Reaction to alien encounter?

Again, history is littered with examples of that. Colonial wars, imperialist wars, conquests, genocides, rebellions, revolutions, tons of examples of forces invading or stationing themselves somewhere killing anyone who opposes their claim of conquest (and sometimes beyond that, intentionally or otherwise).

They tie into the reasons I gave for invading and starting wars to begin with.

The difference is that human history contains examples of different cultures on the same planet, separated by relatively modest distances that made even intercontenental invasions affordable to invaders who were technologicalky no more than a few hundred years ahead of their victims.

I remember hearing someone recount the affair and then summed it up as "aliens show up, toilet paper the house, and leave."

There might not be a good or apparent reason, but maybe the aliens are college frat boys from space and this is their version of cow-tipping.

Edited by Parable on Aug 28th 2018 at 3:18:10 AM

I think he's saying "deploy troops" as opposed to "blow the planet up from a different solar system".

Or seed the planet with bioweapons, or send robots to do the job, etc. There are numerous ways to defeat a technological native species that don't involve front-line boots on the ground.

Same thing. Modern wars have yet to turn into push-button affairs where we just nuke a whole country from the other side of the planet and be done with it. It's unlikely they ever will. Politics and war are fickle, often confusing creatures.

Mind, the entire point of war is to enforce your will via force. It's not easy to enforce your will over the dead.

It's hard to have a productive conversation if points made are simply ignored. If Major Tom wants to envision a scenario in which plucky Earthlings fight a heroic action against a moronic alien invader who throws ground troops into the meat grinder, so be it, but that's unrealistic in the extreme.

Once more, with feeling, there are a couple of motivations for interstellar warfare, only one of which gives us any chance at all:

1. Subjugation. The aliens want Earth under their political control, with its population available to become part of the Interstellar Empire or whatever.
   • They can't wipe out our biosphere or use planet-killing WMDs.
   • They can't exterminate us completely as this would defeat the point.
   • They would have to get us to surrender political control, which means defeating and/or supplanting existing governments and military forces.
2. Colonization. The aliens want Earth as a habitable planet for their own people and don't give a damn about any sapients currently using the place.
   • They can't wipe out our biosphere or use planet-killing WMDs.
   • Exterminating us is either a primary objective or an unfortunately necessary side effect.
   • Political considerations are only relevant if there are other civilizations out there who might object.
3. Resources. The aliens want Earth's resources — water, metals, etc.
   • Planet-killers are out but the biosphere is negotiable depending on their tolerance for adverse conditions.
   • Exterminating us is either a primary objective or an unfortunately necessary side effect.
   • Political considerations are only relevant if there are other civilizations out there who might object.
   • Side-note: attacking an inhabited planet for resources is stupid when there are millions of uninhabited worlds, asteroids, and other bodies out there for the picking.
4. Extermination. The aliens don't want anyone competing for their place as kings of the hill. They don't care about colonizing us or getting our resources.
   • Biosphere destruction and planet-killing WMDs are on the table.
   • Exterminating us is the point.
   • Political considerations are moot.

For colonization and resources, there's no point in sending ground troops until humans are either all dead or are wiped out to the point where there's no effective resistance. For extermination, no alien foot ever needs to touch our soil. So that leaves subjugation.

Now, capturing a planet with seven billion people is a big investment no matter how you slice it, but if they're going to expend millions of troops in the process, it's a colossal waste on their part and they should fail the interstellar What An Idiot test. Again, we can consult How to Invade an Alien Planet for the comprehensive, tongue-in-cheek version, but if I were planning such an invasion against humanity's current tech level, here's what I'd consider:

• EMP all high technology. Just blow the electrical and electronic systems to hell. This alone will knock back resistance by 90% or more. Even if the military has hardened systems, the resulting social chaos would keep them completely occupied maintaining order.
  • Alternative: if our computers are vastly superior, hack into the humans' information technology and take it over. Done comprehensively enough, this might end the war before it starts.
• Destroy military installations from orbit. Forget about city-destroyers hovering a thousand feet off the ground; this isn't for spectacle, it's to get the most bang for our buck.
• Don't set foot on the ground or in the atmosphere until nuclear sites are identified and neutralized. One ICBM could wreck the hell out of our ships unless we brought sci-fi super-tech.
• Once space-to-ground superiority is locked down, contact the remaining leadership of the human race and tell them, "Surrender or die." Offer to be benevolent overlords, to repair the infrastructure, to solve political strife, to use our superior medical technology to cure humanity's ills. In other words, offer the carrot along with the stick. Negotiate a peace treaty with each nation with appropriate but firm terms.
• When the first troops land, it'll be to almost no resistance. Immediately start keeping our promises. For the inevitable small-scale insurgency, let the humans deal with it according to their own laws. If any large-scale resistance is offered, take off and obliterate that nation's cities/leaders. Repeat until resistance is gone.
• In the worst case, deploy a bioweapon and hold the cure out against total surrender.

You see? At no point am I landing small squads of ground troops to sneak around and get shot at by Major Tom and his Call of Duty buddies.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 31st 2018 at 10:48:20 AM

@Major Tom: Well keep in mind the reasons why nukes aren't commonly used don't necessarily apply to space. A spacefaring civilization almost necessarily has to be able to survive in a nuclear wasteland.

Having said that, there are still reasons. A big one is politics. If an alien civilization blows up Earth, the space UN or whatever might call for sanctions and the like. There's a few other ones like this.

Of course, it's worth noting these are for Earth in the modern day. If humanity itself becomes a K1 or K2 civilization the dynamics change quite a bit in ways that would make troop deployments more practical.

I'd expect invading aliens to try more of a proxy war at first. Just find some nation willing to pledge allegiance to your empire, and then give them weapons. It's plausible the quisling state could be defeated, though not the empire itself.

Mind you, a full scale invasion isnt necessary at all. The scenario is a small group of aliens on a casual walkabout in the woods, accidentaly encountering a lone human also walking around in the woods. Im saying no way the human gets the upper hand.

Edited by DeMarquis on Aug 30th 2018 at 6:03:27 AM

Yeah, the topic drifted a bit. Any scenarios in which the human does gain the upper hand seem predicated on the aliens being particularly naive and or dense, or so different from us that they are unable to recognize us as technological sapients. If you present that in a fictional context, I'll be intrigued — cool premise. If you present that in a "what would happen in reality" context, I'd say you're making a lot of assumptions just so you can justify standing a chance.

Everything I discussed is in reference to a technologically superior alien invasion against modern-day Earth. If we get up to K1 (or definitely K2), the calculus changes radically and it's probably not worth trying to conquer us, if that was even on the table to begin with.

Two K2 civilizations going at each other means planets getting blown up. Not really worthwhile unless one of them is Reapers or something like that for which extermination is the point.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 31st 2018 at 12:54:02 PM

A related question, how many of you think some reported UFO and alien sightings are genuine (or at least not completely fabricated by the witnesses)?

More than zero and less than all of them. I've seen a couple UFO type things in the skies over Colorado and they were not meteors or stars or planets or planes. The most prominent one I can remember are two craft each consisting of three points of light (unblinking) shaped in an isoceles triangle flying 100% silent.

Nearby Petersen AFB did not operate F-117's at the time so it wasn't that. Likewise being completely silent ruled out any manmade aircraft in the area. (Air Force Academy gliders operate only in the day and never over the skies near Pueblo.)

Of course, that's not the only thing we've had. It's been almost 25 years but we still don't know what caused a huge sonic boom overhead over my town. Air Force denies everything, Army doesn't have aircraft that fast and Marines/Navy are several states over in terms of geography.

Edited by MajorTom on Sep 18th 2018 at 9:55:49 AM

Until proven otherwise... none.

Tempting as it is, this is definitely the case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

Neil deGrasse Tyson has something pithy and appropriate to say about UFOs. The "Unidentified" part means... unidentified. It means you don't know what it is. If you knew it was an alien, it would be an "identified" flying object.

Plus, human cognitive bias means that anecdotal eyewitness evidence is completely untrustworthy from a scientific perspective. "I saw something in the sky and I think it's an alien spaceship." Unless you have proof beyond a grainy photo, no sale. Proof takes the form of an actual alien organism, or an object of alien manufacture. Something that can be analyzed in a laboratory.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 19th 2018 at 6:45:00 AM

Depends on what you mean by "genuine". People see weird things all the time, and I don't doubt that most of them believe their own claims. There's a lot of ground to cover between "not fabricated" and "true" though.

Also, contrary to popular belief, scientists would love to find incontrovertible evidence of aliens visiting Earth. It would revolutionize multiple fields of study. The problem is that they keep being disappointed. All knowledge that we can bring to bear indicates that it should be extraordinarily difficult to cross interstellar space and impossible to do it without being detected.

Sure, they could have come before we had the ability to detect them, but if so, where's the evidence? We have telescopes and radar constantly trained on space, and we would see anything moving under its own power within millions of kilometers of Earth. We would find evidence of habitation on other planets and moons if the aliens had landed there to prepare any sort of base or staging area.

To suggest that they're everywhere and we just don't know about it requires a conspiracy of vast proportions, and this isn't the X-Files. People can't keep secrets that big for that long.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 19th 2018 at 10:54:11 AM

Which is funny, every time a new phenomena is detected that falls outside the scope of known science the very first thing they shoot down and never test is the idea that it's potentially caused be extraterrestrial civilization.

For example, the unusual light curves around Tabby's Star. Inconsistent with all previously detected phenomena of similar type, the idea they refused to consider even falsifiable was alien megastructures.

Another one are Fast Radio Bursts (FRB). We have no idea what causes them, yet they've proven surprisingly frequent once we figured out how to detect them. And they aren't identical indicating either the natural cause of these has a huge range of sources or at least some of them might be artificial from methods as of yet not understood.

Both situations are falsifiable hypotheses yet modern science seems to regard the idea that an FRB or what's going on at Tabby's Star is aliens to be akin to talking about magic and elves.

You haven't been paying attention, then. Scientists don't ignore possible evidence of aliens, but they do attempt all other hypotheses first before going there. I've watched some videos about the Tabby's Star phenomenon and will go back and check them for what the determination was.

^ The present hypothesis for Tabby's Star is an "uneven cloud of dust". Given the location of the star, it's apparent age, and the relative isolation of it relative to nearby stars, this hypothesis is on sketchy ground, the gravity and tidal forces of the star should have dispersed the dust into a relative equilibrium and given it's not a planet that causes the unusual dimming of the star, something else is afoot.

EDIT: After updating on it, it seems even the dust hypothesis is sketchy. Something huge is circling it because recent observations gave the greatest dimming event ever seen from the star. At least 5% dimming.

Too big to be normal planets or comets, inconsistent with dust, too small to be a stellar companion (a transient or orbiting brown dwarf is one of the proposed hypotheses now), and yet it still proves elusive.

Edited by MajorTom on Sep 19th 2018 at 8:10:22 AM

I’m just going to point out that the very same scientists and astronomers who put forward the “alien megastructure” hypothesis about Tabby’s Star also said that they felt it was an extremely unlikely possibility and that natural phenomena (current best guess is some kind of dust or fine debris cloud, something more supported by evidence than the megastructure theory) is infinitely more likely.

There’s no evidence supporting a huge solid structure, as all analysis has shown that whatever it is isn’t an opaque object. Additionally, there aren’t any potentially technological emissions coming from the system, which further excludes the megastructure hypothesis.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 19th 2018 at 8:14:11 AM

^ The problem with the dust theory is it should be bright as a Christmas tree in the IR spectrum like we've seen around other dusty stars. It is not.

Not necessarily. There are quite a few potential scenarios that could lead to “cold” dust. Moreover, spectrophotometetry has confirmed that whatever’s blocking the star filters light unevenly, which requires an object that isn’t opaque.

It’s not that scientists throw out the aliens hypothesis too quick, it’s that it’s a fairly easy hypothesis to throw out.

Yes, the point is that scientists try every hypothesis that is not aliens first, because "it's never aliens". Only when all other possibilities are conclusively ruled out do we consider intelligent origins. That said, if it is some kind of alien mega-structure (which would be awesome, by the way), that fact does not obviously and immediately lead to, "UFOs are real, you guys!"

Tabby's Star is almost 1500 ly from Earth, and even if it does host a Type 2 civilization, that's a long-ass haul for them to be sending flying saucers to steal our cattle.

^ They won't steal our cattle, they might steal our cable though.