievements and

related national security issues. So no, no matter what your level of interest, they have something for you, and you can donate at their website to help support their work to keep keep nuclear war and and war in general UH relegated as much as possible to the pages of history and fiction and science fiction. Yeah, it's certainly going to need to be the kind of group that we

embrace before we go into space. And I didn't need for that to rhyme, but we we really need people to think about philosophical and political frameworks before we invent this technology because of what we've discovered in this episode. So all that said, we'd like to hear from you. Are you a fan of the expanse. How did our depiction of future warfare or the causes of warfare over

the courts of history line up with your notions? Let us know, and I have a feeling that some of you are going to have strong opinions about this, especially after I read that Cora threat and I saw all of the various ideas of how people are thinking already

about what the possibilities of interplanetary warfare are. The places that you can reach out to us our Facebook, Twitter, Humbler, and Instagram, or you could find us as stuff to Blow your Mind dot com and you can always send us an email at blow the Mind at house to works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. Remember