Star Wars are Unlikely

If there are ever war between planets/star systems, it will most likely be intra-species. It is very unlikly that humans would find them selves at war with an alien race, despite the fact this is a staple of science fiction (including my as-of-yet-unpublished novel Treasure of the Black Hole).

Why is this? The human race has been around about 100,000 years and have progressed to this point in that time (admittedly, a lot of the progress has been in the past 100 years). Say in 100 more years we develop faster than light technology and start exploring the galaxy. Or even in 1,000 years. Then our race would be 101,000 years old. And that is, on the cosmic time scale of a 13 billion year old universe, a blink of the eye. Humans have existed about 0.0008% of the time the universe has been around.

If we find intelligent life, chances are they will be older than us. Much older. As in millions of years older. If they have existed for, say, 0.008% of the time the universe has existed, they have been around over a million years. And their technology will be commensurately advanced. They will either wipe us out as we would a hornet's nest, or treat us like pets, or be so enlightened that they would almost be gods to us. But their technology would be so far advanced of ours that trying to fight them would be like throwing water against armor plating.

In fact, they may already know about us and have decided we're an ant hill not worthy of their bother.

So we'd better hope they have evolved enough to be benevolent and enlightened. Because I don't want to meet a Klingon with million-year-advanced technology.