The Crusades and Jihads, like every other war/conflict was never really about religion, but struggles for power and resources. Religion and political ideologies are only convenient pretexts to war.

If we somehow manage to solve the problem of limited resources, big scale conflicts will greatly diminish. And, the good thing is that we are slowly getting there. Fusion technology is getting closer to be realised, bioengineering (our search for cures for diseases and ageing) is constantly developing. Then we have the not so unrealistic concepts of nanotechnology and quantum computers that, in theory could solve many of our problems.

But of course there will always be conflicts. Humans are far to gullible not to get lured by little midgets with delusions of grandeur. And it will always be easier to blame the people on the other side of the fence for your own problems.
But somehow i just can't stop being an optimist.

Some of you have touched upon this already but unless we encounter a hostile alien race our hatred of our neighbors(especially the ones that don't return that hammer you loaned them for like 3 months now) will just spread across explore space. West vs East, North vs South, or Religon vs Religion will still be at each other's throats just to control the new resources.

The game Starlancer demonstrates this well.

IMO, the human race will have long destroyed itself (directly or indirectly) before travel between the stars (within a mortal lifetime)can be achieved.

We don't have to move anywhere we could just move the universe around us!  

No siriusly!

But what about inertia? it would take huge amounts of energy to just slow down, let alone stop these types of ships. Think how heavy they would be when you factor in armour, weapons, engines, fuel storage, power supply, ammunition and life support systems. There's also no air in space, so things like rudders and flaps used to control aircraft today would be useless, these ships would require reverse thrusters on every side to make them at least somewhat maneuverable, further adding to their weight.

Space combat would most likely be similar to how naval combat is today, large, very heavily armed weapons platforms with poor maneuverability blowing the living crap out of each other, even light fighter craft would perform more like say...an inflatable motorboat with a rocket launcher mounted to the front than X-wing from Star Wars.

Warfare between planets in space, assuming faster than light-speed (or even relatively close to light-speed) travel really is impossible, would probably never happen. Transit times between planets would be measured in months (or even years), early warning devices would pick up any approaching fleets well ahead of when they are due to arrive and the defending side would be given plenty of time to prepare themselves and add to their existing fleets. Look at it this way, would you launch an attack on a currently outnumbered enemy, knowing that by the time your forces actually get there, they'll have MORE ships than you? Unlikely.

I call dibbs on half the galaxy! Its mine allllll mine!!!!!!!

I wonder if the real question here is whether the Sol-descended people who have these hypothetical interstellar transport and warfare technologies will seem even remotely human to someone from here and now.

We're already taking the baby steps twoards dividing or re-shaping our species at a genetic level. In SF, we have examples like Nancy Kress' Beggars series, which includes a "terrorist" action that changes millions of people, making them autotrophic (like plants, able to get a day's nutrition by lying on sunny ground for a half hour).

Would autotrophic people be "human" in your book, and would a longstanding heterotroph-autotroph conflict be about "resources" or "ideology?" IMO, it would be some of both, and the crucial resource would be sentient beings.

nooooooo!
not Hillary!!! lmao

Why do people seem so scared of Hillary? she seems to be a good choice for president.

First off, this post is talking about the future so try to keep current politics out of this, we dont want a spam war on who is better for the upcoming presidential election.

I can't remember who said earlier in this post about Fusion power, but he is correct about fusion except a few detials.

Fusion power does create waste, however it is only radioactive for about 10 years (alot better than current fission power). Also it wont be 50-100 years till we have it. I can't remeber which date it will be completed, but there is a international organization between USA, Japan, France and i think UK on building a workable fusion reactor. Currently they have done it however it requires more energy than it produces to keep it going, however they are building a new test facility to test a radical new design in France that should be completed this year or 2010, cant remember. If the design works, your looking at having it in a few years, if it doesnt, maybe 10 years.

As for space travel, scientists have actually figured out how to make a warp bubble like in star trek to protect the crew from faster than light travel and making that form of travel possible, the problem is as another person stated is power generation, one of there solutions is however Fusion power.

Combat in space will be highly complicated and intense. I beleive that we will see massive new battleship like ships fighting each other, I dont think fighters will come to be a effective role until alot better tech comes out (even in the future) as even with the larger ships, you have to deal with inertia and all that fun stuff and to have a computer small enough to calculate every little course correction during a fight for a fighter would be insanely difficult.

Weapons used will most liekly be railguns, missiles and lasers, and most likely plasma based weapons.

The conflict in the future space will most likely not be between nations but between corperations. As the US government today does not actually go get resources, it hires companies to do it. During the colonization of the new world, the mother countries did not control thier colonies at first, they were companies that were sent to the americas to strip them of resources to make them richer and the mother country richer as they provided protection and got taxes. only later did the mother countries actually take over the colonies, this was in response to the fear of losing thier economic gain from them and increased hostile colonial wars. So yeah in space it will most likely be companies fighting each other for resources while nations will provide protection for the companies withing thier so called territory.

thats my view

My turn to post, yippy.

On polotics, humanities first mistake was inventing money, it is now a part of our very exsistence. kind of ironic how we have become dependent on somthing that, really doesn't exsist, its just somthing we made up in order to make trade easier. Now it has become the very core of our culture.
I am willing to bet, that this will not change, in the near or distant future. Eventualy we may reach a level at which we can practice perfect comunism (as all previous attempts have simply turned into tyrany) But thats still a ways off.
I suspect, that if we ever get off this rock, the whole colonization concept will be turned into an excuse to make more money. Because we like our money. And money is power, and we really like power.

As for space travel itsself. Once we said that humans cannot fly, now thousands of people "fly" every day.
We once thought the vast exspanse of the ocean was endless, now we have mapped nearly every square inch of the planets surface, and are working on seeing everything there is to see under water and under ground.
Once, the invention of the wheele was a great acheivement, now we are on the verge of developting nanotechnology and biogenetic engeneering. We can even create clones! somewhat flawed, but clones none the less. We aren't even far off from being able to decide how we want our children to look and what features we want to give them, before they are even born.
The problem is investing in somthing as theoretical space travel, as today, inventing stuff costs alot of money.
With no garranty that it will work, and no short term gain, or long term gain to be found that we know of, its kind of heard for a company to invest in somthing like this. If the gain doesn't come for another thousand years, why invest now? we won't get any of the money out of it?

So thats my view of it, if we ever bother to invent space travel, we will still be bound by money and greed.

And to the comment above. Railguns, not a good weapon in space. for one, you cannot fire "bullets" in space. at least not the way we do on earth. Two, objects moveing through space do not stop moveing, which makes them somewhat unstapble, as they could come raining down on a near by planet. Plasma sounds more correct, radioactive material would also work, as it would eventualy lose its energies after a while, and if it hit a planet, it would simply be absorbed.

Why don't we just leave them alone? (