We can guess what intergalactic war would look like. And strangely, it matters.

On this episode

About this episode

Intergalactic war is probably billions of years away — yet physics can already tell us how it ends. And strangely that conclusion is relevant to decisions people have to make today. In this video, Rob Wiblin walks through a fascinating analysis from researcher Beren Millidge that uses known physics — no wormholes or faster-than-light travel — to identify the only three weapons that could work at an intergalactic scale. We then unpack how to best defend against each. The upshot is that at the intergalactic scale, violence is a losing proposition. If so, the universe is most likely to settle into a stable patchwork where each galaxy belongs to whoever got to it first. Which would mean that…