Scifi memes that fit better than World War 2

[scvn2812 504]

Something that occurred to me when talking about the Earth - Minbari war and its surprisingly small number of casualties for a major interstellar war, we always seem to default to World War 2 for our analogies of how war ought to work in the future. If it were fought like World War 2, then we ought to expect loss of life to run into the millions, even billions as starships carpet nuke planets that decline to surrender (it gets worse when you realize the Minbari originally started out wanting to eradicate humanity.) On the other hand, if it were fought more like the wars of the late 20th and 21st century so far with extreme care for avoiding civilian loss of life on a significant scale, then there is no reason for huge body counts except in the case of major disruptions of supply lines for interdependent star nations such as those who depend on dedicated agricultural colonies or primitive colonies that cannot synthesize their own advanced medicines.

 

If anything, the cleaner war is, the easier it seems for nations to make the argument to go to war. So all those border skirmishes in Star Trek and Babylon 5 that never escalate into full scale wars would make more sense.

 

I was also thinking that the geography of Star Trek would make much more sense if we dropped the pretense that the star nations of the Alpha and Beta quadrants have neat, clearly established borders rather than having core territories and then far flung outposts spread across the quadrants in much the same way the Imperial powers of the age of sail had global empires and warred at home in Europe, the New World, Asia and Africa.