[SRI] Why "Make space not war!" shall be our leading concept
I believe this is a typical case of doublethink (referring to Orwell 1984 novel), the mind mechanism that allows to consider true and valid two opposite concepts, in two different times, according to the most convenient temporary opportunity.
No dubt that, in history, war was a factor of destruction, massacres and genocides. But wars also pushed technological advances. And the worst dictatorships favored great enhancements, namely in space: the first rocket reaching space, V2, was developed under Hitler regime. The first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, flew in orbit under the Stalinist dictatorship.
Further consideration, a similitude: when the weather is stagnating, with heavy air and oppressing humidity, a storm is very welcome, to clean the air and restore a limpid weather condition. Similarly, when the global economy is stagnating, trapped in recurrent crisis, a war will destroy redundant production, of weapon systems, mainly, but not only, posing the conditions for a general recovery and resumption.
Now, we should ask ourselves: are we sure that history will repeat itself forever, in any social, demographic and environmental conditions? Zooming on our current time, are we sure a global war will do its dirty (yet sometimes useful) job this time?
As in all natural processes (our species is part of nature), cycles repeat until when repetitions are possible, and sooner or later come to a point when the process accumulated a saturation of physical conditions, and the process ends, in some way: collapse, implosion, explosion, ....
Btw, in Ukraine there are 15 nuclear plants, and many of them were made during soviet age. Their safety is very much far from nuclear 4.0. A tremendous risk for Europe, and for the whole world.
The advent of nuclear weapons changed the War&Progress paradigm already many years ago. Many thinkers stated that, should a WWIII occur, the next war will be done by stones and sticks.
This war could trigger world war III, and is already trashing several space programmes, including ExoMars (20 years of work by thousands of researchers), and putting at risk the ISS to remain in orbit.
We could try to foresee the future, however we already made something of this kind during our last congress (SRI 3rd World Congress, 2021), when we analyzed that likely -- given the nowadays social, environmental, pandemics and resource conditions -- the civilization would not survive to a global conflict. First of all because we cannot loose billions of humans, since our human patrimony -- 8 billion intelligences -- is the needed (we hope sufficient) thinking and working platform, to try stepping to the stars.
In the unlikely case of a WWIII happy-end, another file of considerations would bring us to a more political discussion: do we really like to be still lead by military and oil lobbies? Are we happy to pay a terrible price in lives and personal prosperity of many billions of innocent good people, to allow "their excellencies" the warmongers to drive humanity and maybe, if they will think convenient, to move their greediness to space?
Wouldn't it be very much better to be lead by persons like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, ... Jeff Greason, Rick Tumlinson, Michelle Hanlon, ... Bernard Foing (:-)?
Gino Strada, the founder of Emergency, who recently passed away, said that war is like cancer. War should be considered as a problem to solve, not as our destiny. From his speech to the Swedish Parliament, when he received the "Right Livelihood Award 2015": "International leaders are failing to perform their most important duty: ensure and preserving vitality of human civilization. The biggest challenge for the coming decades is to imagine, design and implement the conditions that will allow us to reduce the recourse to force and to mass violence until they fully disappear. War, just likely deadly diseases, has to prevented and cured. Violence is not the right medicine: it does not cure the disease, it kills the patient. The abolition of war is the first indispensable step in this direction. We may call it utopia, as it has never occurred before. However, the term utopia does not designate something absurd, but rather a possibility that still has to be explored and accomplished. Many years ago even the abolition of slavery seemed "utopian", the possession of slaves was deemed "normal". A massive movement over the years decades and centuries changed the perception of slavery: today we repel the idea of human beings chained and reduced to slavery. The utopia became true."
International leaders are failing to perform their most important duty: ensure and preserving vitality of human civilization. That's true, and we well know that the only way to ensure the vitality of civilization, when we passed the threshold of 8 billion citizens, Is civilian development into outer space. A global war would not help such a process, rather it will accelerate the implosion of civilization, and likely put a tomb stone on further human evolution.
Therefore I strongly believe that Make space, not war! shall be our leading concept.