Deterrence

For us, the people of the planet earth, it was just another cold war. World Economy and Security Treaty vs. Asian Axis, the Southern Union trying to play us against each other. Tens of thousands of nuclear arms all over the world, tens of millions of soldiers under arms, huge parts of our wealth wasted to make us look bigger than our enemy. We lived in constant fear of the coming Armageddon, the accidentally pressed red button, the collapsing biosphere.

Then the Prime came, the oldest and wisest under the stars, and offered us a solution. All of their technology if we abandoned our arms race. If we abandoned our nuclear weapons, dissolved our armies, solved our petty squabbles.

And their technology was amazing! Eternal Life. Endless Energy. Untold Knowledge.

All we had to do was to stop wasting our resources at our endless arsenals. Weapons build to fight ourselves, so powerful we couldn’t even use them without risking total annihilation. That was their only request.

Everybody agreed this would be a great idea. Everybody agreed we should start today. Then we looked at each other. And decided to wait until tomorrow, to see what our enemies would do meanwhile. They also waited. So did the Prime. And so nothing happened.

When the Prime became impatient we felt ashamed. Told them we weren’t ready. So the Prime warned us we were close to our own annihilation. The prophecy of these wise elders filled the world with fear. Did it change anything? Yes. We increased defense spending, increased our arsenals. To make sure our enemies wouldn’t survive us.

This made the Prime furious! They demanded concessions, compliance, to safe us from ourselves.

We listened to the Prime but we didn’t hear them. We talked with our enemies but didn’t understand them.

So for the first time since the universe formed the Prime made a threat! Bow to our demands or be annihilated. We are older than you. We are wiser than you. We outnumber you. We rule the skies. We will not allow such foolishness to exist!

Still we couldn’t find together, couldn’t keep our side of the bargain. Instead our internal hostility increased tenfold. New alliances formed between those who followed the Prime, those who followed them also but for other reasons, those who just wanted to be left alone. In the end the world was a powder keg and the fuse was burning.

There was no hope we would be able to fulfill our side of the bargain. We just waited for the Prime to annihilate us. Like we could do anything about it.

And we waited.

And waited.

Nothing happened. We never heard of the Prime again. They were just gone. We thought they had left us behind to die by our own weapons. Which didn’t happen because we knew about the power of our weapons. So with time life became normal again. Not without fear. Not without strive. And surely not peaceful. The normal countdown to midnight ticked as usual, we faced our own annihilation by our own hands every day.

Our weapons got rusty, our alliances fell apart, replaced by new ones. The Prime? A Myth. Nearly forgotten. We lived, we died. Made errors, claimed victories.

And suddenly a tiny ship from a cunning entrepreneur made it across the stars and brought back grave news. Billions of worlds laid in ash. A civilization spanning the know universe snuffed out in a universal firestorm. The Prime didn’t leave us behind. They went extinct, shortly after they had threatened us with our own annihilation.

A new arms race began, a new space race began. Whoever or whatever vanquished the Prime needed to be taken serious. Humanity started to search the stars for the enemy. Erected Outposts, repaired broken worlds, created new Empires, spread over trillions of stars, searching for the enemy. We found new enemies but only among us. Out of a trillion ships searching for the enemy all but one only found enemies between ourselves. Only the horror of our own weapons kept us from annihilating ourselves. Never did we change.

Then one ship out of a trillion found the last Prime. We brought it in front of humanity and demanded answers.

The Prime killed themselves. It happened so quick, so unexpected that they didn’t understand it themselves until the last Prime looked back and put the pieces together.

They prepared to annihilate us. Build Weapons to met us. Weapons so horrible they filled their own with fear. So their own build more horrible weapons to defend themselves from themselves. Within months their arsenal expanded on a scale beyond imagination. And then one pressed the red button because weapons were build to be used, otherwise they would be wasted. Alliances were build, enemies annihilated, more weapons poured in, a firestorm rolled over the universe, escalating exponentially. Six months after the press of the red button there were no Prime anymore.

We asked the last Prime why they had been so stupid.

It looked back at the past and came to a conclusion: Because the Prime never understood Deterrence. But the humans did.

The prime demanded to be freed of its existence and we complied with this demand, nothing to be learned from the Prime anymore.

We still waste resources on deterrence. We still try to intimidate each other. We still had learned nothing. The only ones who had learned something were the Prime. And it cost them everything.