lt is time we talked about a new battleground in the never ending wars between humans - this one is virtual, in the electronic arena, the Internet. For example, see this ABC News article on Yahoo News.
We battle each other on land, on water, underground, in the air, under water, in space (in a limited way to date), and now in the man-created arena of electronic space. Of course, the Internet is also the universe COTTonLINE inhabits, with a bazillion other creations.
I've tried to list those battle arenas in the approximate order in which we engaged in them. It may be that war is the most distinctive human creation or, if not distinctive, certainly the most universally applied. That thought leaves me somewhat depressed.
On the other hand, perhaps it means we humans are merely the result of a not-always-attractive evolutionary impulse to be survivors. In the often brutally competitive environment we occupy, we are honed by evolution to battle anything in our way - storms, floods, famine, predators. For much of our history many of those predators have been human.
Unfortunately, evolution must work the same way everywhere, on every planet, creating creatures who are unrelentingly competitive. When we meet ETs we should expect them to be armed and dangerous, if not immediately, soon.
Not a happy thought, is it? And if the environment in which ETs developed was more brutal than ours, we should expect them to be even more aggressive and combative than ourselves ... a thought SciFi authors have explored.
