Is Alien Invasion Plausible?

Discussion in 'SciFi & Fantasy' started by RHaden, Sep 5, 2006.

  1. The Devil Inside Banned Banned

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    yeah, i already organized that shit.

    now we are just waiting for enough curse words to have been said, in order to break through the gates of your dimension.
     
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  3. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    Spoiler alert for book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (the taking -koontz)



    I was reading 'the taking' by Koontz. It was good. it starts off as an alien invasion story, but really cruel and unpredictable. It turns out the devil was given free range of the world for a few days to get rid of most people. Because they were just too far gone. Had done too much shit. Only a few survived...and the children.

    It was fun.
     
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  5. The Devil Inside Banned Banned

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    dean koontz wrote like 2 good books:
    Whispers
    and
    The Watchers


    everything else i have read from him has been shit.
     
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  7. reasonmclucus Registered Member

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    An invasion doesn't seem likely. E.T. would more likely to be interested in studying earth than conquering it. Moving a large number of people to the planet would require too many resources. Generation ships would be a possibility, but we cannot rule out the possibility of the equivalent of FTL travel, even though our science doesn't consider it possible.

    For modern day earth E.T. would probably just monitor our broadcast communications. Possibly an early E.T. would have sought to educate primitive peoples. One of the more plausible accounts of such a visit is told by the Dogon people of West Africa who descibe a visit by E.T. from the area of the star system Sirius in 3-legged space ships. the fact that makes the account plausible is that the Dogon knew about both Sirius A and its companion Sirius B which was not detectible by astronomers until 1862.

    http://www.crystalinks.com/sirius.html
     
  8. Communist Hamster Cricetulus griseus leninus Valued Senior Member

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    Isn't sirius the "dog star", studied by the romans?
     
  9. RHaden Registered Senior Member

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    If you clicked on the link, you could answer your own question...

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!



    Seriously, can we please stop derailing this thread?
     
  10. RHaden Registered Senior Member

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    Why is it more likely for ETs to be interested in studying Earth than conquering it?

    Would a large number of people have to be moved to the planet in order to invade and conquer it? I doubt it, since the ETs would be far more advanced than we are, which would presumably include a higher degree of automation. Indeed, the ETs themselves may not invade, merely their machines.

    Even if they had FTL travel, it seems likely that they would use suspended animation on the journey here. Otherwise, they would risk using up precious supplies on the voyage. Furthermore, I think most of their materiel would be "home-grown" -- that is, produced locally in the Solar System. They would not invade immediately upon their arrival.

    This is, of course, highly disputed.
     
  11. Roman Banned Banned

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    How many Spaniards does it take to destroy an Incan empire? How many Conquistadores does it take to conquer the Aztecs?
     
  12. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    180 men, 1 cannon and 27 horses.
     
  13. Roman Banned Banned

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    Yeah. Aliens will totally pwn.

    Unless Master Chief is with us!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
  14. glenn239 Registered Senior Member

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    What exactly is that monkey doing to George Bush?

    What reason(s) or motivation(s) would the aliens have for coming here in the first place?

    Generally speaking, if an alien species were capable of getting here then they've access to what functionally amounts to an endless supply of energy. If this is so, then there can be nothing of any sort in this solar system of any material or economic value to them; with infinite power the main hurdle to manufacturing is overcome, and if this is so then they can probably conjure any atomic element they need without having to piss around looking for it in mines or the centers of stars, or wherever.

    So, by process of elimination, if they come then they are interested in us and only us. Sort of like the IRS with guns.

    What assumptions are necessary for them and/or their technology?

    The assumptions of our own technological evolution in weaponry are applicable. That is to say, in space, aerial or naval combat being behind one generation in technology = certain defeat. Being back two generations = certain humiliating defeat....they'll be considerably further than two generations ahead.

    What type(s) of tactics would the aliens use in their invasion?

    How about run a 40,000 ton rock through the planet at .99 times the speed of light?

    Oh, for an actual invasion where they don't want to liquify the crust of the planet? I don't know, if not germ warfare or poisons, how about tiny armored smart bombs swarming the planet in the millions that fly up to you at high speed and inject a device that blows up with the equivelent of 500lbs of TNT as soon as they fly away? How about a fleet of electron guns that sit in low earth orbit picking off anything that moves on the surface? Skies the limit on this one...

    Could there be any real way to repel the aliens?

    Beg them to stop.


    I have plenty of my own thoughts here, but I would like to see some others post theirs first before joining with my own. Serious replies only, please.

    A serious discussion on this site....?

    The overall trend in warfare is that the age old symmetry between defense and offense is being undermined as technology advances. That is to say as a trend, the more advanced the weaponry is, the harder it is to defend against it. For example, in WW1 the British Royal Navy might have had to spend 10 quid on defenses against submarines for every 1 the Germans spent on submarines. Now, to defend against a sub probably costs 50:1, and a defense against an ICBM might be 1000:1 (for a 50/50 shot at a shootdown).

    So overall, thousands of years ago warfare started off looking like a soccer match and as technology marches on, it's more and more resembling a game of basketball; offense works, defense doesn't. My thinking is that this is probably a PERMANENT trend. That is to say, the utmost exploitation of the natural laws of the universe allow attack to cancel defense.

    So, for our evil green meanies (who know everything there is to know about the universe) two things are eventually going to be true about us vs. them if they sit back and allow us to develop:

    1) We can destroy them with an investment of say 1 on the attack to 100,000 on the defense. (Presumably this is because it's easier to build 1,000 lbs warheads that hit planets at .99999c than it is to build a defense network to stop warheads moving at .99999c)

    2) There is nothing they can do about it because, no matter how advanced they are, they can't violate the natural laws of physics.

    So put it this way - what if on Earth everyone who owned a car could blow up the planet? Sound like fun? Functionally, that's the galactic power given to any species that can harness the energy to move between stars.

    I've proposed in the past that if the speed of light is an absolute barrier, then it might be the case that we can now match an advanced technology faster than said advanced society can hop on their UFO's and fly to earth, (if said aliens were dumb enough not to have come here thousands or millions of years ago). Because moving close to the speed of light slows down time (a relativistic effect), if a UFO were approaching us at very high speed, to the occupants on that ship it might appear that Earth went from the steam age to matching their technology in mere days. I ask - would it not suck donkey balls to sail on the USS Iowa to invade Canada, expecting nothing worse than our war canoes and beaver hatchets - only to find that in the day it took to get here we built the USS Nimitz and kicked your ass?
     
  15. Kendall ......................... ..... Registered Senior Member

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    Is alien invasion plausible? They would have done it a century ago when we had no weapons!
     
  16. spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

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    We had weapons a century ago.
     
  17. Jaster Mereel Hostis Humani Generis Registered Senior Member

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    Ok, I have nothing more to add. I'm going to second this post. Mostly the end of it, though. I'm going to say that the speed of light is the limit. That puts one hell of a damper on ET's invasion plans.

    Also, it seems like you're all talking about technology. We have a pretty extensive warfare education system on this planet, if only informal in the vast majority of places. In other words, our experience at fighting each other should not be discounted when considering ET's invasion. If, say, they had stopped fighting themselves a long, long time ago, then there may not be a single one of them who had ever experienced any kind of violence, ever. Even pushing a button requires some kind of strategic and/or tactical savvy, and if it had been thousands of generations since any of them had ever fought a war, that would give us a slight edge in terms of experience.

    Of course, I'm also assuming that the galaxy is not filled with civilizations that they could have been fighting. It doesn't matter, though, since I've already assumed that the speed of light is the barrier.
     
  18. glenn239 Registered Senior Member

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    Well, if we are assuming that they are around here at all, then presumably they didn't invade hundreds of years ago because they know what they are capable of and what we are capable of, so the advance in tech on our end is deemed meaningless.
     
  19. eburacum45 Valued Senior Member

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    Now I think we could perhaps talk about defense, just for a moment or two.
    The overall tend that Glenn239 noted, that offence outsrips defence, is only true up to a certain (very high point).
    You see, there is a limit to the attack capability of an interstellar spacecraft; it is very high indeed, but it is a very definite physical limit. The maximum amount of energy a spacecraft can bring to bear in an offensive situation is the mass of the entire spacecraft converted into energy. If the defenders can a/ more than match that available energy and b/ detect any incursions into their territory in time to prepare a defence;
    then they are likely to win the engagement.

    We are a very, very long way from being able to detect relativistic vessels or projectiles headed our way, and a long way from having the available energy to destroy such a vessel or projectile at a safe distance; but once we do have that amount of energy at our disposal, we will be more or less impregnable.

    A few thousand years should do it.
     
  20. glenn239 Registered Senior Member

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    IIRC, the battleship Bismarck would require the energy output of the sun for about 3 seconds to accelerate to .99c. So if a planet were hit by a 30,000 ton object at that speed, it should be sufficient to boil the oceans and melt the crust.

    For a planetary defense against such nonsense, one of the problems is that the attacking projectile is moving almost as fast as the communications are between defense installations. For example, if we had a radar site on Pluto which detected an inbound attacker at .99c, then even the warning to the defenses further in would arrive only 1% faster than the missile itself. This effectively negates any meaningful contribution by anything save equipment sitting on the target itself or within an extremely narrow approach cone to the target.

    An anti- missile shot would probably be hopeless because the guidance system on the attacking warhead would be subject to time dilation near the speed of light with both its internal processing and its sensors. A beam weapon might be more feasible, but it too is restricted in accuracy by the fact that any sensory emissions are returning only 1% faster than the missile. Presumably this means that accuracy would be somewhat hopeless until the warhead was close to the planet, regardless of the processing power of the installations. Even then, a beam weapon is only 1% faster than the attacking projectile, so if we assume that the warhead is able to actively evade (say, 500,000 G or something), then it might be able to introduce sufficient uncertainty in the solution to prevent a kill upon it until it impacts the target.

    If the defenses were 99.9% reliable, then the planet should die by the one thousandth attack. Maybe a reliable defense might be found using gravitational energy (or the event horizon of a black hole), but this is speculation. From the trends as we’ve witnessed them (which is the only SCIENTIFIC method to approach the problem right now) it is the case that defense is being outstripped by attack.
     
  21. eburacum45 Valued Senior Member

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    Relativistic missiles or craft would be detectable very far away; when they accelerate, from their friction with the interstellar medium, and because of gravity waves caused by relativitistic masses (or so I am informed).
    So you would generally have years of warning.
     
  22. glenn239 Registered Senior Member

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    Yes if the missile is at those speeds a light year out and it's velocity isn't very near to C. No if either:

    A) The object is moving very close to C. (Gravity waves move at the speed of light, only slightly faster than the missile).
    B) The object accelerates to near C only when approaching the target.
     
  23. glenn239 Registered Senior Member

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    I think this might be in the ballpark.

    If the warhead is moving at .999c and is, for sake of argument, detectable at 1 light year then the defenders should "see" the attack with about 31,500 seconds remaining before impact. However, what they will "see" at that moment is the warhead's gravitational effect at 5.87e12 miles. The warhead itself will be about 5.9 billion miles away. Assuming that the defenders have a great radar that can instantly send a pulse towards the attack at the moment of detection, then it will intersect the warhead at about half the distance remaining to the defenders. As the radar pulse returns, the warhead follows it at .999 times it speed. By the time the pulse gets back to the base station, the warhead is about 31 seconds to impact.

    Merely chopping the warhead up won't help - the debris will hit the planet at .999c, which is almost as bad as a miss. If a kinetic kill is scored which vaporized the attacker, then the planet will absorb a massive dose of radiation since the energy of the impact should be tremendous.
     

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