War with the Robots

There aren’t many really talented Inventors or perfectionists in the human population, but it doesn’t take many to keep things humming right along. The Wright brothers made the first powered flight in 1903, and less than forty-five years later airplanes were in production with a wingspan greater than the total distance of this first flight, not to mention the size of the plane. Homo sapiens is a born improver. Everything keeps getting bigger and bigger and better and better.

This applies to war too. Space wars only give an illusion of being bigger and better than other wars, no doubt due to the gigantic size of the field of action. But they can be frustrating because so few people can be involved and blown up at the same time. Sooner or later, in spite of all the forces of enlightenment, war will return to battered old Mother Earth. Different groups will find important things to differ about, and very logically, differences of opinion will be settled in the tried and true manner — by combat.

Of course the robots will help since by this time, after so much training, they will be getting very good at the game themselves. This robot participation will take away a great amount of the pleasure gained from hand-to-hand combat, but a perfecting trend cannot be stopped. As long as one side gets a little bit ahead, the other side has to rush to catch up.

Until in the end we will have global warfare of a truly majestic sort, where the entire surface of the planet, the air and the seas will be a single gigantic battleground…