Alien Invasion

Alien Invasion

It’s a fairly common theme in science fiction, usually with it being somewhere along the lines of them being after our resources or in the even cheesier iterations our women.  Usually you see, at least looking back at the 1930s, tentacled aliens going after big breasted blonde women. Most of the time  the argument after now would typically say its all absurd, or say advanced civilizations don’t make war, or don’t invade, or logically there are to many resources to fight over. All of the rationalizations tend to forget a few things, one the history of our civilization as it goes from more primitive to more advanced hasn’t exactly gone from less peaceful to more peaceful.  Two wars are typically fought over actual resources vs. potential resources (remember the talk about space resources, well it’s the same thing, why develop your own if you can more cheaply take it from somebody else). Three,  wars also often times do not involve rational reasons, you have only to look at human history to see this, if we are capable to prosecuting wars for irrational reasons, it’s the height of absurdity to think a alien species couldn’t. Four wars are very often fought for rational reasons, for resources, for power, and the most basic of all reasons survival.

You see the problem I have with people who think of alien life, is that they tend to incorporate very little of reality into their diagnoses, in their own way they are as absurd as those old 1930s ideas of aliens, but with one difference at least the old 1930s alien conceptions weren’t intended to be serious. Now a rational person would try and incorporate what we know of the only intelligent species we know of (us, and yes I’ve hear the joke no intelligent life here, lets presume for the moment we are intelligent),  and use that knowledge to extrapolate some information about what intelligent life out there would be like. Instead they say well it’s impossible to know what they will be like, and so ignore the entirety of human history because none of the E.T.s could possibly be even slightly like us. When you try and use human  history to offer predictive models, it’s  usually well we are the anomaly, and our history couldn’t  possibly predict what is out there. Yes the aliens could be so  alien we don’t know anything,  yes they could have a entirely different history; but it  is still reasonable to at least start with our own  history to serve as if nothing else a baseline for comparison, and a starting point to make useful predictions. It is reasonable to start with the one intelligent species we can confirm to have existed, us.

So nonsensical rant done with, to the nitty gritty, a alien invasion. Since I want to have fun writing this, I won’t delve into every historical example imaginable, but will pick and choose the ones I like.  To start with every example of a advanced civilization meeting a more primitive civilization usually results with the advanced civilization winning. This is a indisputable fact, primitives usually get screwed. But what the history books typically get wrong is the why of how they were screwed. Most of the time the reasons follow along the lines of our superior technology allowed us to defeat them, blah blah, nothing else mattered, but our superior nature.  And most of the time people accept those reasons, because it suits their egos, because we are the ancestors of that civilization that won.

However looking at the facts, we see it wasn’t the superior technology which allowed the more advanced civilization to defeat the primitive. Therein lies the hope for our own civilization when faced with a more advanced alien civilization invading. One the very first colonists were typically rather pathetic and depended on native help to survive. The case of Jamestown, the Puritans, and even Cortez’s conquistadors all required native help to survive, to establish their particular branch of civilization. We see in those cases that it is when the colonists first arrive that they are at their most vulnerable, and it is then when they are most vulnerable. This makes sense from a human history viewpoint but also from a payload capacity viewpoint. Put simply using normal conventional ways to crossing interstellar space, you need large amounts of energy to get up to a certain fraction of the speed of light. The more mass you push, and the faster you go the more prohibitive the energy cost. So there is basically a payload limitation the faster you go, there is less of a energy cost to push less mass. You can  get more payload, but you get less speed and slow down your transit speed. So alien ship traveling at high fractions of the speed of light is likely to get here with comparatively little in terms of mass, and also whatever capacity they have for maintaining their own civilization. To push this analogy into human history it is like Puritans arriving, having few guns, few numbers, and only their pathetic survival skills to get them through the winter. They might technically be more advanced, but it doesn’t buy them food, or the industrial capacity to replenish their supplies.

In the hypothetical alien ship example, them coming to conquer, means they might have a few advanced weapons, but once they have exhausted their stocks, they have only the high ground of space, and no advanced technical infrastructure to rebuild those stocks. The high ground of space is a significant asset, but it is useless without the capability to exploit it. The aliens in this scenario must be prevented from building their infrastructure so that they don’t build more of those advanced weapons. So two strategies, continual attacks to reduce their advanced weapons, and attacks on their attempts to create  a high technology infrastructure. The worst part from the viewpoint of the Indians surviving with regard to the Puritans was letting them survive and grow, as it was partly the cause of their near extinction.

Two is a bit worse from a viewpoint of defending against advanced civilizations. In that advanced civilizations often time come with a set of negative side effects born of living in their own world. In the case of the Westerner civilization against the Native Americans it was diseases nasty enough to wipe out the majority of the population. Now this is possible but relatively unlikely when it comes to alien species invading, as whatever diseases they have would not infect us most diseases we know of tend  to  be  species specific, and using history that means  both sides would be unaffected by the other’s  diseases. Does this mean no lessons may be learned from human history, in regard to the negative carrier problem?  No, it doesn’t, because as we know disease denied Western civilization a large scale foothold in Africa even up to today. Even though their diseases  would not a affect us and ours theirs, it is not inconceivable to develop a bioweapon capable of only infecting the invading species,  this would require some significant knowledge of the  species, but in principle it could be used to deny  a alien species our world much as disease did to the white man in Africa. Of course there are two downsides to the strategy, one they are as capable of slowly designing a bioweapon as we are, and two creating a perfect area denial weapon also prevents the aliens from using our world which might mean they upgrade the response to say pushing a asteroid into impact with the Earth. Best advice for creating a bioweapon would be to use existing pseudo life that already lives in the aliens, much as life such as bacteria lives in us, and modify that life to be hostile.

It’s a bit harder to envision other negative carrier problems, I can think of a few but they primarily involve Von Neumann terraforming fleets going ahead of the aliens, or nano tech. Nano tech is one of the few areas of their advanced that might give us some hope; as it like any form of technology would have the problems of having to adapt to our current environment. This ‘adaptation’ might take the form of the aliens designing in modifications with regard to our current environment, but would still take time for it to be implemented. Nano on the alien side also runs the problems of any replicating system, in that it could mutate or even be affected by our own native life, in a interesting parallel to the War of the world’s scenario. But as to active resistance to said life, would depend on what design the alien invaders use. But our options would consist of three options, one active destruction of nano matter through say nukes, or directed energy weapons (experimental at this point but still possible), or very high yield conventional explosives; two would be what I call the disruption strategy and it consists of two possibilities, one the use of electromagnetic pulse or perhaps information attacks such as hacks of software governing the nanos, and two a indirect strategy, or poisoning the nano basically. Nano technology like all forms of technology would require specific combinations of materials in order to replicate, it should be possible to disrupt the replication ability by allowing the nano to ingest a combination of materials of various minerals, rather like it is possible to disrupt any life form’s ability to replicate by doing the same.

Strategies for contesting the alien’s space superiority are problematic, as currently our offensive space capability consists of a few antisatellite weapons, and nuclear weapons which can hit only hit LEO at best. This could be changed if we repurpose a few of the current boosters which already have a high earth to solar system launch capability, however this is likely to take some time and preparation. But other than that, most resistance is likely to take place on the ground. One advantage the people on earth have is in the alien invasion scenario for the invaders need to preserve the infrastructure. Without that need, aliens could use more destructive weaponry without which we could not defend against. It is important in any alien invasion scenario to strike a balance between resistance and pushing the invaders too far. A alien invasion consists of buying time until we can learn enough to be a true threat, it also consists in destroying just enough but not too much. In a way it is best if we accept the alien invaders,  as  the alternative is our annihilation, even if our decision is resistance, if we cannot push  them  off world, then it is best to draw them in  where our advantages are  best, and not where they have the advantage which is in orbit.

The third of the lessons from history in resistance applies to unity, later when the Native Americans had some technological parity, the Western powers were able to play the divided Indians up against each other, when the Western powers were just as divided as the Native Americans in some ways. In a alien invasion scenario, this lesson applies when the invaders have already established themselves, without a coordinated capacity for responding to the aliens, they can use our divisions against us. Ideally this strategy can work, but works best when the aliens themselves are as divided as we are, if they are unified it works only well  enough to ensure they do not use our divisions against us.