What if?: Alien Invasion

Sn1p3r187

Sn1p3r187

Carolinian Shaolin Monk
You know. With Independence Day Resurgence coming out and me playing through XCOM and Xenonauts it kinda got me wondering. What would happen in the event of an Alien invasion in the future? How would we as humans take that we're not alone in the universe? How would we react to a sudden invasion from a small fleet of invasion parked outside Earth's orbit? Do any of you have an idea or a scenario? My scenario would be we'd be very likely under the U.N doctrine unite as an entire species to protect ourselves from the invaders. Of course you'd have idiots like ISIS who'd still want to fight a war with the Western world. But they'd likely all be dead from two factors. The U.N and the aliens. It'd be a bit of a rough alliance, more similar to a Confederacy. But it'd hold together strong enough to fight the aliens and turn every continent on the planet into a major strategic stronghold. What do you think? Thoughts?
 
I'd say humanities chances would depend on how much warning we had. If we were able to spot them years before they arrived I see us a species faring well, but if they are at a tech level where they can jump from system to system quickly or approach undetected, I'd say humans would be the new slave class for whatever species of alien arrives.
 
If that species just wants to kill us, we are fucked. A species that can travel through interstellar space, at relativistic velocities perhaps? Superduperfucked. As in, none will survive kind of fucked. Read "The Killing Star" by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski for a realistic vision on how that would work out. Not pleasant :D
If they want to invade and take the land, well, they're obviously completely retarded and shouldn't have been able to travel through interstellar space in the first place.
 
Literally nothing known about that.

Also, travelling at relativistic velocities is silly because of the absurd energy required, and also the fact that getting there would probably blow up whatever you're trying to accelerate. And still take years and years of travel even if you managed the task somehow. Also problems of time dilation and all that. (Yeah your ship is advanced now. But the time outside the ship passes much much faster relatively. At which time the thing you're getting to may not even exist anymore or be just as advanced.)

So speculatively, we would want some kind of "loop hole" or "hack" that would allow us to fold space or some crap like that to give us the apparent effects of FTL travel while avoiding the problems above. A warp drive.
But of course, we don't know if that's possible.

The other problem with aliens is that we don't really know the incident probability of life forming in the universe or the percentage of those that make it to being an interstellar civilization, or even if such a thing is really practically/physically possible (see above). It may simply be inefficient to leave the solar system ever. Just might be better to build a Dyson Sphere around your star and sing Kumbaya.

We don't know where we rate on a bell curve of all species that have ever existed. For all we know, we could be pretty up on the high end in terms of intelligence, culture and civilization. Meaning that this is about as good as it gets for life.

Basically you can't even speculate as to the composition or goals of an attacking force at all. We don't even know how expensive it was for them to even get here. Or how their society is composed. Like nothing.

We'd know a whole lot more if it actually happened though.
 
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Alien-topics are very mind-boggling.

In summer I sometimes resque snails from drought-death on the wall. I toss them over on the moist grass.
1. The snail does not SEE me. It only sees whatever part of me is like 1 inch from its eyes, it only detects whatever visual cue is relevant to its tiny brain.
2. This means, the snail doesn't know when I am approaching it untill I am just about to touch it, and then
3. It has no idea I am a living thing, it has no concept of "living thing", it does not understand what is happening when I touch it. The salt on my skin probably causes pain, it contracts in fear (instinctive mechanism, but hey, so is our own fear), and then it becomes airborne for a moment, as I toss it to the grass. This is likely the first and last time that snail ever experiences weightlessness, a concept it can NOT comprehend whatsoever.
4. After it lands on the grass, it immediately stretches out, and crawls along like nothing happened. It has allready forgotten. My alturistic deed absolutely incomprehensible for the little being - concepts like "fellow living thing" "help" "survive" "drought versus moisture" none of this makes sense to a snail, it simply lives in it.

SOME things DO make sense to a snail: Certain surface textures, certain lights and shadows.

In a "worst case scenario" we are the snails: We study the universe using our eyes, mostly. We analyze various effects of light in space (all vision is light based) and we eventually have to stare at the results with our head-eyes. Good luck being a blind astronomer.

A foreign alien would have powers that could be as foreign to us, as a big, looming work-shoe coming down above a snail. The snail has no concievable defence - its little shell beyond helpless, and it doesn't even understand what is happening, or that it needs to flee.

In a worst case scenario, as Hass implies, if aliens are so advanced they can make a triviality out of impossible space travel (impossible for us. Yes, impossible. No, worm-holes will kill us, so - impossible.), they would make such a short process of us, we would litterally not even know what hit us.
 
Huge advances in the field of transportation from an intergalactic alien species don't necessarily translate to super advanced weapons. They could land here plant their flag and then get summarily executed nuclearly by our literal shittone of WMD's.
 
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Izak said:
Huge advances in the field of transportation from an intergalactic alien species doesn't necessarily translate to super advanced weapons. They could land here plant their flag and then get summarily executed nuclearly by our literal shittone of WMD's.
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They do, actually.
Look up Jon's Law:
"Any interesting space drive is a weapon of mass destruction. It only matters how long you want to wait for maximum damage."
Or the closely related Kzinti Lesson. If a species can travel through interstellar space in less than cosmic timescales, their drive systems make your puny little "WMD"s look like wet farts. Seriously. That ship in "Avatar"? The laser systems used for propulsion from Earth and the antimatter-catalysed fusion drive will fuck everything up good. Not to mention that a few thousand tons of matter crashing into your planet at 0.7c will be cataclysmic. And that's a ship that takes 5 years or so to travel to the nearest star.
Any ship that can travel at that speed is a potential extinction event, and any reasonable space travel besides computers and seed or sleeper ships will involve those speeds.
Again, read The Killing Star.
Oh, and let's say that Alcubierre warp drive is actually physically possible so we can zip around at speeds faster than light? Whoo boy, that's even worse. Apparently, the warp drive bubble will capture all the interstellar dust it hits on the way and release it in a MASSIVE gamma ray and particle burst in the direction of travel when it stops.
Meaning that you better not point your ship directly at the planet you're traveling to, unless you want to kill everything there. Which, incidentally, makes that drive also a very handy weapon if necessary.
Interstellar warfare does not leave prisoners.
 
We'll if that's the case we're fucked, we are either enslaved by our benevolent and merciful alien overlords or turned to dust.
 
I'd also think the recovery of alien tech and such could jump us forward 700 years if we had to retro fit it or have some understanding of how the aliens got here or how their weapons work. And Izak, I think being dead is better than enslaved by alien overlords. And Hassknecht I actually read that around 4 years ago. Yes, an alcubierre warp drive would be devastating. So bad that you would've wished for a nuclear war.
 
I imagine aliens would have some type of protocol in place in the event that their tech is captured, I doubt we'd ever get our hands on anything they deem useful at least.
 
If they have the capability to travel here, they have the capability to win a war against us. There is absolutely no way they'd come here and not be prepared, no matter their intentions. If an invasion would take the form of a fleet of spaceships, there are no weapons currently available on earth that could stand a chance against them. The only way we'd have a chance is if we were to fight the way our militaries and military technology is designed for. And I have a hard time believing an alien race sophisticated enough for space travel would fight in such primitime ways. If they'd wanted to eradicate us, they'd bomb us from orbit or use chemical weapons or whatever - safe from harm. You can probably compare it to a person wanting to get rid of an ant mound in his backyard.

If such an alien invasion were to take place and it despite the above would be a drawn out process, humanity would likely not stick together and fight side by side. Different groups would have vastly different reactions to them coming here. Some would say it's God's work, some would say it's our overlords and we should do whatever to please them, some would be in complete denial and believe it's the NWO trying to control us, and so on. Politics would still matter, and especially the US and Russia would see to themselves first and foremost.

All that is based on the presumption that extraterrestrial intelligent life is somewhat similar to us and would have some reason to wipe us out. There's nothing to say that's the case. It could take shapes and forms vastly different from us, which would more likely result in them being more interested in observing us the way we observe new exciting lifeforms we find on earth.
 
Whenever we envision any chance of victory with aliens, we need to imagine them being here, with us - they need a mouth, like ours, that we can punch, like Will Smith

But why would they play ball like that?
Why wouldn't they just zap the earth, from a safe distance? Yes, zap it. Zap, poof, gone. :V
 
aenemic said:
If they have the capability to travel here, they have the capability to win a war against us. There is absolutely no way they'd come here and not be prepared, no matter their intentions. If an invasion would take the form of a fleet of spaceships, there are no weapons currently available on earth that could stand a chance against them. The only way we'd have a chance is if we were to fight the way our militaries and military technology is designed for. And I have a hard time believing an alien race sophisticated enough for space travel would fight in such primitime ways. If they'd wanted to eradicate us, they'd bomb us from orbit or use chemical weapons or whatever - safe from harm. You can probably compare it to a person wanting to get rid of an ant mound in his backyard.

If such an alien invasion were to take place and it despite the above would be a drawn out process, humanity would likely not stick together and fight side by side. Different groups would have vastly different reactions to them coming here. Some would say it's God's work, some would say it's our overlords and we should do whatever to please them, some would be in complete denial and believe it's the NWO trying to control us, and so on. Politics would still matter, and especially the US and Russia would see to themselves first and foremost.

All that is based on the presumption that extraterrestrial intelligent life is somewhat similar to us and would have some reason to wipe us out. There's nothing to say that's the case. It could take shapes and forms vastly different from us, which would more likely result in them being more interested in observing us the way we observe new exciting lifeforms we find on earth.
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I think the most liable reason an alien species would have to wipe us out is likely Galactic conquest or wanting Earth resources and we kind of stand in the way of those resources. The only way I see us winning is if they did an Independence Day and sent one mothership carrying city destroying smaller ships and they happened to underestimate humanity's strength for resolve here. In a likely case of fighting them I see them dying out fast if they were exposed to Earth born diseases and viruses or we could quickly reverse engineer their tech and use it against them if there's a chance.
 
Resources are a pretty stupid reason because it is highly unlikely that there are any resources on Earth that they couldn't find anywhere else without having to kill indigeneous lifeforms that might try to fight back. And traveling through interstellar space is highly unlikely to ever be profitable enough for mining. And an alien species advanced enough that they actually have to mine out the Solar system (meaning that they mined out their own system and all their adjacent systems up to ours!) is probably a solid 2 on the Kardashev Scale already, so there's nothing that we could really do about it.
Terran pathogenes are not much of a problem, I think. I mean, we're talking about a highly advanced species that fucked evolution up the arse millenia ago. There's no reason for a) them having no defense or technology against our puny bacteria or b) our pathogenes even attacking them in the first place if their cellular structure isn't conveniently similar to ours. Which it most likely isn't.
Reverse engineering tech is also not easily achievable depending on how different from us the alien species is. Their technology might be radically different from us from the start (full-on biotech, for example) and completely incompatible with our technology, or so advanced that it is more or less incomprehensible to us (compare Clarke's Third Law).

/edit: Galactic Conquest doesn't make too much sense, either. If not for a revolution in physics (meaning something that overthrows Einstein's relativity) a galactic empire doesn't make any sense because communication simply isn't possible. The only viable reason that I see is a preemptive strike because of the danger of relativistic travel.
 
Sn1p3r187 said:
I think the most liable reason an alien species would have to wipe us out is likely Galactic conquest or wanting Earth resources and we kind of stand in the way of those resources. The only way I see us winning is if they did an Independence Day and sent one mothership carrying city destroying smaller ships and they happened to underestimate humanity's strength for resolve here. In a likely case of fighting them I see them dying out fast if they were exposed to Earth born diseases and viruses or we could quickly reverse engineer their tech and use it against them if there's a chance.
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If biology on Earth was dangerous enough for them that it could mean them losing a war, they would not risk it. It would be incredibly stupid. Only in the case of Earth being the only planet they could settle (after terraforming and changing the environment) within the entire distance they could travel, and their own world was completely dead would they likely be willing to take such a risk. And then it would still be up to us to effectively use that against them, which only happens in games and movies. Wars are not won by a single hero or team of heroes installing a bomb on a ship, releasing a virus that wipes out an entire species, or anything like that.

Looking at human history, I'd say that contact with an alien civilization similar to us would likely end in war. If the possibility at all exists of either species being a threat to the other (for example, the aliens noticing we are very close to technological breakthroughs that could result in us finding them, traveling to their world, or such - or the other way around) there would most definitely be a display of power.

As for a galactic empire, I agree that it doesn't really make much sense. I could however see one or several highly technological species spreading out to explore and to keep tabs on the universe. That could potentially be a reason to have "listening posts". But it's highly unlikely that they would feel the need to actually colonize different worlds. Granted, it's hard to imagine what could be possible with the technology requires for such exploration, but it's easy to imagine that the resource costs would still be so incredibly staggering that it would simply not be feasible.

I'm actually more and more inclined to believe that no intelligent life reaches such a level of technology. Again, if alien life is at all similar to us, it's much more probable that every such species sooner or later wipes themselves out or meet their demise due to natural phenomena. I have no doubt that there is life out there. But we may very well be the most advanced there is, or we're nearing a point most species reach before they die out. But then again I'm a pessimist - if there's a race of space hippies out there that have evolved past wars and killing, no one would be happier than me.
 
aenemic said:
If biology on Earth was dangerous enough for them that it could mean them losing a war, they would not risk it. It would be incredibly stupid. Only in the case of Earth being the only planet they could settle (after terraforming and changing the environment) within the entire distance they could travel, and their own world was completely dead would they likely be willing to take such a risk. And then it would still be up to us to effectively use that against them, which only happens in games and movies. Wars are not won by a single hero or team of heroes installing a bomb on a ship, releasing a virus that wipes out an entire species, or anything like that.

Looking at human history, I'd say that contact with an alien civilization similar to us would likely end in war. If the possibility at all exists of either species being a threat to the other (for example, the aliens noticing we are very close to technological breakthroughs that could result in us finding them, traveling to their world, or such - or the other way around) there would most definitely be a display of power.

As for a galactic empire, I agree that it doesn't really make much sense. I could however see one or several highly technological species spreading out to explore and to keep tabs on the universe. That could potentially be a reason to have "listening posts". But it's highly unlikely that they would feel the need to actually colonize different worlds. Granted, it's hard to imagine what could be possible with the technology requires for such exploration, but it's easy to imagine that the resource costs would still be so incredibly staggering that it would simply not be feasible.

I'm actually more and more inclined to believe that no intelligent life reaches such a level of technology. Again, if alien life is at all similar to us, it's much more probable that every such species sooner or later wipes themselves out or meet their demise due to natural phenomena. I have no doubt that there is life out there. But we may very well be the most advanced there is, or we're nearing a point most species reach before they die out. But then again I'm a pessimist - if there's a race of space hippies out there that have evolved past wars and killing, no one would be happier than me.
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The only way they'd begin to know biology on Earth is too dangerous for them is when they touch down and start fighting. But by then it'd be too late for them because they would've already been exposed to human and earthborne diseases and they'd likely bring the diseases back to the crew members of their starship. Imagine an alien getting exposed to the Zika virus, ebola, influenza, or maybe even smallpox. The effect of bio warfare on aliens such as they would be devastating. The event would likely be they'd stop the war and runaway tail tucked and carrying earthborne diseases with them so it'd likely kill off whatever's left of them or infect their temporary home planet or base. I think the film "Battle for Terra" would perfectly describe human contacts with aliens if we contacted them first.
 
Why would an alien react to an earth virus - if actual mammals here react differently, and some are completely unhurt?

This would be like impregnating an alien, while this at the same time is impossible between different mammals right here on this planet. Talk about DNA being vastly different between a Human and a Horse - an alien could quite simply not even have DNA. They could simply not have cells.

Viruses were transmitted between explorers and natives because we are the same species, but parrots, pigs, anacondas, these are practically immune to human diseases, and vice versa. Aliens could be affected - but they could also be immune. They could be hurt by the ebola virus, but they could also drop dead from a spoonful of mash potato. You just can't predict it in this kind of manner. "The war of the worlds" is pure fiction, it's a fantasy scenario - not even meant to predict alien invasion, but meant as a philosophical thought-piece about human-to-human behavior.
 
zegh8578 said:
Why would an alien react to an earth virus - if actual mammals here react differently, and some are completely unhurt?

This would be like impregnating an alien, while this at the same time is impossible between different mammals right here on this planet. Talk about DNA being vastly different between a Human and a Horse - an alien could quite simply not even have DNA. They could simply not have cells.

Viruses were transmitted between explorers and natives because we are the same species, but parrots, pigs, anacondas, these are practically immune to human diseases, and vice versa. Aliens could be affected - but they could also be immune. They could be hurt by the ebola virus, but they could also drop dead from a spoonful of mash potato. You just can't predict it in this kind of manner. "The war of the worlds" is pure fiction, it's a fantasy scenario - not even meant to predict alien invasion, but meant as a philosophical thought-piece about human-to-human behavior.
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hmmm. In any case, feed the aliens mashed potatoes. But that theory would be liable if there were some connection between humans and the aliens in regards to some biology.
 
zegh8578 said:
Why would an alien react to an earth virus - if actual mammals here react differently, and some are completely unhurt?

This would be like impregnating an alien, while this at the same time is impossible between different mammals right here on this planet. Talk about DNA being vastly different between a Human and a Horse - an alien could quite simply not even have DNA. They could simply not have cells.

Viruses were transmitted between explorers and natives because we are the same species, but parrots, pigs, anacondas, these are practically immune to human diseases, and vice versa. Aliens could be affected - but they could also be immune. They could be hurt by the ebola virus, but they could also drop dead from a spoonful of mash potato. You just can't predict it in this kind of manner. "The war of the worlds" is pure fiction, it's a fantasy scenario - not even meant to predict alien invasion, but meant as a philosophical thought-piece about human-to-human behavior.
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Exactly this. And don't forget that this is an incredibly advanced species that, I can't stress this enough, can travel through interstellar space. They already know to expect foreign microorganisms, and it is reasonable to assume that their antibiotic and quarantine technology is more than capable of handling everything on Earth, if there's any compatibility (which is also highly unlikely, convergent evolution or not).
 
Hassknecht said:
Exactly this. And don't forget that this is an incredibly advanced species that, I can't stress this enough, can travel through interstellar space. They already know to expect foreign microorganisms, and it is reasonable to assume that their antibiotic and quarantine technology is more than capable of handling everything on Earth, if there's any compatibility (which is also highly unlikely, convergent evolution or not).
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You have a point. But there could always be a case where the alien medicine is not enough to fight back earth borne diseases that could be spread in many ways. Antibiotics are good for fighting bacteria but not viruses. Of course there would be a quarantine for the aliens but depending on how many are infected. It'd lay down a pretty big stress factor on the aliens having to allocate resources to treat at least 200,000 infected aliens that have no honest measure of being quarantined forever. Along this it'd basically be a war on two fronts.
 
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