Warfare has been so common through the last several millenia on Earth that it might be thought to be inevitable that it would occur on all exo-planets with thriving alien civilizations. The killing of other individual aliens and the destruction of their property, on a large scale, can be motivated in many ways. It might be the equivalent of envy, hatred, greed, love of destruction, desire for power, wishing to spread one's world-view or religion, fear, and likely others. Since there are so many reasons for having a war, wouldn't there necessarily be some?
The antecedents of mankind's love for war might be their evolution as hunters. Killing large game and killing other aliens is not so much of a jump in direction as eating only fruits and vegetables and then starting to kill other aliens. Can only omnivores evolve intelligence and eventually a civilization, or could herbivorous creatures do so as well?
Perhaps this question should be asked in a reverse manner. Can herbivores who develop tree-climbing ability and then grasping appendages stay herbivores, or would the ability to reach nests start them on the path to eating eggs, newborn animals, young animals, and lastly full-grown animals? Raiding nests on the ground might start them off on the same evolutionary track. Given the nutrient value of eggs and young animals, this track provides significant advantages, and therefore it is likely that such creatures would not stay herbivores, but would evolve, step-by-step, into hunting animals, and then into tool-using hunters. This is the likely step before killing one another, and then as groups form, so does the concept of warfare. Warfare is therefore likely in the history of most alien civilizations in the galaxy.
Technological determinism says that society is shaped by the level of technology it has achieved. Warfare, as one feature of society, is also determined by technology, and as technology travels from stone and wood tools, to metals of ever increasing strength-to-weight ratio, to combustion in various forms, and onward to machinery, so do the tools of war. In the later stage of the industrial era, on planets with uranium in the ground not already decayed into too much U-238, nuclear weapons should be invented, and then the society would quickly realize the disutility of weapons of so much destructive power and requiring so much expertise to use.
There is likely an overlap between the genetic era, when biology is being understood in many of its details, a precursor to genetic technology, and the last stages of the industrial era, that of electronics, automation and robotics. Breeding of plants and animals would have been proceeding for the whole age of the society, using trial-and-error techniques, and as the understanding of disease becomes widespread, the concept of bioweapons does also. One can use trial-and-error methods to breed disease organisms as well as socially useful organisms. Initially, the analogous use of bioweapons would be tried, similar to chemical weapons, such as by explosive canisters or sprays, applied on the front lines of armies, but these methods have quickly-discovered drawbacks of self-contamination and countermeasues, such as personal protective equipment.
Contagion is a more appropriate use of spreading a bioweaponized virulent organism. If one region has a particular and unique type of crop, which provides a substantial fraction of the nutrition for this region, then an enemy region could attempt to devise infectious organisms which would spread widely through the crop, eliminating its value. If the crop was annual, the yield would plummet. If it was a perennial, the productive plants would fail to grow the product, or even die. No such type of attack would work if all regions grew the same range of crops, however. Analogous arguments would work for animal husbandry as well.
If there was some unique genetic characteristic that most of the inhabitants of one region possessed, and it were possible to breed an infectious organism that would only attack those inhabitants with the particular feature in their genes, an analogous attack could be made. However, if this genetic dissimilarity is not wide-spread, or no organisms can be made to focus on one that exists, biowarfare can only be accomplished through a more organized and insidious means. If contagion is the means by which the infectious organism spreads, then the attacking society must somehow have some characteristics that allow it to be only slightly affected, which the opponent must have the opposite characteristics. If the disease is mediated by insects which live in unhygienic environments, a hygienic region could attack a unhygienic one. The reverse is obviously not true, but if there is any infection-carrying options, such as pets of some particular type, these might serve as the vectors for the disease contagion.
If the disease spreads only from dead bodies of victims, then burial details might make one region more susceptible to being the target of a biowarfare attack. However, this is something that could quickly be recognized and altered, so such an attack is problematic at best.
If the disease spreads only through direct sharing of bodily fluids, such as blood to blood, it is not likely that it could be transformed into a bioweapon. There might be the equivalent of Earth's mosquitos on some particular exoplanet, but insect control is not difficult in an industrial civilization. Thus these diseases also would not serve well as bioweapon candiates. But if the disease could spread through indirect sharing of bodily fluids, or even without bodily fluids being used on the whole transmission path, then there might be a possibility of a bioweapon. If the infectious organism can spread through touch, or live on any kind of common surface for a period of time long enough for mutiple aliens to touch it, or travel on dust particles or water micro-bubbles, then the disease could act to have a large degree of contagion.
If the attacking region has a way to prevent such sharing because of social customs or other social controls, and the target region has different customs or no ability to install social controls, then the opportunity for a bioweapon war might be possible. It would not look like any other type of war, as there would be no battleground or front lines, no armies involved in mass attacks, no industrial war machines being used, and perhaps even no declaration of war. The only thing that would happen would be one region would succumb to a high level of fatality, while another would not. Then economics would finish off the struggle between these two regions.
Could one or more biowarfare wars doom an alien civilization to collapse and never reaching star travel? This is not likely to happen, as social controls can defeat a bioweapon attack or serve as a protection of an attacker, so society might have some economic disruption during the period of the attack, but the attacker would not lose their grip on technology, nor suffer a great deal of economic disruption, and would be able to control the other region or regions and continue to pursue technology and eventually get to asymptotic technology. After this point, infectious organisms are easily controlled and no biowarfare would make sense, as antidotes and antigens could easily be generated as soon as the infection was noticed.
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