If there was a very aggressive alien invasion / take over of earth....

[Deleted]

voyager 1 has left our solar system, not our galaxy. depending on what definition of solar system you use.

just think of what it would take to survive in space, look how it wrecks humans who stay in space for just 6 months, and they don't even have to deal with the worst space ahs to offer radiation wise.

[Sylar Hao]

We have Nicki Minaj. All we need is make them listen to her and they'll suicide.

[truckboattruck]

well if earth was attacked, invaded and colonized
the side with the more advanced technology woudl win, which of course is the aliens

and then for 100's of years the aliens children would feel guilty that their ancestors won a war
and shame themselves and possibly do more harm to their own culture than they ever did to ours

[Garehn Vi-Brittania]

Wouldnt it be disappointing if we were the most advanced life forms in existence?

[LilSaihah]

Surely they will just take control of Obama using a secret alien mind control implant.

_{OR MAYBE THEY ALREADY HAVE}

[Rumred]

You assume they would even have to use a invasion to take us over if they are as advanced as to get from galaxy to galaxy. They could unleash any number of things from a virus to automated weapons to wipe us out in quick order.

[Zethras]

What if we made this abit more realistic? That these so called aliens were aggressive by nature, but we are their first encounter of new life in the neighboor universe?

Don't forget guys, our Voyager 1 as already exited our galaxy. The aliens would just need to be able to sustain life/families in space over a longer period of time. We can already do this aswell, short term. All I'm saying is that the aliens would be further advanced then us, but not necessarily anywhere close to the Deathstar, planitary destruction, automatic universal healing suits, laser weapons etc.

They might be more familiar to us then we'd like to think. Creatures with exoskeletons to counter the long term effects of space?

I almost bit that.

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you guys are thinking too small we need to build this
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news...4e86e435b50fe4
and hold the universe hostage problem solved anyone messes with us we destroy the universe.

Any links to websites I don't need to subscribe to view it?

[muto]

Our chances of surviving an attack from an alien race that have mastered interstellar/galactic spacetravel is between 0% and 0%

Independence Day is such a good movie though =[

[Yvaelle]

The resource they would (most likely) want is a habitable planet.

There are 2 kinds of aliens that could visit us:
-the low tech option: a race that has only just developed the means for interstellar travel and for whom this travel therefore is a huge resource investment. These guys will only come here because they NEED resources, presumably because they have depleted or fucked up their own world. They come here to survive so they don't want to share, they will just lob a asteroid at us a few decades before their main ships arrive.

Ask yourself this - what would it cost to travel to a neighbouring (let alone distant) solar system? Try to put a number on that. Now with that number in mind, scale it up to bring enough military hardware and personnel to combat and defeat 7 billion people, and then occupy their home planet (if you think Afghanistan is hard to occupy, magnify that to match all of Earth's population).

Now, add in that this force needs to be self-sustaining - and you don't know if you will find resources where you are going - so you either need to bring all your food/ammo/supplies with you - or you need to bring enough manufacturing equipment to populate a moon/planet in our solar system as a base of operations during your Earth occupation.

Don't just assume it's a really big number, take a wild guess as to what that would cost.

Now factor in the time involved to travel - if you detect an Earth-like planet from your homeworld, and immediately set out without any other knowledge of whether or not its inhabited, no scouting etc, and your entire fleet moves as quickly as our fastest probe ever (Voyager 1) - it would take 80,000 years to get here from the nearest star. Now factor in 80,000 years worth of fuel and supplies.

Or, you want to scout our planet first? That's 80,000 years for your scout to get here, and another 80,000 years for it to report back - 160,000 years after you detect our planet - and your intel is now 80,000 years out of date by the time the probe returns to your home planet. Then you need to be immediately ready to leave - and it would another 80,000 years to get your invasion fleet to Earth: 240,000 years after you had the tech to detect Earth, and your intel is 160,000 years out of date by the time your fleet arrives. Last you were aware, humanity was a few million monkeys that paint on cave walls in Africa.

The logistics of invading another planet without FTL travel are hard to even fathom.

Now, instead assume they have FTL - Warp Drive or Star Gates or something - you eliminate all the travel time, but the cost of transporting your army is still going to be quadrillions or quintillions of dollars. It's hard to imagine what kind of problem they could be running from - short of an expected Super Nova - that would make interstellar invasion the cheaper solution.

If they depleted their planet - they are surrounded by a solar system full of resources, and likely have other solar systems nearby full of resources - to say nothing of how hard it would be to deplete a planet like ours of resources. Also - there is no great reason to believe what is habitable for us (liquid water, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere) is desirable for them - they could prefer Venus, or Mars, or Europa, or Titan, or Neptune.

-The high tech option: a race for whom interstellar travel is trivial, they do not need anything we or our planet can provide, so they will come here to study us/treat us like cattle/treat us like pets/what have you. Just think of how we treat animals let alone insects and plants to see what is the worst case scenario depending on the level of interest they take in us.

For any race for whom interstellar travel is trivial - we aren't comparable to cockroaches (pests in their kitchens) or weeds in their streets - we are a distant, self-contained planet - we are a garden, or a zoo - it takes effort for them to come here, and they don't (seemingly) maintain residence nearby - so if they come here, they are interested in us. We are house pets - not vermin.

[mittacc]

First:
1) We would die.
2) We would become slaves.
Then if 2):
We would have to wait until an alien or a human starts a 'human rights movement' similar to early womens/black peoples right movements.

[diddle]

If they have the technology to reach us then they have the technology to do whatever the hell they want with us.

[endersblade]

Just make sure you have a board with a nail in it. When conventional weaponry fails..

You may be surprised at how true that could be.

Think about it. Every time someone makes a weapon, armor is made to protect them from it. At some point, that armor will be vulnerable to a previous weapon.

Take for instance, kevlar. Kevlar was invented to stop kinetic power, i.e. bullets. However, any point-based weapon - a knife, or an arrow - will cut right through it. We made chainmail to stop arrows, plate to stop swords, but crossbow bolts punched right through it. Guns were invented, in comes kevlar, but arrows punch right through it. Lasers are invented, some sort of possibly reflective or light-absorbing material is invented, bullets go right through it. So on and so forth.

Granted, this is all Earth tech, who knows how other civilizations have evolved?

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If they have the technology to reach us then they have the technology to do whatever the hell they want with us.

And that is really just a big fallacy. Just because they have the tech to do X does not mean they have the tech to do Y.

We can fly around the world, we can dive deep into the oceans, but we do not have the technology to cure many illnesses and viruses. We can see the human skeleton via X-Ray, but we can't cure cancer. One does not have anything to do with the other.

[mittacc]

You may be surprised at how true that could be.

Think about it. Every time someone makes a weapon, armor is made to protect them from it. At some point, that armor will be vulnerable to a previous weapon.

Take for instance, kevlar. Kevlar was invented to stop kinetic power, i.e. bullets. However, any point-based weapon - a knife, or an arrow - will cut right through it. We made chainmail to stop arrows, plate to stop swords, but crossbow bolts punched right through it. Guns were invented, in comes kevlar, but arrows punch right through it. Lasers are invented, some sort of possibly reflective or light-absorbing material is invented, bullets go right through it. So on and so forth.

Granted, this is all Earth tech, who knows how other civilizations have evolved?

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And that is really just a big fallacy. Just because they have the tech to do X does not mean they have the tech to do Y.

We can fly around the world, we can dive deep into the oceans, but we do not have the technology to cure many illnesses and viruses. We can see the human skeleton via X-Ray, but we can't cure cancer. One does not have anything to do with the other.

So if they've mastered worm holes, why can't they just split Earth into two? Alternatively, if they've traveled faster than light they've broken physics as we know it=>we can't even start imagining what they could do.

edit: Besides, a knife can't penetrate kevlar. If it could, a bullet would as well. Kevlar is however soft and it will damage the wearer unless the kevlar is somehow supported fro mthe back.

[Deleted]

I'll just automatically assume all of our conventional weapons will be useless against them if they can actually have the tech to get from galaxy to galaxy.

But what about thermonuclear/atomic/biological weapons? Isn't ground zero of a thermonuclear weapon as hot as the sun...there can't possibly be any tech to survive that out there?

It will just never happen, if those guys really came here from a galaxy away surly they have the means to mine an uninhabited world for the recourses they need. And yes i have heard the "ant theory" but if i where to walk in a jungle and i wanted to pick up some fruits, would i pick out the tree that has an ant infestation or would i pick the tree that i can go in without getting bitten by ants? In reality aliens could get everything they wanted on other worlds except for DNA. But if you want DNA you would not want to destroy most of it before collecting it. There is simply no need for them to destroy a civilization, it gives them nothing they could not get without a fight somewhere els.

[v2prwsmb45yhuq3wj23vpjk]

All they would need to do is release a microbe onto our planet genetically designed to target our species. If they can cross space, engineering a dozen plagues would be child's play. If it's airborne and released in enough quantity, we're fucked.

Why would it be child's play, exactly? What about crossing space makes you particularly good at genetic engineering? What, are we supposed to just assume that highly advanced in one technology means highly advanced in all technologies? Are we to assume that their understanding of our genetic makeup would be understood enough for them to create such disease?

[AeneasBK]

I'm so glad Mars Attacks was referenced first

[v2prwsmb45yhuq3wj23vpjk]

So if they've mastered worm holes, why can't they just split Earth into two? Alternatively, if they've traveled faster than light they've broken physics as we know it=>we can't even start imagining what they could do.

edit: Besides, a knife can't penetrate kevlar. If it could, a bullet would as well. Kevlar is however soft and it will damage the wearer unless the kevlar is somehow supported fro mthe back.

A knife can, in fact, penetrate kevlar. Bullets aren't sharp and thus impact many threads of kevlar at once. A knife will go between the threads because it is sharp, possibly cutting a few that remain in the way. You can break 1 pencil, but can you break 20 pencils at once? How about putting your finger between the pencils, can you do that?

[Mancowski]

Why destroy earth for resources when the solar system has everything in abundance already. Why have biological slaves when you have the tech for very good mechanical robots.


We are very vulnerable to biological warfare, something as advanced as they would turn our own bodies against us with foreign antibodies that they could manufacture to harm only our DNA.




So they would either be hostile towards us if we refused to stop altering things in space, or they want us to stop altering life on earth.


Only things that make any sense to me

[Deleted]

I'll just automatically assume all of our conventional weapons will be useless against them if they can actually have the tech to get from galaxy to galaxy.

But what about thermonuclear/atomic/biological weapons? Isn't ground zero of a thermonuclear weapon as hot as the sun...there can't possibly be any tech to survive that out there?

An alien invader would be a fool to not correctly assess the Humanity's military and natural conditions of Earth, and I don't think an alien species would travel parsecs of space to go full-retard in Earth's atmosphere.

The movie War of the Warlords? An affront to basic logic. Aliens dying to Earth's natural microscopic lifeforms?! Are you fucking kidding me?! The writer assumes the aliens were too stupid to investigate the environment's possibility to actually support alien life and then expired because it wasn't hospitable to them after all.

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Why destroy earth for resources when the solar system has everything in abundance already. Why have biological slaves when you have the tech for very good mechanical robots.


We are very vulnerable to biological warfare, something as advanced as they would turn our own bodies against us with foreign antibodies that they could manufacture to harm only our DNA.




So they would either be hostile towards us if we refused to stop altering things in space, or they want us to stop altering life on earth.


Only things that make any sense to me

Earth has an abundance or organic life. An alien life form might be interested in consuming it. It's also a reservoir of water and oxygen that is much easier to exploit than chasing rocks in space.

Or perhaps they would be just interested in the habitable conditions for a colony.

[Gheld]

It actually all depends really.

Theoretically interstellar travel (not intergalactic, intergalactic travel is actually an absurdity without being able to go millions of times the speed of light) is possible with not much more advanced technology than we already have. So it's conceivable ET could be less than a whole order of magnitude ahead of us technologically.

The most energy efficient method of interstellar travel would be to have a large multigenerational colony ship that houses an entire civilization. To survive such a long journey they will likely be prepared for almost any contingency. (other than being outgunned). The utilization of advanced weaponry would also make their military aspect much more of an educated and specialized role, because what good is a soldier that can't troubleshoot their hardware.

It's also possible that we might get lucky and some astronomer might detect them early. As far as cloaking goes, the most likely method of cloaking would be a metamaterial system, since it doesn't require a whole lot of energy to employ, which has to be custom tailored to the wavelengths you want to pass around the object. So without first hand information about the wavelengths of light our eyes pick up, hiding themselves from us could involve a lot of guess work (and they might guess wrong).

So random chance could possibly work in our favor for early detection. As well as the fact that they would be exhausting energy in our direction in order to slow down for some time before they arrive. (but the night sky is a big place, and the chances of detecting them by accident are very low).

They would likely have weapons that could reach us from high orbit. We do not yet have weapons that would reach high orbit; making orbital bombardment an issue still.

However we do have Gauss rifles in development, and we do have rockets. So if we had enough time to place a Gauss rifle into low orbit it would actually make a ridiculously powerful deterrent. (however they probably have Gauss rifles too, and targeting ours would probably be a trivial matter to them)

So while in most scenarios it's conceivable that a hostile alien invasion force would kick our asses.
There is also a very strong possibility that they are not that much more advanced, and that by some stroke of luck we might detect them while they still think they have the element of surprise, and then surprise them with a pot shot from an experimental weapon, and put a big hole in their boat and letting the vacuum of space rip them a new one.

As far as nuclear weapon goes, high yield nuclear weapons are absolutely gigantic; comically so. Very few nuclear weapons in the megaton range were actually produced other than for testing purposes. So the very idea of firing something like a 1+ megaton bomb at an alien space craft in high orbit is laughable at best.

If they reach the ground, a nuclear weapon would be quite effective but also cause ridiculous amounts of collateral damage.

So TLDR : The only real hope we have against a hostile alien invasion would be to detect them early and surprise them with small fast moving projectiles that are difficult to detect (and thus defend against) in order to destroy their craft before it is close enough to bombard our asses.