If the world is invaded by aliens...seriously..

i maintain my view that there's only one solution, which can be elegantly summed up in two words: slimy tentacles.

Originally Posted by panzerkom

i maintain my view that there's only one solution, which can be elegantly summed up in two words: slimy tentacles.

you've already expressed your view in this thread so theres no use repeating it. I think I speak for about 6.5 billion people when i say that i don't relish the idea of going down on an friggin alien, which may or may not be your cup of coffee. Give then choice i think all of us would rather put up a fight.

Imagine Alexander The Great and his army fighting the full force of a modern army - with its machine guns, tanks, fighter jets - 3000 years from the future. Imagine again the world's modern army at present, fighting the machines of an alien's race with 30,000 years of civilisation and technological advancement. By the way, 30,000 years is nothing much in astronomical terms.

The only reasons they haven't attack us yet could be because they haven't found us yet, or they have the good alien sense of leaving us to boil in our primitive juices (in the words of Stephen Hawking)

If the aliens do decide to takeover planet earth, our only consolation is that they would not be very bad masters afterall, considering that they have survived that long in their own world without self destruction. Or maybe not.

I am kind of trying to imagine such races, maybe something inspired from the game Universe At War, where three alien races with distinctive technologies decided to settle their differences on Earth. Can an infantry man with machine guns and assault rifles deal with a mechanized alien in a hard suit carrying direct energy weapons? Can our modern tanks deal with Walkers spewing death from massive direct energy weapons? Can our modern fighters and ships deal with hordes of alien fighters and drones launched from massive motherships that float in the air effortlessly?

Or is it our own concept of an invading alien species is the one that is obsolete? It all sounds like Hollywood material.

A civilization that is far more advanced than ours may not view warfare as the way we view it now. We view warfare still in the hard kill, attrition and territorial take over. They may view it in more subtle terms, perhaps to even challenge their superior intellects by using strategies to force us to give up without a fight, the Sun Tzu ideal. Portraying themselves as gods and offering promises to turn the world into a utopia, and fooling the gullible to follow them would be one way. That alone would already divide the Earth population to fight one another.

Originally Posted by crobato

I am kind of trying to imagine such races, maybe something inspired from the game Universe At War, where three alien races with distinctive technologies decided to settle their differences on Earth. Can an infantry man with machine guns and assault rifles deal with a mechanized alien in a hard suit carrying direct energy weapons? Can our modern tanks deal with Walkers spewing death from massive direct energy weapons? Can our modern fighters and ships deal with hordes of alien fighters and drones launched from massive motherships that float in the air effortlessly?

Or is it our own concept of an invading alien species is the one that is obsolete? It all sounds like Hollywood material.

A civilization that is far more advanced than ours may not view warfare as the way we view it now. We view warfare still in the hard kill, attrition and territorial take over. They may view it in more subtle terms, perhaps to even challenge their superior intellects by using strategies to force us to give up without a fight, the Sun Tzu ideal. Portraying themselves as gods and offering promises to turn the world into a utopia, and fooling the gullible to follow them would be one way. That alone would already divide the Earth population to fight one another.

OMG! it'll totally be like the goa'uld in stargate but but!...just no..-_-.

Far more believable is that we come into contact with a seemingly benevolent alien race which helps us to further develope and integrate our society only to have a dark agenda. E.G. gives us a vaccine to cancer with the slight side affect of making us sterile..BOOM! instant world take over and not a shot was fired. This idea i also got from stargate... but when one actually thinks about it, its far more credible then alexander the great coming to our rescue.

Here's an example of the kind of scenario your talking about. In the game UFO Aftermath your classic saucer releases a living fungi-like organism into the Earth's atmosphere that blankets everything, killing all exposed humans and then it starts growing, covering the Earth's surface.

Slimy tenacles?

Give then choice i think all of us would rather put up a fight.

Hail yea, just give me a F-15...er, pop rocks, dry ice, and soda.

or they have the good alien sense of leaving us to boil in our primitive juices

Say you what? What means that? Leaving us to our global warming and sterilising doom?

Looking back at history, what's the chance that 2 alien species finds us at about the same time and decide to pitch us around like the Burmese (or was it Indian?) princes?

I had actually talked to this "guy" and that will be the some of this information. But, here was the "guy" thought processes which is shared in this guys circle of knowing.

IF a Alien species has the ability to get from point A to Point B (earth) based on the the technology just to travel such a vast distance and IF these Aliens had intention of taking the earth for their own. Well, in all likelihood we would not even know we had been hit. That's how fast we would all be dead through means we can only wonder.

think about the best extermination company in the world taking out a small ant mound. thats the tech gap we are talking about.

Originally Posted by Roger604

Since alien biology is likely to be very different from ours, the solution is biological warfare. Fill the atmosphere with deadly (for them) viruses or bacteria, yet harmless to humans.

But really, the above poster is right.

Ok you asked for it.... Raptoreyes guide to creating a star spanning empire. (as opposed to terra-forming dead or pre-sentient biospheres which is more sane and much much easier. heheh

To conquer earth you will need these ingredients if doing so from a distant star. If you have a recipe book now is the time to take it out and take notes. Some of the needed things are hard to obtain. I wrote this from the aliens point of view for the sake of humor whenever I could reasonably do so.

1-- Unlike the Humans you need a culture that is very command and control based. The Zerg in Starcraft or the Formics in Enders Game would be best examples of this. These invaders could have large stockpiles the world destroying technology without the independence of mammals. Any individually independent starfareing species with faster then light travel would be very peaceful simply because any ones hostile enough to threaten other spicies would be rare. If your anti social enough to want to take another intelligent species home planet, then your anti social enough to destroy yourself with your own weapons too, in an internal conflict LONG BEFORE you become a threat to others elsewhere in the cosmos. Any wantonly hostile race would be one who was a hive or insect colony type race with one or two leaders and lots of servants lacking will of their own or ability to act with true independence.

2-- A reason to attack humans in particular. In other words any star faring race is also one that can "terra-form a planet" to the specifications of its species using space spanning technology. Humans are already talking about making Mars habitable for its species via a thickening of the atmosphere and out-gassing the water already detected on the planet. Needless to stay any member of the stellar community that could or would desire earth would be FAR MORE ADVANCED making terraforming far easier for them. Large Mirrors have already been discussed and one human Robert Zubren a noted astronomical engineer has gone through most of the math and tech needed to turn Mars into a living planet. Check out www.themarsociety.org

This presents a real problem for the would be conquerers. Why take somebody else's stuff when the universe as we understand it now is very open and unclaimed. Most stellar bodies only need some "fixing up" with easy things like an atmosphere which humans can already replicate slowly on Mars. Now imagine an alien species that can have an army of nano-robots or something humans have not dreamed up yet to help you terra form largely from local resources fast and efficiently rather then the slow human method of primitive chemical engineering and mirrors and macro scale robotics that humans are now planing for Mars.

3-- Even if you had a reason to choose earth rather then some dead body you could alter.... you still need to terra-form your body or the planet earth so you can live on it.

If you wanted to conquer earth you would first introduce microbes into earths biosphere that could contend with and destroy earths microbes (but were harmless to the invading spices) Even early Sci Fi novels noticed that our biosphere's bugs would be very toxic to anything without an engineered resistance. Any Aliens we saw invading earth would likely be altered genetically to deal with known samples of microbes they might have collected in secret earlier. "War of the Worlds" after all was not won by earths military but by the cellular toxicity of its environment to the invaders. At the human tech level it would be harder for a space invader to ensure protection against earths very different single celled organisms then the aliens of a interstellar tech level would have with 5-15 Tomcat fighters, missles or ASTAT weapons the humans could launch.

Worse the Aliens might end up fighting human scientists in a battle where they had no advantage....the engineering of biological warfare organisms.

stay tuned for part 2

Part 2 of the cookbook for taking over another world already inhabited by other intelligent beings.

As unlikely as any space faring race would be to want or need to attack other intelligent beings lets go through them to see why its unlikely. Even humans would not attack an invade another planet full of sentients on a whim like a pack of teenagers hopped up on intoxicating beverages, each others pheromones and sexual displays. I will assume that the aliens gave an attack on earth more begining to end planing then the Bush Administration gave to Iraq. If a star-faring race decides to "whack" enslave or decapitate humanity from something dangerous its doing it will give it a lot of thought I am guessing.

5-- Earth would have to have a unique biological resource that a dead planet could not give them or Humanity's actions would have to pose a unique threat to areas far far outside its solar system.

Let say humanity was monkeying with a technology such a Nano tech or bridging our universe to alternate ones or something considered so dangerous that the humans would have to be dissuaded. Since we established that any multiple star star system culture would have destroyed itself BEFORE becoming so advanced if they were violent enough to consider taking other peoples things then we are left with the possibility which is similar to an adult taking a loaded gun away from a child (or america preventing Iraq or Iran from having Nuclear weapons)

A malevolent hive race might harvest a few humans for our DNA to fight a plague or bolster their race with our genes against some other challenge but that would not require full scale war. If the stories and shadey underbelly of the psycological profression is to be belived aliens have been plucking red necks and Nevada residents off the face of the planet for experiments since the 1950's without any through desire to invade.

6-- Great Hot-roded space ships that can travel between stars in very short time periods. (or very very long life spans)

No matter what the aliens first have to adapt them selfs to our environment because wiping out our biosphere and replacing it with their own is not very cost effective.... unless the engines of their warships were so advanced as to make the trip from earth to a distant star much much much faster then the speed of light. In that case it would be worth it to destroy earths bio sphere as enough pre grown bio material from the homeworld (or nearest planet in their sphere of influence) be could be brought to earth after its bio sphere was cleared completely to "start terra-forming from scratch"

Worse Slow engines would entail a problem that was discussed in Harry Turtledove's World War, and Colonization series. In it the aliens started for earth when humans were riding horses with lances and arrived to a world fighting WWII and as a result "better" prepared for them. If you want to conquer another already habited planet even if you are hostile but sane enough to save your superweapons for the humans only.... you have to have starship hot-rods.

I was about to start a new thread about the recent box office hit Cloverfield but thought better of it as people online are claiming that it is an alien ( for those who've seen the movie, notice in the very last scene theres something falling out of the sky and striking the water when rob & beth are at coney island). I have 2 questions.

1) judging by the ineffectiveness of conventional weapons against the monster, if earth was invaded by an army of these things, what are our options short of full scale nuclear strikes?

and

2) the monster attacked new york in the film but what would happen if it attacked a more densely populated area such as Shanghai? what would be the response of the chinese government as opposed to tha US's that we see in the movie.

Part 3 of Raptoreyes guide to inter stellar conquest.

7-- Excellent small unit warfare units. (if you decide not to destroy the bio sphere and start over)

Lets say you conquered the problems of resisting the earths germs without making those in the space landing dead green men the moment they took a breath of air or drank some earth water. Ok now you need to be able to take the planet without the humans nukes totally sterilizing the surface of the earth you tried very hard to avoid destroying yourself.

If you introduced your own engineered germs to kill off the humans you have the problem of the humans developing medical techniques to fight it and even germs to kill you. That is long slow warfare for the likely alien intervention of stopping some human science project that you feel will likely go wrong or harvesting something unique from the earths biosphere to solve some problem too big for your race to solve on its own. That means ground troops that could passify the humans quickly since humanity already has genome tech to fight a slower bio war and you are not likely to want to give them the time Cyborgs, zergling hordes, or other types of disposable purpose built beings would fill in nicely here.

8-- Inability to communicate with the humans.

Almost all possible alien aims could be done via negotiations even for a race that things humans bodies are tasty snacks. Its just easier to talk to humans then to destroy us from orbit and start over. Lets look at the possiblites that are solved by talk.

8A-- Humans are doing a science project that threatens the whole universe and don't know it.

If you can talk to the humans you just tell them "you clumsey bastards your going to kill everybody and here is the mathematics that explain why your science fair project will not work as you expect". Most humans in most parts of the world are pretty crazy but the parts of the Earth where all the high level research is done are much more sane judging from the low number of explosions in urban centers in these high tech regions. The aliens will likely know this after some short observation period. They would choose to talk.

8B-- If they came for some resource they could simply strong arm it from us by saying "stay out of our way while we harvest resource X" while firing some horrible death ray at some passing asteroids to impress these humans about how serious you are. Most world governments would probably be cowed by promises of being left alone so long as whatever exotic resource the aliens wanted was left to them.

Originally Posted by RavenWing278

I was about to start a new thread about the recent box office hit Cloverfield but thought better of it as people online are claiming that it is an alien ( for those who've seen the movie, notice in the very last scene theres something falling out of the sky and striking the water when rob & beth are at coney island). I have 2 questions.

1) judging by the ineffectiveness of conventional weapons against the monster, if earth was invaded by an army of these things, what are our options short of full scale nuclear strikes?

and

2) the monster attacked new york in the film but what would happen if it attacked a more densely populated area such as Shanghai? what would be the response of the chinese government as opposed to tha US's that we see in the movie.

I have not seen the movie yet. Tell me more about the monster.

1-- Does it breath (you can kill it by liquefaction of a particular area of ground since I assume it cant fly after touching down from what I little I know so far.) Try to lure it near a body of water that it can suffocate in.

2-- Does it have joints on the legs as joints would be easier to break with shaped charges then attacking the main body mass of any creature. If it can be kept immobile its only a matter of time before you find a way to defeat its armor.

3-- Does it eat people or larger sized objects regularly. (feed it a big explosive and see if the inside structure is as resilient as that outside)

4-- Directing Lazers and other directed energy weapons at the creatures sensory organs might confuse it and make it blind in one way or another. If it tries to take out the lazer blinding it you simply make the lazer mobile and you can lead the creature out of a populated area and toward an environmental feature possibly harmful to it. (I am assuming anything big and indestructible is not particularly fast on its feet)

5-- If it does not eat things then their might be other holes on the creature that you put an explosive into such as auditory sensors or other such things.

6-- bombard the creature with high levels of every single type of energy we can introduce into its environment. You can do this without using nukes but you might have to evacuate first since some energy released cannot be done so in a directed fasion (in sufficient quantity) with our technology at this time.

Without having seen the creature

Originally Posted by RavenWing278

OMG! it'll totally be like the goa'uld in stargate but but!...just no..-_-.

Far more believable is that we come into contact with a seemingly benevolent alien race which helps us to further develope and integrate our society only to have a dark agenda. E.G. gives us a vaccine to cancer with the slight side affect of making us sterile..BOOM! instant world take over and not a shot was fired. This idea i also got from stargate... but when one actually thinks about it, its far more credible then alexander the great coming to our rescue.

I just do not think that would happen the way it happened in Stargate. Humanity may be greedy and often dumb... but not all of us at the same time. If the aliens offered a health drug sterility mixed in secretively it would likely be detected in early trials. What?? You don't think we would test the drug first upon volunteers and would have limited it to a small sliver of the population for many years to ensure it was safe? In that Stargate episode I guess the Food and Drug Administration was out to lunch.

However other subtitle stratagems might be more likely.

Star Treks plan by the Borg Queen to explode a weapon full of Nano probes in the upper of atmosphere of earth that subverts or destroys the humans is more likely. Aliens might also make some horrible super plague look like some earth borne virus direct out of the tropics coming to a city near you. Aliens however would not have the sort of advantages in a bio war they would have in say a "soviet invaders from space 1950s movie model" we are all so familiar with.

The nature if interstellar travel means you will destroy yourself long before you destroy other planetary spicies if an avowed goal of your race is the conquest of others. WMD is necessary to move from one star to another and a conquest based spices has little chance of keeping its weapons only for other spices and not itself.

I guess the aliens could simply get all of our manufacturing to move to their economy via economic competition and then conquer when the process is complete.... but they will have to play some serious catch up because China already has a big start over any extra- terrestrials on that score.