People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f**ed that it just does not matter.
People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.
There was an amusing short story called "The Road Not Taken" about that. In it gravity manipulation technology turns out to be really simple. It is something every civilization (except one) discovers early, like before they reach what on Earth would have been medieval technology level, and then all their technological development is focused on their gravity technology.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
Harry Turtledove also wrote a series of alternate history novels (called the world war series) based on a similar idea. In it, the aliens’ civilization progresses very slowly. A few centuries of human progress would take them millennia. They send a probe to earth in the middle ages, mark earth for an easy conquest, and show up during world war 2 where they find an almost evenly matched adversary. It’s pretty contrived, but an easy and amusing read.
>So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?
Especially if, as it seems, those weapons aren't mitigated by having gravity manipulation? Literally no one in the universe realized the potential of having gravity manipulation and modern technology?
“ That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?”
It’s kinda like asking - why have some of the world’s brightest minds spent the past 20 years trying to get people to watch more ads? What else might they have achieved or discovered instead?
It stopped progress on other technologies because there was no need to develop them. They spent all their time expanding and attacking. I assumed that aliens didn’t develop science or industrialization. The story didn’t go into how they improved FTL or how was distraction.
> People need to understand that if you’re being attacked by a FTL capable alien invader, you are so incredibly f*ed that it just does not matter.
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
It doesn't have to be FTL capable after the crash. Just imagine, you with a rifle, an armor, a good sword and some grenades went back in time to say 20K yrs ago, for sure you are like God to the primitives for a moment but whence you exhausted the resources it's done business.
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
That’s dumb sci fi logic though. Aliens don’t need deep ocean FTL fuel. If you can move matter at the speed of light, you have the capability to kill everything on earth very easily.
The odd exception being, halflife (1/2)
Apparently those games have a ton of unused lore that actually does a realistic invasion scenario from a dyson-sphere level civilization.
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
No half life is very dumb. The aliens invade using largely small arms weapons. It is called the 7 hour war because a guy surrenders on behalf of earth after 7 hours.
If anyone imagines fighting alien invaders with small arms they’re already stupidly out of touch.
I am sorry, if the Aliens are invading we will just have ChatGPT upload a virus to their system while at the same time we fly one on of their space planes with a nuke to take out their mother ship
And, fortunately, the hero’s MacBook Pro will use the same graphics card as the alien mothership, so we’ll display a jolly Roger on their screens right before we set off the nuke.
Or it’s a node js program and they’re not able to download all the dependencies to counter it so they have to make a parley with us because the only way to stop it is to come to earth and download
Anyone who's ever started pre-warp in a game of Distant Worlds: Universe[0] knows the hopelessness.
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
I said the same to a conspiratorially minded friend today ... Like dude, if they're aliens who are capable of finding us and then _coming here_ they're not going to be getting shot down by the Air Force.
Just think of what kind of technological advancement it would take for _us_ to determine there was life on some planet, and then the subsequent advancement we'd need to actually send something there. And then, imagine actually bothering to do so, when you're at the level of technology that it would imply to have the ability.
I forget the name of the TV series but there was a great show where aliens had occupied earth and the drones were just completely lethal and unstoppable. It was very realistic, the machines would just show up and instantly frag everyone in sight. The story was about a cop who ended up working for the alien occupiers, I wish I could remember the name of the show.
I liked Titan A.E.'s take on that. An alien race (the Drej) attack and destroy the Earth and the Moon, while simultaneously attacking evacuation shuttles. Most of humanity is wiped out in mere minutes. No silver lining. No happy ending at this stage. What's left of humanity is slowly dying in drifter colonies scattered around the galaxy. It takes a miracle, the Titan project, for humanity to be given a new hope again.
They are cylindrical, grey, without apparent means of aerial propulsion, and prone to interfering with ultrasonic sensors...
Most dolphins are smaller than a compact car, but I bet they would break apart upon impact with a frozen sea after dropping out of the sky. This might be the correct answer.
I want to read more comments like this, there seems to be a very clear trend to frame this like an alien invasion. It’s unnerving, even if it’s just click bait driving the narrative…
I wish that I could believe this. We have all seen the deleterious effect of Q and Fox News, and the zeal that goes along with them. At this point I believe that there are those who are so far gone into the partisan abyss that they would rather collaborate with alien invaders than with their fellow countrymen, if those countrymen were Democrats.
Didn't expect to dive into xcom timeline right now...do I need to buy some guns to defend against aliens? I mean at least you can hurt them by guns in the game.
> That balloon’s journey set off a huge debate within the U.S. about why it wasn’t shot down earlier, with Republicans arguing President Donald Trump never would’ve allowed such a thing to happen. Except that it did, many times, including over sensitive military facilities in Virginia and California.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other
People have forgotten 20 years ago the US intercepted Iraqi aluminium tubes. They are fully capable of detecting what ever they want to imagine. And these days American imagination is purely restricted to what collects Likes and upvotes.
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...