# A New Arms Race in Space: Will Humanity Survive to Reach the Stars?

### *“For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers."*

1 Chronicles 29:15

The United States has, for the first time, publicly acknowledged that it has deployed weapons in Earth's orbit, whilst keeping the intricacies of those systems classified. As unsettling as this revelation may sound, the actualization of space warfare is hardly new.

![Image Credit: ASI](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/66271e3ee6e2f69ddecaf4f9/18025483-2f57-4534-bf4e-db7d5ab1b54e.jpg align="center")

On January 11, 2007, China conducted an anti-satellite test that destroyed its ageing Fengyun-1C weather satellite, scattering thousands of pieces of debris into orbit. Russia, too, has attracted scrutiny for testing maneuverable spacecraft with robotic-arm systems capable of disabling adversarial satellites in orbit.

And even without weapons stationed in orbit, satellites remain remarkably vulnerable to terrestrial warfare. This is deeply unsettling, since satellites are so woven into modern civilization that we scarcely notice how dependent we are on them. Navigation, communications, weather forecasting, broadcasting, financial systems, scientific observation and disaster response all depend, to varying degrees, on space infrastructure.

So perhaps the meaningful question is not whether the United States has deployed its first weapon in space, but whether this is simply the first one it has chosen to tell us about. Your guess is as good as mine.

The [1967 Outer Space Treaty](https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/ourwork/spacelaw/treaties/introouterspacetreaty.html) was born from an understanding that humanity's expansion beyond Earth should not simply reproduce our terrestrial rivalries in a new arena. It prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in orbit and reserves celestial bodies for peaceful purposes. Yet it doesn't explicitly prohibit conventional weapons in Earth orbit. Within this legal grey area, major space powers have continued to develop capabilities to contest and potentially dominate space.

Is there anyone else out there to rival us in space?

For all our technological sophistication, we have yet to find convincing evidence of another intelligent civilization beyond Earth. We have listened for distant signals and scoured the abyss of an almost incomprehensibly vast universe, yet so far we have heard only silence.

Why?

The question lies at the heart of the [Fermi paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox). The universe contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, and our own galaxy alone contains hundreds of billions of stars. Against such immensity, it seems difficult to believe that intelligence arose only once, here, on this small planet. And yet, as far as we can presently tell, the cosmos remains silent.

Perhaps one possible answer lies in the [Great Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter): the idea that somewhere along the journey from lifeless matter to an advanced, spacefaring civilization, a difficult barrier impedes the expansion of life into outer space. Maybe that barrier is behind us: the emergence of life itself. I certainly hope so.

But what if the filter lies ahead?

What if technological civilizations eventually acquire powers greater than the wisdom required to control them? What if the same intelligence that allows a species to split the atom eventually furnishes it with the means of its own destruction? Perhaps the silence of the universe is not evidence that intelligent civilizations never arise, but that they rarely survive themselves long enough to become truly interstellar.

I prefer a more hopeful possibility. Perhaps a civilization sufficiently advanced to cross the enormous distances between stars must first learn something we have yet to master: coexistence. And perhaps surviving long enough to become an interstellar species requires learning that power without restraint is not progress at all. If that is true, then humanity's greatest obstacle to reaching the stars may simply be humanity itself.

Much love.