One of the oldest cliches of science fiction is the “alien invasion.” Often enough it’s used as a metaphor for whatever’s going on in the world. But when used as straight serious storytelling, the problem always becomes an issue of “how the hell do you explain how an invasion across interstellar distances makes any sort of sense.”
There are two contradictory issues:
1) Anyone powerful and advanced enough to mount a military action across lightyears would kick our asses in a heartbeat.
2) Anyone powerful and advanced enough to mount a military action across lightyears would have no good reason to kick our asses.
A discussion on Fark produced this succinct explaination courtesy user “Tofu:”
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Bendal: 1. Show up in alien battle cruiser with asteroid in tow
2. Get on the radio “Hey guys, we want X tons of the following metals in orbit when we came back in 2 months.”oh by the way, it just occurred to me why this is funny. Pick any metal. One moderately sized asteroid contains more of that metal than has ever been mined on Earth in all the history of civilization. Ya really.
Also, a couple of good-sized comets contain more water (at least more fresh water) than exists on Earth. Saturn’s rings contain perhaps a thousands times as much water as exists on Earth.
There’s really nothing that you can get on a planet, that isn’t easier to get elsewhere, from a more shallow gravity well (except possible hydrogen if you need an assload of it). If you have the technology to travel between the stars, planets are useless to you.
This is the genius of Sagan’s book, Contact. The aliens say, “the only thing that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” The only use that an alien civilization would have for us is to be amused by our quaint folk songs and monkey dances. So, we’ll give them our Beibers and our “rap stars” and our season 3 of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and in return, they’ll give us resources that are trivially easy for them to acquire (like hundreds of tons of gold or copper) – to them that would be like giving a New Guinea tribesman your pocket mirror in exchange for a shrunken head or something. He finds the shiny thing amusing, and you get to put the head on your coffee table and joke about it with your friends.
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Unless somebody invents a way to send armies across interstellar distances essentially instantly and virtually free – perhaps some form of *extremely* unlikely easy wormhole system – then interstellar invasions seem very unlikely. By the time humans gain that sort of power, the bulk of us probably will not be living on planets anyway, but on asteroids, comets and free-floating stations. While interstellar wars might be barely conceivable (if you have a relativistic starship, you’ve got a dandy weapon for destroying planets and, conceivably, whole solar systems), invasions just don’t make sense for most of the reasons invasions are usually held for. There is, of course, one exception: the purely irrational. In human history, nothing has inspired quite so many truly insane wars as religion, or religious-like irrational ideology. A close second is probably an absolute ruler gone bonkers. So if the aliens get it into their heads (or whatever) that their gods, their king, their Fuhrer, their Supreme Soviet hates humans… watch out.
14 Responses to “Sci-fi and the wisdom of Fark”
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I can think of one or two other reasons aliens would do this:
1. They are the equivalent of interstellar locusts (ID4, John Ringo’s Posleen books). They basically strip the system and move on.
2. Slave raids – It doesn’t make much sense, but possible. This could be for various reasons. Both Weber and Pournelle have explored one possibility where for various political reasons, they need lower technology troops to fight for them. SO, they come down and grab some primitive soldiers and force them to do their fighting.
“Meh” to both of those. Creatures with the sensibilites of locusts are incredibly unlikely to develop starships. Interstellar slave-soldiers are easily replaced with robots or gengineered/cloned soldiers. Or by simply slamming your starships into enemy worlds.
Wimmens, aliens want our wimmens.
Some humans enjoy Uni, basically urchin balls. Let’s hope we don’t become a delicacy.. Or our four legged friends..
“Kittens give Morbo gas”
Religious crusade/jihad – they must conquer all other intelligent races because their god tells them to. In return, they are rewarded in the afterlife with 72 quatloos…
Instead of invasion there’s the Charles Pelligrino books, “Flying to Valhalla” and “The Killing Star” with an exceedingly detailed picture of what getting hit with several thousand .92 c missiles would do to the Earth…
Pellegrino paints a grim picture of total, all-out, complete, foundational paranoia where emergent cultures get bombed by more advanced ones for just one reason: at .92 c there’s no warning time, no defense, except to bomb the other culture preemptively.
Charles Pelligrino book “The Killing Star” is malicious
the Aliens there analyzed Humans TV signal and find eposide of Star Trek
and came to conclusion Humans want to conquer all other intelligent races !
Doug >aliens want our wimmens.
why only Wommen ? WI there all female and need men to reproduce
by way those aliens are man size bugs…
I think bigges Alien menace will be this:
– We come to bring laws of oure pure Gods, teaches them !
– we come for biological sampels of Earth (include also humans)
– We come in peace to bring (maltreatment) development aid
– We come to establishment a colonie…
Ex-term-i-nate! EX-TERM-I-NATE!!!
Although I’m willing to buy the bit about a big asteroid having more metal in it than all we’ve mined, the thing about two good-sized comets having more fresh water in them than on all the Earth is BS.
Earth has around eight to ten million cubic miles of fresh water in total associated with it: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_total_volume_of_fresh_water_on_earth_in_cubic_miles
These would have to be some monster comets, even if the were pure water ice with no dust or methane ice associated with it.
I bid four hundred quailoos for the newcomers!
“Morbo wants the the lower horn of the humans!”
> “Morbo wants the the lower horn of the humans!”
See, now that’s just ignorant, racist crazy talk.
It was Lrrr that wanted the lower horn.
:Alien invasion” sells books and movies. Seems simple enough to me. Besides,
[whisper]
they are works of fiction, not really real ;-\
[/whiper]
Suspension of disbelief needed.
“Alien invasion” Awww! Someone should figure out how to check for errors before submitting pithy comments, Hmmm?
I can think of one scenario in which an invasion sort of makes sense: the aliens are refugees fleeing some massive disaster. All of their resouurces went into saving as many of their people as possible, so they didn’t invest in weaponry to conquer a native population of Earth that they didn’t know existed when they began the migration.