The first interplanetary war begins the moment people on two worlds wake up and realize the others aren't us anymore.

Planets don't rebel, people do. And once they live on different worlds long enough, even peace may come with an expiration date.

Science fiction loves to show us tiny conflicts between planets, Earth squaring off against Mars or even against

its own moon, fleets median neat formations and armies that seem suspiciously small for planetary wars,

with a few thousand troops supposedly representing civilizations of billions.

It makes for good drama and simpler storytelling,

but it quietly cheats on the demographics, the logistics, and the politics.

A real interplanetary war is not defined by whether the weapons are lasers or railguns,

or whether the battlefield is in orbit rather than a field.

It is defined by where people live and who they think we includes.

In the early days of spaceflight, war was still being an entirely earthly affair with higher stakes.

The first conflicts involving space will look like extensions of our current politics. Someone will shoot down a satellite, someone else would jam a navigation network, or spoof a lunar mining rigs telemetry.

A country will accidentally nudge our rival's orbital platform out of its aligned lane.

These will be ugly incidents, possibly deadly, but they

were still fundamentally earth-based conflicts. The soldiers, taxpayers, and voters while sleep

under the same sky, even if some of their toys circle that sky in 8 kilometers per second.

A true interplanetary war requires something very different.

Two sides, whose people no longer live on the same mold, whose majority population,

industry, and military power are based on different planets, moons, or clusters of habitats.

Once that happens, you are no longer dealing with quarrels inside one civilization, you're

dealing with rival civilizations who both think of themselves as the rightful adults

in the room.

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