Remember last week when I talked about the inherent conflicts involved in President Obama’s idea to merge NASA with the Pentagon? Well, we haven’t heard anything new on that subject since the Inauguration, but it seems he has been thinking along related lines. Reuters reported on Sunday that the Obama administration is working on a global ban on all space-related weapons. The ban idea is mentioned on the “Defense” page of the administration’s official agenda, and it goes like this:

“The Obama-Biden Administration will restore American leadership on space issues, seeking a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites. They will thoroughly assess possible threats to U.S. space assets and the best options, military and diplomatic, for countering them, establishing contingency plans to ensure that U.S. forces can maintain or duplicate access to information from space assets and accelerating programs to harden U.S. satellites against attack.”

Since both the U.S. and China have demonstrated that it’s possible to shoot a satellite down from Earth’s surface, the “defending satellites” part of the ban is both understandable and topical. But, through the wonders of science fiction, it’s easy for us to predict that one day — possibly not far off — there will be other categories of space-based weaponry. Lasers could be fitted onto satellites, high-power sunlight magnification devices could be launched into orbit, and, eventually, photonic energy guns could be fitted onto space shuttles. I’m not saying that anyone is currently working on these things, I’m just saying that they will be someday, and once one country has it, everyone’s going to want their own.

And this is where the genius of a preemptive space weapons ban really comes into focus. Usually when someone attempts to ban a weapon globally, several armies already have stockpiles of the stuff. Nuclear, chemical, germ, etc.; sure, we have rules about them, and they don’t tend to get used all that often, but the fact remains, we have the fucking things on our planet, and it’s scary and dangerous.

But! To the best of my knowledge, nobody actually has any real space-based weapons yet. Banning the damn things now, before some country begins the sort of tests that put everyone into a Cold War-style panic, could be the best way to prevent Solar War I. This is exactly the sort of forward-thinking that I’ve been wanting from a politician all along, and my guess is that, wonderfully, we finally have a president who knows his science fiction. So, cheers to Obama, and cheers to sci-fi, for, for once, warning us about a threat before it happens.