What do space empires fight over?

[briggart]

Boredom. One society has become so advanced that everyone is basically immortal, with instantaneous memory backup and rapid cloning. Material losses are irrelevant and even death is only a minor inconvenience. After a few thousand years of this, people got so desensitized to this that to them war is just a break from the routine, regardless of whether this is true for the other side.

Or maybe a young generation is fed up by their stale/codified/ritualistic society and war is seen as a return to a nobler/purer/truest past, even to the point of rejecting immortality technology and looking for true death in battle.

 

[practicalm]

There are aliens in the book First Contract that hate Limited liability corporations. As good as any reason to go to war.

Other reasons in no particular order
1. To Unite a single race (2nd Empire of Man - Pournelle and Niven CoDominium - Wikipedia)
2. To Unite all sentient beings (Star Wars Empire ??)
3. For religion (Ori from Stargate)
4. For ancient artifacts (Startide Rising - Brin )
5. Philosophical / Cultural Differences (Use of Weapons - Banks)
6. Misunderstandings (careful not to get eaten by a small dog) A quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
7. Revenge (Last Angel series The Last Angel)
8. unique resource Dune
9. Because you can just fight (Klingons - The Final Reflection indicates Klingons believe an empire is either growing or dying. There is no way to be static)
10. extermination of all life (Berserker series - Saberhagen Berserker (novel series) - Wikipedia

 

[MarkB]

6. Misunderstandings (careful not to get eaten by a small dog) A quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

That reminds me of the Timothy Zahn series (I think I only read the first novel) about an alien species who were particularly vulnerable to radio waves. An unlikely scenario, but it does make for a compelling misunderstanding - from their point of view, the first thing any human vessel does when they show up is to shoot at them.

 

[Deset Gled]

That reminds me of the Timothy Zahn series (I think I only read the first novel) about an alien species who were particularly vulnerable to radio waves. An unlikely scenario, but it does make for a compelling misunderstanding - from their point of view, the first thing any human vessel does when they show up is to shoot at them.

IIRC, the Oswaft from the old school EU Lando Calrissian Adventures had an inverse of this. They were a space-borne race that talked with some sort of high powered electromagnetic emissions. The first time the encountered a small ship, they tried to talk to it. It didn't respond, so they yelled at it. Then it exploded. Oops.

 

[GMMichael]

Because one space emperor had an affair with the other space emperor's wife.

To echo those who said it before me (you know, in the brilliant posts that I didn't read because they were too long):
1984. Constant war keeps the economy moving and keeps the proles distracted. They say they're fighting for victory, but the governments are actually just fighting to maintain power over their people.

 

[Dioltach]

I've shared a wardrobe with my wife for 18 years. I can confirm that there's never enough space.

 

[RangerWickett]

I recall in the book Accelerando, there was a species of aliens that basically ran 'Nigerian Prince' scams on civilizations that were newly entering into interstellar exploration. In a universe without faster than light travel, it would offer an exchange of its technology for the cultural and artistic creations of the new civilization. You send us your copyrighted material, and we'll send you patents so you can build a hyperspace gate! Sure, it might take a few decades for the messages to travel at light speed, but once you get the hyperspace gate built, we can meet in person and trade real goods.

Except, lol, hyperspace gates are impossible. So dumb species send a bunch of valuable intellectual property and in return get some useless patents for superscience like fusion and antimatter reactors that, sure, might improve their standard of living a bit, but are old news among the interstellar community. Then the aliens get to score big by licensing all our pop culture.

 

[Janx]

Whatever you do, please, for the love of Roddenberry, do not put a population size under a billion on a planet and have them bitch about not having room to share. I swear, if I came to resettle a population whose planet exploded and got that answer from the existing colonists, I'd wipe every last one of those entitled whiners and make it the refugees new home world.

 

[Bagpuss]

This is a world building question. What’s the conflict?

So if you have a galaxy full of space empires. Say a dozen at least, each covering a big swathe of the galaxy. And you assume that:

1) space/habitable places isn’t an issue. Space is big and they’re not short of land.
2) a single resource like Dune’s spice or Discovery’s dilithium is a well-mined trope you want to avoid.
3) you want to steer clear of “species” othering: assume they’re all human and have similar motives.

How do you create constant conflict between these space empires? If indeed you can after ruling out the above?

There might be a lot of land but how much is habitable? There might be plenty of planets but if you are going with all humans that implies complex life isn't necessarily out there in space. How many have a biologicals on them suitable to grow crops? If you look at the Expanse the Belters and Mars were initially tied to Earth because it was the only source of organics, you can't grow something without fertile soil.

Control of ancient jump gates to gain access to planets. Resource rich planets, asteroid belts, stars. Access to ancient technology,

Rather than species othering, culture othering, again The Expanse is a good example, they are all human, but try to take advantage of each other. Religion, politics, philosophy, ethnicity is just an obvious external difference, the USA and USSR never got on despite both fighting the Nazis and all of those countries were predominately white. Old treaties (like what lead to WWI) that pull nations in that otherwise wouldn't be involved, the need to be the dominant empire, the need to gain independence from an empire...

 

[DemoMonkey]

An enigmatic (but real) super-race who offers unimaginable wealth and power to the civilization who proves itself worthy.

Of course, what they mean by "worthy" is not something any two races agree on.

And at least a few of them think it must mean "ascendant in conquest".