Reaction to alien encounter?

Yes, but some people are just that dumb. Why should aliens be any different?

I use "aliens never invented guns" in my own work for a few Doylist reasons (it makes humans special for having guns, and lets the aliens be more unique). Its justification is that humans have Improbable Aiming Skills compared to aliens, but aliens are physically stronger. However, I don't think it's particularly likely an alien race would achieve space travel without first inventing guns.

The thing is that rocketry is a very closely related technology to firearms. And even aliens that were much more pacifistic than humans are as a general trend would probably still run into situations where they needed them occasionally (just one war every century would do it).

Also worth noting that if a species has no natural predators, no prey, and no reason to compete with each other for resources...there probably isn't that much of a point in being sentient.

With alien psychology:

Aliens would almost certainly be psychologically quite different to us, but their psychology would be understandable to us (after doing research). In addition, there are some things we can safely assume they'd have in common with us.

By definition, a species that builds space ships has something in common with us. Indeed, probably a lot in common with us. We'd expect such aliens to be innately curious, because sentience without curiosity isn't very useful.

Similarly, it actually is safe to say any civilization smart enough to contact us would recognize our intelligence and probably would want to study us at the very least. While we often talk about humanity being insignificant, the truth is that intelligence on humanity's level is probably very rare (see: the Fermi Paradox).

In fact, humanity would probably be a great source of insightful information to aliens. Sentient aliens would tend to be either stone age, or spacefaring (humanity has spent most of its existence in the stone age, and it probably won't be too long until we're in the space age). Humanity is currently transitioning between the two, which aliens would almost certainly not be accustomed to seeing that often.

Aliens that achieved interstellar travel would not be that dumb, by simple necessity. Now, maybe they've been at it for thousands of years, to the point where any yahoo can rent a junker and hop across the stars, but to correspondingly suggest that they've never encountered another sapient alien species in all that time stretches the bounds of probability.

And yes, you might pull the Insufficiently Advanced Alien trope and have them be idiots who stumbled upon someone else's spacefaring tech, but again, this means that there is (or was) definitely more than one alien species out there and, thus, that humans aren't the first they've ever encountered.

To spell it out, either:

• Interstellar travel is difficult and rare such that only the best and brightest would ever attempt the trip, and therefore the idea that they're too stupid to appreciate that humans are sapient and potentially dangerous is implausible in the extreme.
• Interstellar travel is commonplace and simple enough that any yokel can attempt it, and therefore they would not be surprised to encounter another alien species, nor unaccustomed to the idea that such a species might be hostile.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 23rd 2018 at 12:15:56 PM

I'm specifically spelling out firearms, not all weapons in general. Humanity hasn't been universal about the concept. The only "universal" weapon all of Humanity has known is the spear.

Historically it wasn't that long ago that there were still regions of the world where the primary military arm was bow and arrow or the spear. I remember seeing a late 19th century photograph talking about Japanese archers. Firearms development wasn't universal, some parts of the world had no need for them until they were thrust upon them by a nigh invincible force come to conquer them. If we didn't have the imperialistic crusades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some of those parts of the world might still be using ye olde bow and arrow. Hell, some parts of the world still are.

Rocketry and firearms may be similar in terms of science but remember when gunpowder was invented in China it went for over a century before anyone thought of its potential as a weapon (specifically cannon). It took centuries more after that before we had infantry muskets and centuries more before the concepts of repeating rifles, assault rifles, machine guns, missiles and what not.

The technology behind firearms is so simple and effective I find it hard to believe any spacefaring species wouldn’t have at least some knowledge of them.

A device that uses chemical or mechanical force to propel a projectile at a target. Not that hard to grasp.

Also worth noting that guns resemble a lot of other common tools aliens will probably have, such as the nail gun or the paint gun. They might be able to insinuate the the device is a tool that does something in the direction it's pointed at.

In a hypothetical scenario of say, an alien crash landing on a farm and a human approaching it with a loaded firearm, it could probably insinuate the following (depending upon how much attention it's paying):

-It's entered the territory of some form of creature.

-The creature is probably frightened.

-The creature is possibly sentient given that it wears clothes and is holding a metal tool.

-The tool it's holding is likely some form of weapon.

Mind you, it's hard to say what the alien would be able to do at that point. The gesture for "I surrender" can be different between species, for example. This sort of thing is why cats and dogs tend to not get along, actually. The cat's gesture for "Halt!" happens to be pretty similar to a dog's "Let's play!" gesture. A similar example is humans and chimps: a chimp grinning at you is usually a Slasher Smile.

Pennyfarthing Effect. Sometimes the simple things are overlooked or only thought of later.

Edited by MajorTom on Aug 23rd 2018 at 9:42:57 AM

My gripe with that trope is that pennyfarthings had large wheels for an actual reason. I’ll point out that guns are a little different as well, there’s only so many ways to shoot little bits of metal into things and a tube with a gunpowder charge at one end is probably one of the easiest and most effective.

Either way, notice I said “spacefaring” species. A species with insterstellar travel not being able to recognize a gunpowder weapon strains credulity to the extreme. Even if they didn’t have any themselves the concept is so universally simple they’d likely have encountered it somewhere already, or have used them in their past.

Its less likely tbey would be unable to deduce what a weapon does than that they just lack the emotional makeup to understand what the human intends to do with it. Its not altogether unlikely that an intelligent species could have evolved without developing, or encountering, threat displays. Their response to a human waving a gun at them might be something along the lines of "Be careful with that thing, you might hurt me!"

That said, it seems rather unlikely that a space faring species would lack the capacity to deal with things that can hurt them. Like I said, you might get lucky and cap the first one, but after that they are going to take steps to neutralize the source of the danger. A human with a firearm isnt going to last long.

'Course, if they are really smart they simply contact the human police (pointing guns at people is illegal you know). Which brings us back to the question of why they didnt get in touch with a human government in the first place. The OP specifying this condition was what led me to speculate that they just dont care about us one way or another (shoot one of them, though, and I bet they focus their attention very quickly).

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 24th 2018 at 8:03:59 AM

It is obviously fallacious to insist that evolution must have, or could only, proceed along certain lines, but it is very difficult to imagine a species achieving sapience and spacefaring capability without ever encountering something harmful, or conceiving of the possibility of intentional harm on the part of another sapient.

Adversity, as far as we know, is a fundamental part of the process of natural selection, and any sort of ecological system must involve predation between species. Joke scenarios like Meet The Meat postulate that some species might regard being preyed upon as a desirable thing, but that seems antithetical to everything we understand about evolution. A species that doesn't desire not to die will invariably be out-competed by those with such a desire, and a habitat that presents no selection pressure won't have any mechanism to evolve a sapient species.

A species that figures out how to travel between stars, lands on an inhabited planet, and doesn't expect or at least anticipate that the initial response from the Puny Earthlings will include violence is implausible in the extreme. Now, depending on relative technology levels, they might not feel that such violence is a threat, but that's a different matter from being completely ignorant of it.

What I think, to be honest, is that far too many people have been weaned on Alien Invasion shows and films where the aliens show up and try to conquer Earth with vastly superior technology only to be thwarted by the plucky, gritty humans with either the ingenuity to figure out their obvious weak spot or some sort of surprise superweapon. ^note Never mind that such shows are often love poems to the U.S. military or to Second Amendment lovers. This wasn't always the case: War of the Worlds tells us that we're fucked; we are overwhelmed and outmatched from day one and the only reason we win is that the Martians didn't anticipate biological compatibility with our pathogens.

Over the years, this has been flanderized to the point where every set of invaders starts with some decisive advantage that we defeat by figuring out its Weaksauce Weakness, implying that the aliens are simultaneously suicidally overconfident and utterly incompetent at engineering: both traits that one would expect to be weeded out before they undertook the massive effort of invading a planet in another star system.

^note Not every work cheats like this. Half-Life 2 is notable for presenting a scenario in which the aliens invaded and won, decisively. The only reason we can even hope to fight back is that they left only an occupying force on the planet while they went off elsewhere, and it takes a lot of effort for them to move mass amounts of materiel. Our counterattack is simultaneous and focused on taking down their communication and transport networks, preventing overwhelming retaliation. In other words, sound tactics, not pure luck or pure idiocy on the part of the bad guys.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 24th 2018 at 9:16:10 AM

Oh, I agree, they would almost certainly understand the concept of a physical threat and have responses to deal with them. That doesnt mean they evolved with threat displays. Perhaps on their world preditors all use ambush attack strategies—they pounce without warning. Maybe their own species didnt have overtly violent competition among themselves. The possibilities are endless. Regardless of that, intellectually Im sure that they could adapt to us fast enough to figure out what humans do with weapons, and react accordingly.

Bottom line, Major T better hope he's the first one to confront the aliens with his rifle bayonet, for him to have any chance of surviving the encounter at all.

And that their apparent incaution is, in fact, due to unfamiliarity with aggressive displays of weaponry rather than indifference granted by overwhelmingly superior technology.

Amusingly, we have lots of our own science fiction and space opera works in which overconfident humans land on a planet and get taken down by the local equivalent of blowguns and rocks, so maybe these aliens are just as dumb as we think we are.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 24th 2018 at 9:25:38 AM

Even though evolution doesn’t have to converge it seems fair to say it would proceed along certain lines. A spacefaring civilization would have tool use favored in its evolutionary history, which in turn would mean at a minimum prehensile limbs or manipulators of some kind.

To be fair, aliens are not likely to be thwarted by terrestrial disease. The analogy it was going for was the way colonialist empires often suffered from diseases in place like Africa. However, this analogy fails when talking about different species, however. Initially, the aliens would be completely unaffected by terrestrial diseases.

Of course, with Wot W part of the issue is also a case of Seinfeld Is Unfunny. During HG Welles time, the aliens would be a force to be reckoned with. However, a modern military would utterly laugh at them. The '05 movie had to give them energy shields, and according to my Dad (US Logistics Officer) the military in it was severely nerfed in a lot of ways (a lot of the vehicles and such they're using are, in his words, "ancient").

Now, in general humanity as-is would stand zero chance against a full-on interstellar civilization if it really, really wanted us dead. This is for two reasons:

1. 1: Logistics. Your average space opera tends to seriously underestimate exactly how big a spacefaring army would be. They could drop a billion soldiers on us and call it a rounding error.

2. 2: Planet-busting weapons are not difficult to make if you have interstellar travel. They could kill us before we even know they exist.

To be fair, if you're not talking the entire alien civilization against us, then you can justify Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion. A small band of space pirates, for example, could potentially destroy or conquer our civilization-but we could plausibly win, too.

The key assumption is that if a civilization is going to go the bother of mounting a expedition across dozens of light years to conquer an entire planet, they'd bring the resources and technology to do it properly, not least because the challenges involved in such a project are so immense that only a Type 2 species could even attempt it in the first place.

Now, we have lots of fiction about that not being the case, but it's important to remember that it's not as much fun reading about an alien invasion if we lose and go extinct, The End.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 26th 2018 at 2:30:22 PM

More likely, an invasion force would move a large asteroid into Earth Orbit and then threaten to drop it on us. After that we're basically a vassal state.

This leads to another kind of plot where humanity has to rise from second-class citizens into major political player. However, this also makes the first encounter a background element rather than having center stage so let's table this line of thinking for now.

Even an asteroid tossed our way is underkill. If you are a K2 civilization, you can build weapons that can destroy the Earth from a different solar system.

For example, assembling an array of mirrors around a star, focusing all of its light into a laser beam. Or, alternatively, taking just a fraction of a star's energy and firing a relativistic projectile in our direction. As they say, Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.

Of course, but it's usually more efficient to use simpler technology rather than more advanced technology. We could have all our cars used air cushion hovering but the wheel is just easier to pull off.

That, and I don't know if we'd recognize a planet melting array at first but we'd certainly notice a planet killing rock.

As with many things, it depends on the objective of the enemy. Do they want to subjugate and control us, exterminate us and occupy the planet, or sterilize the planet? If the latter, then nothing we do has any chance at all, because they'll just bombard us from space until the biosphere is too hot to sustain life, or RKKV us or something equally final and unstoppable.

We only have a gnat's chance of resisting if the aliens want to take the planet with its biosphere more or less intact. This means they have to dispose of us without causing climate-changing devastation. There are ways to do that without fighting, of course, such as bioweapons, which leads into more Fridge Logic, such as why one would ever want to invade a planet at all. Well, maybe once 99% of the natives are killed off, you'd send in a cleanup and occupation force, but if ground troops are your first wave, you're officially Too Dumb to Live.

The Combine in Half-Life 2 are of the "subjugate" variety, and although we never see the Seven Hour War on screen, we learn indirectly that they simultaneously invaded from everywhere with an overwhelming force, using interdimensional portals to transport their troops. Through other hints, we gather that they are a Type 2 civilization with colony worlds everywhere and the resources to conduct such attacks.

The only reason we have any chance at all, as I mentioned before, is because they send most of their front-line forces off to fight elsewhere, leaving an occupying army consisting largely of "converted" troops — humans impressed into their army — run by a quisling. This allows the resistance to surreptitiously gather momentum until it, too, can attack in many places at once with surprise and locally superior numbers.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 27th 2018 at 6:43:17 AM

Why did historically people want to invade other states, other continents? Money, prestige, power, God, lebensraum, resources, there's at least a dozen plus reasons behind it. Not all of them are rational or well thought out and not all of them can be rejected either.

The only significant difference between the Great Game of Politics on Earth and the Great Game of Politics of the Milky Way is simply the number of people and places affected.

Edited by MajorTom on Aug 26th 2018 at 9:56:45 AM

I think you interpreted my statement incorrectly. I mean invade as in "send lots of troops to kill us in something resembling conventional warfare". As in almost every Alien Invasion film in the last 30 years.

Edit:

That and it takes decades to move things between planets rather than days or weeks. The war could be over by the time your fleet arrives. At the very least, any potential target would have years to prepare if the Great Game of Politics involves any sort of formal communications between worlds.

If FTL Travel is possible in your 'verse, then obviously that changes things, but if you want to use real world physics, that's out. There's a reason FTL is considered a prerequisite of Space Opera.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 27th 2018 at 9:44:23 AM

If memory serves the people who encountered the Hopkinsville Goblins did shoot at them numerous times, and confirmed striking them as well. The bullets didn't do anything.

On the flipside, the aliens were unable or unwilling to seriously hurt the people they encountered, ultimately leaving them more frazzled than anything else.

In the Hopkinsville case one of the aliens actually approached with it's hands up and the people still shot at it. It's not to surprising, these where backwoods Kentucky rednecks during the 50's, they would have shot at anything mildly different.

Thats needlessly dismissive. But the key point is that there is no apparent reason for technologically advanced aliens to tolerate that kind of reception, or to persist in pestering a group of humans that way.