Alien Invasion - Lets be serious for a second

i think the most likely extraterrestrial contact will be via 'intelligent" probes, no not the anal kind. these probes would only disseminate information. you have to factor in the distances involved. what is the point of gathering information if it takes you a 1000 years to get it? the idea is not to have a two way conversation but to let other possible civilisations know you are around. the sender of the probe may even have ceased to exist by the time we get it.
 
Boris2 said:
the idea is not to have a two way conversation but to let other possible civilisations know you are around. the sender of the probe may even have ceased to exist by the time we get it.
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That reminded me of a great novel.

The Listeners
Not a probe but a signal, but it was an exploration into how the world would reaction to contact and possible invasion. Carl Sagan said it inspired his own novel Contact.

The reason I was reminded was your last sentence.
 
To say "Alien invasion" and then "Let's be serious for a second" is . . . insane.

OK, second's up. Still insane.
 
Aqueous Id said:
To say "Alien invasion" and then "Let's be serious for a second" is . . . insane.

OK, second's up. Still insane.
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LOL, no more insane than many other suggestions on this forum!

Sorry, been away for a while.

I agree its unlikely, but not I think impossible. I certainly do not believe the optimist idea that any alien race will be so technologically advanced and culturally advanced that they will not want to invade/destroy us. I suggest that an alien race will be just that, ALIEN. So will have motivations and concepts alien to us. There may never be a meeting of minds.

I hope that this means that they will ignore us.

As for unmanned probes. I guess that these are more likely. That said, we can be eliminated just as easily by an unmanned probe as by a manned invasion force. (Shades of Berserker).

As for standing no chance from an invasion. I would suggest that we stand little chance, but not no chance. Any invasion will have an impossible supply problem. Will be severely resource limited. The way to succeed is to get the aliens to deplete their resources. Look at Afghanistan. The Russians lost a lot of resources there.

I still think that any technological civilisation will grow and grow until it uses up all its resources. This is why wars are fought. I agree that it would be easier to get us to give up resource X for information rather than take it from our dying hands. BUT what if resource X was something that we too valued highly and did not want to give it all away?
 
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@river --

I'm pretty sure that any species capable of travelling all the way here would have the ability to make as much gold as they want.
 
Xotica said:
A few sensible assumptions. Intergalactic space travel requires not only an understanding of physics far beyond our current threshold, but also the material resources and the engineering creativity to utilize such knowledge. Attaining such a lofty plateau implicitly requires the avoidance of technological self-destruction. This in turn implies the ability to attain goals sans violence.
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It does not logically follow that a species would be reluctant to exterminate other species simply because it's unwilling to exterminate itself. An alien race might put a very high value on its own civilization and little or no value on the civilizations of others. In fact, although its difficult to do anything other than wildly speculate when talking about the psychology of hypothetical unknown aliens, the one thing that we could probable be pretty sure of is that they are likely to value their own survival more than they value ours.
It is also reasonable to assume that such exploration will be conducted via proxy... command/navigational systems imbued with AI.

Beyond acquiring data, I can't conjur a compelling reason why such a civilization would even bother with us.
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Perhaps they wish to exterminate any possible threats to their race? That seems like an entirely reasonable motivation.
 
spidergoat said:
A very expensive exploratory vehicle from another civilization would not come here to steal our resources. They would come to learn about us. They could kill us in a matter of weeks simply by sending down some biological weapons that we have no cures for, a mutated flu for example.
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There's no reason to assume that a starship (especially a crewless one) would be particularly expensive for advanced aliens. Perhaps they have a completely automated factory that can crank out a thousand interstellar drones/day for no more expense than it would be for us to make remote-controlled toy cars.
 
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Yes, I've read a lot of alien invasion sci-fi too. It's always fun, but my favorite is an old Woody Allen stand-up shtick so old, well, from back in the days he was still doing stand up. He says (to paraphrase): 'What if a a vastly superior alien race pulled into orbit tomorrow in enormous, invulnerable star ships and they sent down 40,000 pairs of trousers and said, 'Have them cleaned pressed and neatly creased by Monday.'
 
Maybe they have somekind of wormholes that they can creat?
Also maybe they want to study us?
Or even lost their world, and Earth is closest habitable planet for them, so they decide to come here as a last hope, and take all what they have, and then try to take over.

Just some thoughts :p
 
Don't forget what will be the reaction of the world politics and military about it, even if they have come peacefully with a scout or something, they will surely try to hunt it down and have its technology, we can't trust some aliens because they said they are peacefull anyway, that's if they found away to communicate with us (inless they have studied us for some time)
 
@Shadow1 --

From what I've read creating a wormhole that's stable enough to travel through would require some amount of "negative mass" inside of it, otherwise it would collapse well before it could be traveled through(I could be wrong about this, someone please correct me if I am). Given that this, so far, appears to be impossible that means that these aliens would have access to fearsome technology indeed, technology which borders on the realm of magic. If they do indeed have access to such technology then they really wouldn't need the planet for anything, they could conceivably make a new planet if they needed or wanted one. So they would still have no reason to come here, no matter how you slice it, and even if they did want to study us, wouldn't it make far more sense for them to just take some genetic samples, go to/create a suitable planet, and populate it with humans to study? Sure would save a lot of time and energy to just do it that way, and they wouldn't run such a high risk of discovery.

In a way I would view such technology as more frightening than just "regular" FTL drives as it would represent a civilization unimaginably more advanced than our own, to the point where they wouldn't have to "try" to take over our planet, they could do so before we even had a chance to fight back(or before we even knew they were there).

So I don't really view the "wormhole drive" idea as being any more, and probably less, feasible than just punching through the light barrier, even though it's typically used by ET enthusiasts as a supposedly more feasible alternative for FTL travel.
 
Good point.
What about the survival idea, a race that have just lost hes planet, or their planet don't have much time intill it turn dead, and Earth is the closest habitable planet to them, so they take all whta is left, and come here, and try to settle down, and kill us just like Europeans did to native Americans.
 
Wayward said:
I have a crazy idea that will not go away. So I after much resistance I have decided to post it here to see if my house of cards can stand up to sensible scrutiny.

I have watched a lot of the Hollywood alien invasion movies. All of which seem to assume that the Aliens have terrible tactics. They all end up getting killed in hand to hand fighting. Why?

To my mind, if an Alien race wanted to attack us, then they would have to commit huge resources to the venture. Assuming no faster than light travel, then the Aliens will have to get here the hard way. Taking hundreds of years. So the gains have to be worth it.

They also have an enormous supply train problem. They have to bring everything they will need with them, or know that it is available here.

So here comes assumption number 1. Any alien invasion will first have scouted us out. There is simply no point sending in a significant invasion force blind.

Assumption 2. If a scout gets here and sees that we have potential, then it will send a signal home and stay here. Continuing to monitor us. Because it is sensible to have up to date intelligence on your enemy, and because the scout may have additional resources that you may need.

Assumption 3. We are more vulnerable to alien attack at our current stage of development that we ever have been before or will be in the near future. This requires a bit more explanation, and some considerable speculation.

Any alien race capable of sending an interstellar invasion force must be highly developed technically. Will have expanded throughout their own system, and will have mined and extracted and used all the minerals that they can. If they continue to expand then sooner or latter they will want to look outside their own system for the resources. Say these are the Rare Earth elements. Now would it be easier to go to a neighbouring system and try to look for these elements and then mine them, or to go to a planet that has already mined them and has them readily available.

At our current stage of development we are heavily dependent on technology, on mass farming and mass distribution. We are also only just putting a toe into space.

So any invasion force, having taken a hundred or so years to get here, will not mind taking its time destroying us. Just sit in high orbit. Throw rocks at anything likely to be a potential risk to it (airport, missile launch facility, etc) throw a few more rocks to destroy all bridges, power stations, dams, power distribution grids, and all sea ships. Then drop a enough rocks to simulate a nuclear winter and sit back and wait for disease, famine and cold to kill off the vast majority of us. After a few years they could demand whatever they want from us. It would make a poor movie, but good tactically.

Assumption 4. The invasion force will try and sneak up on us. The element of surprise is a good one. If we see them coming, decelerating into the solar system, then we can have a few months preparing. If however they timed their approach so that we were on the far side of the sun we wound not see them until they were much closer. The scout, presumably still here, would also be much closer. Perhaps on the far side of the moon, or at one of the trojan points. It could be used as an advance guard to take out any initial potential threat we could put up.

So there it is. A possible invasion plan. I apologise for being cheeky and for this being my first post, but what do you think?
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The space map betty hill drew was reworked by a new person to mean the solar system of sol and therefore each dot corresponds to asteroid travel for mining. They were mining on asteroids and traveled to earth through that trade path. Anyways they are breeding human hybrids to integrate into society thereby over-riding the need to terraform earth and destroy it's lifeforms, this way they get bioforming instead. It's simple.

And of course they will have telepathy on their side to control humanity so we are screwed sorry.
 
JDawg said:
Welcome to Sciforums!

A few problems here. One, the distances between stars is prohibitive to interstellar exploration, so this isn't ever going to happen. It isn't just a question of time, it's a question of energy. To move at those speeds for that length of time requires tremendous amounts of fuel. NASA can't get money to go to Mars; imagine some distant alien congressman asking his government to okay a quintillion-dollar-per-day mission to Earth.

Two, supposing there is some sort of workaround for this problem, we're talking about a technological society far outstripping our own. It likely wouldn't take an invasion for them to get from us what they needed. A simple virus would do, I'm sure, or perhaps some form of long-range weapon. I mean, hey, if we're allowing for star-hopping space aliens, why not gamma ray bursts from 100 light years away?

In other words, if there ever was a reason for some alien civilization to attack us, we probably wouldn't know it was happening.
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Thank you. The first assumption is always, "Do Aliens Even Exist?".
I also really like the description of the amount of energy it takes to get from here to there.

Sorry. Not trying to prove anything. I've already posted the best thing I could have hoped for, and it was for informative purposes only.

Aliens do not exist. It's possible that they do, but until we find one, we are alone.
 
How about a staged alien invasion with advanced human weaponry mounted from a distant planet using uber-speed space machines carried out by suits? Thats more likely to me.
 
This is an interesting subject - how would intelligent life distribute itself within the universe/galaxy? Much may depend on whether it's possible to traverse distances faster than would electromagnetic radiation. So, let's assume that everyone is limited to classic means of travel.
Now, go look up "Von Neumann probe" in your browser, and read up on the subject. This very simple concept may indicate that outer space is already in fact quite crowded with intelligent beings. They will have been well-adapted for an existence in space, and certainly not require (or even desire) a planetary surface to live on. They wouldn't require resources of a populated planet, with probably trillions of rogue planets to make use of, in our galaxy alone. A planet such as ours would acquire intense interest as an object of study, with many different alien species vying for access. They obviously couldn't make themselves known to the general populace, as that would completely ruin any sociological studies.
Anyhow, that's my view of our relationship with alien beings - no "take me to your leader", no malicious intent, just hands-off observation.
 
Arioch said:
@river --

I'm pretty sure that any species capable of travelling all the way here would have the ability to make as much gold as they want.
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Your smart. Better question is what would suggest there is a species able to amass the speed and fuel source necessary for such a distance of travel? How long will it take to map the universe once we are capable? What would suggest that we are the only thing evolved to this stage? Alien life is unlikely.
 
Just a thought

If the aliens were that advanced, then, in theory, wouldn't they be capable of producing their own resources from any element. If they were that technologically advanced, then it would stand to reason, that they would be able to manipulate matter, and turn what ever element they had readily available, into anything they needed.
 
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