What would you say to this man?

First, sounds like he's bitching about 40k, so let's use that as an example.

The main resource that's being fought over isn't Physical Resources, it's Sentient Life, which does live within a finite known sphere. Tyranids want DNA and organic resources, Chaos wants Humanity to suffer or convert for various purposes, Tau want all to join the Greater Good, Orks want a good opponent to fight, C'Tan want Planets with a lot of life on it, and the Imperium are Space-Nazis that want to eradicate everyone else as a matter of principle. Eldar may just want to live in peace, but that just conflicts with Slaanesh and the Dark Eldar's interests.

Second, engineering Meteors Fall, Everyone Dies means that the planet as a whole will be unusable, and you're likely killing off anything you really want down there. Hence the need for Ground Troops. Also, Exterminatus just because some Xenos landed on a decent planet is far too much of an overreaction when a couple of troops will do just fine. Especially considering that such an event would alter the environment drastically, if Earth's history is anything to go by, and that Humans are a cheaper resource than the tech needed to alter a meteor's path.

Honestly wonder why people don't think we'll need ground forces in the future. No matter how advance we get, no matter if we reach the point we can destroy planets with ease, we'll still need something physical to capture or hold objectives. Doesn't matter if it's human soldiers, or high tech robots, or bio-constructed monsters. They would all be classified as ground forces.

I'm going to assume you mean "galaxy" instead of "solar system," but otherwise Also I want to add fighting over territory is so passe. No one that's anyone does that anymore.

Also of those situations really only the Tyranids or the Chaos ones tend to warrant exterminatus regularly because they spread like a plague if not treated right.

>There is no reason to ever have interstellar combat.
Ideological, religious or trade reasons suffice, just to name a few. If Earth came in contact with aliens who were lead by tyrannical dictators, I'm fairly sure there'd be some sort of push to liberate their people.

>There are BILLIONS of planets in the solar system, let alone fight over.
There are 8 planets in the solar system, of which a maximum of 2 are habitable. In the galaxy there's a shitload more, but you're going to want planets closer to home to minimise travel time/cost.

>And besides, even if nuclear weapons are expensive you can always engineer to throw rocks at the other plant until it dies. There's no reason to have ground forces, not ever
How about if we're not intent on genocide or attacking civilians, such as in the scenario I described above?

>engineer to throw rocks at the other planet until it dies
Rocks are not free, citizen.

Dune is an interesting case where the technology level of the setting has actually made conventional warfare basically impossible. Atomics can destroy large concentrations of troops and are banned by the great convention, personal shields make most kinetic and projectile weapons obsolete, and lasguns are practically suicide thanks to the shield reaction. Rather than making ground forces 'obsolete' this has, under the Great Convention and the system of Kanlay and Wars of Assassins, transformed warfare into a baroque conflict of intrigue and schemes, carried out by small teams and directed by near superhuman computers. Interstellar combat is also impossible because the only ships capable of traveling from star to star are controlled by the same entity, the Spacing Guild (at least until after the death of Leto the Second. In the last two books Herbert wrote there are a few examples of starship combat toward the end).

If you consider the Dune Encyclopedia canon, it does mention that Houses which violate the Great Convention and defy the Imperium in particularly egregious ways ARE usually exterminated from orbit with atomics.

youtu.be/T-PxA-iDKC0?t=236

People do silly things that aren't necessarily efficient or logical.
Black Science Man calls them historically inefficient drivers, I believe.

>Tetsubo
I watched some of his earlier videos. Completely lost interest after hearing is nonsensical and uninformed review of trailblazer, and since then i doubt the claims he's made about anything else.

>BILLIONS of planets in the solar system
>BILLIONS
>solar system
Ahem. Galaxy is the word you're looking for. And decent planets for habitation are an absolute rarity, what with all the gas giants and super earths.

More to the point though, if you have something worth fighting over you usually don't want to destroy that thing in the process. And opposing forces don't necessarily consist of huge sides pitted against each other. You have factions, coups and asymmetrical warfare all the time. You NEED boots on the ground to hold and control area.

>there's no reason for x
>i have no gums
>and i must grimace

Philosophy major detected.

Any archeologist or historian can tell you that lots of ultraviolent shit went down on THIS planet for no known reason. Navel-gazing's okay in your ivory tower safe space, but telling people out here in the world that they needn't prepare for the fight of their lives because YOU don't see a threat is obama-grade faggotry.

>possible explanations include the only way faster than light travel can occur is with a gate, getting the other side of the gate to a new solar system takes fucking ages making the supply of habitable planets limited.
>no matter the amount of resources available eventually population will grow to the limit of said population and desire more resources.
>nuclear weapons and rocks destroy the thing you're fighting over, don't be retarded.
>ground forces occupy whatever it is you're fighting over

Basically he's dumb.

Population grows on an exponential scale.

Great distances are inconvenient or impractical.

Rare resources and habitable worlds are worth fighting over therefore.

The same reason aircraft haven't made ground combat obsolete. If you need an occupying force, then you need boots on the ground. The object of war is not always complete and total annihilation. Usually there's more of a point to it than that.

Habitable planets could be a rarity, and the complexities of space travel could mean that there's only a small known number. Even many potentially habitable planets could require hundreds or thousands of years of full-scale terraforming in order to make them habitable. That's a long time to wait, and makes habitable planets too precious and valuable to burn.

Assuming spacefarers have complete and total knowledge of every habitable planet in the galaxy, or that habitable planets are so common as to be found in nearly every single solar system, FTL shuttles people between these places relatively inexpensively and reasonably quickly, and burning a planet full of sentient beings doesn't raise any moral or ethical concerns for some reason, then I don't see any reason why you can't just burn planets. But that's actually a lot to take for granted.

>>Ideological, religious or trade reasons suffice, just to name a few. If Earth came in contact with aliens who were lead by tyrannical dictators, I'm fairly sure there'd be some sort of push to liberate their people.
This is the funniest joke I've heard all week

>There are BILLIONS of planets in the solar system
There's, like, nine planets, and only one you can live on. If you meant the galaxy, then yes, there are many, but not that many where human life is possible, and that are close to us.
> And besides, even if nuclear weapons are expensive you can always engineer to throw rocks at the other plant until it dies. There's no reason to have ground forces, not ever
You don't want to fuck up the world so badly that you can't live there anymore. I mean, you could, but then you couldn't get the world for yourself.

Eight. Pluto is a Dwarf Planet, and Dwarf Planets don't count. If they did then there's like 20+ because Pluto was just one of many similar objects in a belt.

By the time you have technology to travel to a habitable planet and colonize it, you'll probably have the capability to either terraform or harvest inert resources to create artificial worlds to begin with

You clearly do not understand the human condition. Despite the GALAXY having enough space for all of us, that didn't stop humans from fighting before, back when our population was barely one billion we fought just as much, if not more.

We will always fight for reasons that might not always make sense, people aren't 100% practical, and it's better that way.

>There's no reason to have ground forces, not ever

Literally every time someone ever says anything like this in any situation ever it's the dumbest most retarded shit, so I'd laugh at some greasy neckbeard thinking he has any business giving me his opinion on military, even hypothetical military, matters, and tell him to fuck off?

Well, if it's relatively easy or at least feasible for a colony or group of colonies to develop the ability to retaliate in kind you essentially have a situation that has points of similarity with the Nuclear one today. You fuck someone, they burn your civilization or big parts of it to the bedrock in retaliation.

The main difference would be that you could probably feasibly escape or would already have some diaspora of colonies and the potential for more growth if we assume a really open field for new colonies.

Not that I really buy so much of that in Hard Sci Fi or anything remotely hard. There will probably be few even habitable places, travel will be difficult (at best something like age of sail difficult, AT BEST. Like unreasonably optimistic after a quantum leap of understanding) and things will be tough.

Or I guess you could have like, Gurps Infinity stuff, but that would require some truly weird and unlikely shit. There are definite limits on what's practical in that kind of setting even though China has deported almost everyone who isn't Han Chinese in China in that setting and pretty much everyone is fecklessly looting alternate Earths for rare earth metals and easily accessible coal and surface ore and stuff.

(After all, a virgin earth that's identical to ours will predictably have places where you can literally dispatch unskilled labor to harvest gold and largish diamonds and stuff by hand, in streams and stuff, and after that, with relatively little effort in side scrape mines right near the surface. And it might even be cheaper to just go to another alternate than bother developing further.)

Of course you might also fuck up and stumble into an alternate with wonky rules of physics, or that looks empty because SUPER BUBONIC PLAGUE killed everyone in the year 400, or that has magic which lets the locals stick it to YOU, etc. Or something prosaic like yet another alternate with killer rapist Rage Virus victims (AKA Gotha Zombies)

religious war

Other than the bit about the solar system, he's correct. An spacefaring interstellar civilization will have ended material scarcity and conventional economics would collapse, leaving man to devote himself to whatever pursuits he finds most immediately satisfying. Furthermore, a civilization with this level of technology should also have VR technology and most people would have no need of interacting with the material world.

>permitting unrestricted population growth

People also forget the fact that ground forces are the most cost effective way in terms of money of winning a war.
Hitler wanted to win against Britain using nothing, but air forces. However ultimately his campaign cost so much money and man power and all they ended up doing was inspiring the entire nation to rise up against them. You can see similar parallels with the conflicts today. Every military leader believes that a war with as few of your own men's lives at risk as possible are the best, but the problem is you pay for that lack of risk monetarily and are not guaranteed success.

If the man is pic related, I would first ask if anyone ever mentioned that he looked like James Lipton on meth. Following that.

>"There is no reason to ever have interstellar combat. There are BILLIONS of planets in the solar system, let alone fight over."

Yeah, there's BILLIONS of planets in the galaxy, but how many of those are actually habitable? Most of the planets we've found are gas giants and dwarf planetoids. The planets we've found that are theoretically capable of sustaining human life, even after extensive terraforming, are quite few, which makes them prime real estate to fight over.

>"And besides, even if nuclear weapons are expensive you can always engineer to throw rocks at the other plant until it dies. There's no reason to have ground forces, not ever"
Except, again, there's not a whole lot of planets out there capable of sustaining human life. If your solution to ending a war is bombarding the other side's planet with nukes or asteroids to the point of rendering the planet uninhabitable than congratulations; you just fucked yourself out of all that planet's resources and potential for growth

Even if you don't care about that planet and just want the other side dead, nuking from orbit won't necessarily bring that. Oh sure, you'll kill a lot people, but what if the other side builds a series of hardened underground complexes to protect themselves from your assault and then fight back? Hence why, either way, you're gonna need boots onna ground to win the war.

>what is latency

>soldiers are cost effective
Not in space, where the primary problems with travel revolve around accommodating meatbags with air, food, water, gravity, and a place to shit. Furthermore, human lives in the utopian post-scarcity interstellar civilization in question are likely to be far, far more valuable than an army of robots - not that there's any real reason to build a land army in the first place.

Not relevant.

Highly relevant in VR. People get irritated by a delay of 200ms. Can you imagine what it's like to deal with a 30 minute delay?

That just avoids the problem without getting rid of it. Maybe most people would be happy to loiter in Eden and sit on their asses, but it only takes one Eve (or one Cain) to get the ball rolling.

When American was put to the choice of besieging the main islands of Japan right away or having a RACE WAR NAO across the rest of Southeast Asian, they picked the latter.

They have since then demonstrated that they will always pick the race war over the reasonable solution.

>Billions of planets in the solar system
>solar system
>billions.

I think he might not know what he's talking about, and would tell him such.

And just because there might be billions of planets in the milky way, they aren't all habitable without a lot of terraforming, and may be too far away to bother with.

He's also really underestimating human spite.

>They have since then demonstrated that they will always pick the race war over the reasonable solution.

You seriously do not understand history if you think America was the one who made the Pacific a racial conflict, of if even a fourth of US conflicts since then have had a racial component to them.

Someone needs to learn about 40k. No please tell me he's got a video on the politics of 40k.

Go to the fucking dentist.

>it's America's fault that a bunch of slopes are at each others throats

Nope. You animals will fight over anything

I'd ask him why he's trying to bring realism into fantasy. Is he also going to bring up reasons why the Force is a sham and why Space Marines are physically impossible?

I guess you could play a space game where all wars are fought with planet-busting weapons as the only threat, but why would you want to?

>even if nuclear weapons are expensive you can always engineer to throw rocks at the other plant until it dies. There's no reason to have ground forces, not ever.

ICBMs falsified this stupid air-power fetishist's hypothesis ages ago.

In interstellar warfare, ground forces would obviously be the army equivalent.
What would space forces be? Naval? Aerial? Equivalent of both?

Traveling through space is a lot easier than transforming planets.

Case and point, we can currently do one but not the other.

Also have fun building an atmosphere.

The strike-from-impunity after-superiority ethos of air power, the zone control and transport functions of sea power.