Alien Invasion in aliens' perspective.

I was just looking through the note containing my old ideas and dug this one:

Typical alien invasion, in their persective.

I always wondered, why do aliens invade earth? As we all know, space expedition is honking expensive. It should be even more when it comes to intergalaxy journey that probably involves FTL (I don't know anything about warp drive or something) travel. Also, if aliens have that much technology, why do they have so much trouble with us?

I came up with a way to possibly justify that.

The scenario involved Zyorimuns (why that I have no clue, maybe I should ask younger me) who searches for resources because their planet is going through severe energy crisis. So they send a crew of scientists/militia to find a planet that can provide them with plenty of energy.

Their primary source of energy is called Trichrome (again, don't ask me why) and it's a major resource that is used in basically everything, weapons and whatnots.

When they crew discovers the Earth, they go and collect the most widely used form of resource, which is obviously (unless not, I didn't do any research) oil.

It was a biggest discovery the team ever came up with.

It turns out that when oil is mixed with Trichrome, they produce ENORMOUS amount of energy, and according to their calulation, just few barrels of oil will be more than enough to fuel their planet for at least centuries.

So some of the representatives disguise and go to buy some oil...until an unchecked weaponry blows a major oil pipe up.

And well...shits get worse. Wow, I can't believe I wrote something shoddy like that.

According to that one, human weaponry is EXTREMELY effective against the aliens' armor because something in ammunitions is very good at dissolving the force field that they rely on. So warfare between alien fleets and human aircrafts are not as hard as in most that kinds of work.

Do you think this makes any sense?

edited 16th Jun '11 1:55:52 AM by dRoy

What's in it for them. Even if they do it for kicks. Their gain is the fun of it. If they are born to conquer others, their gain is fulfilling an internal drive.

edited 16th Jun '11 1:51:20 AM by Blurring

Alien invasion from the Alien's perspective is pretty much what Avatar is about. A grey is to a human pretty much what a human is to a Navi (small, weak, technologically advanced).

Well most of it sounds good, except for one thing: Why would the aliens stick around to fight the humans rather than just steal some oil and then fuck off?

Are the aliens incredibly greedy and/or racist? If they’re greedy, they’ll want to do more than just steal a couple hundred barrels of oil and go. If they’re racist, they’ll be more willing to kill the humans even if it’s economically impractical.

Maybe you could have them be really vengeful, feeling the need to declare war on an entire species because some of them killed one of their own. Maybe something about human behavior/appearance/sense of humor deeply offends them.

Or perhaps you could just have them being really bad diplomats? I think it would be an interesting scenario if the humans were angry enough to try and hijack their ship and then sail to war against their home world just because they fucked up first contact.

Well, when I did it, I used a variant of Closed Circle. The aliens used small scale individual ship teleporting (which averted Possession Implies Mastery and was Black Box), but you couldn't teleport a bunch of ships at once because of drift. So they built an experimental gate system, but when they turned it on, Eldritch Abominations came through (of the Horde of Alien Locusts variety) and messed their shit up. Only a small number of ships that weren't close to the gate escape, breaking the rule about mass transit and setting a random destination. About half get destroyed, and they end up at (the far side from Earth of) Neptune. They are then left with about 20ish ships (at least, of a military variety; they have about 36 with the civies), no homeworld, and a garden world nearby inhabited by a source of manpower and resources they could use to fight a war.

Of course, I was deconstructing it, so they spend a few months decoding our transmissions (they're telepaths), then invade using military tactics like we would if we had warships in space that could disintigrate mountains. The monkey wrench comes when North Korea uses bioweapons out of spite (a mix of ebola and small pox they got from the former Soviet Union) and kill about half the world's population... though North America and Europe still get conquered in what they call The Six Weeks' War.

How much energy are we talking about, really? Because the total energy consumption of the Earth in 2008 was 474 exajoules (474 * 10¹⁸ J). The total amount of solar energy that fall on the Earth per second is about 0.05% of that. The total amount of energy absorbed by the Earth per year is some 10,000 times that.

The Sun's output, meanwhile, is 10 billion times higher than that.

I assume that the aliens live on a similar planet, so if they actually need to traverse all of space to find new energy sources, this kind of energy is trivial to them. If all of that energy was consumed on a single planet... Well... That planet would be instantaneously vaporized by the energy-density.

So your alien civilization can't be limited to a single planet, to put it that way.

Oil, a form of hydrocarbon, is fairly abundant on Earth. It is, however, also abundant on Ganymede and Venus, so unless humanity has taken over the entire Solar System, the aliens can just drill (or drain from lakes; it's abundant) Ganymede or Venus for free, cheap hydrocarbons by the megaton.

But that's combat between two foes at an almost equal footing, something the aliens would/should never permit in the first place; if they can traverse interstellar space at faster-than-light speeds, they can also hold High Earth Orbit, which means that instead of going up against the human forces, they can, say, drop a small meteorite down on Earth, cause an extinction-event, and then snipe the survivors from orbit with lasers. If they don't hold Earth orbit by default, e.g. humans hold it already, they're still treating K2-levels of energy as if it was candy-wrappers; whatever forces the Earth has, they don't stand a chance.

No.

edited 16th Jun '11 6:07:50 AM by LatwPIAT

Unfortunatly, I suspect Alien Invasion will become more and more discredited as the Space Is Big meme spreads out.

Didn't think so either. If I remember correctly, I came up with that idea after watching War Of The World and Angels And Demons. I think I was 12 that time.

edited 16th Jun '11 7:37:17 AM by dRoy

I kind of want to see an alien encounter a human and go insane from the revelation.

"The creature stood. It stood. On two impossibly thin legs. Its forelimbs hung like dead fruit from its trunk, ending in bizarre, jointed tendrils capped with bizarre plates. It's flesh...thin and soft, as though its muscles and bones could tear through at any moment... But the eyes! THE EYES! Each was a single white mass - not compounded, but sickeningly solid - but inside of the meaningless void of white floated an island of brown swirling into a black abyss. Our eyes met. I think I went mad then."

Well I've always been using the justification in that Earth type worlds are 1 in 10 000 and terraforming takes centuries. So as civilisations solidify waiting to get new worlds, there's pre-colonised worlds sitting all around them in a tight cluster. Assuming FTL is cheap (the ships will still cost lots of money though) then you can have war.

You might also want to justify it as, FTL is "cheap" for use but a high sunk-cost. So they discovered Earth but they only have limited resources on building FTL gates to other solar systems and their planet is dying so they don't have time. Basically, Earth is the only earth-type planet they could find in time, they build a gate and then discover humans crawling all over it. So then they have to go to war.

What stops the defenders pulling Taking You with Me?

Wanting to survive?

I doubt he wants a suicidal human race for his plot :P

I really don't think Alien Invasion will be discredited until we start exploring space beyond Mars in person. It's really a different facet of science fiction from, say, space opera. Ultimately, alien invasion will be accepted by audiences so long as authors can justify why the aliens are there. Perhaps in the future, when we've settled on some other world, alien invasion will simply be a period piece-type of fiction, using today's modern as a kind of mythologized past: Standard Invasion Setting, if you will, from 1910 (War of the Worlds) to about now.

The Taking You with Me thing is really hard. I solved it by making the aliens militarily adept. They actually target the missile bases (for nukes), up to and including vaporizing the mountain where NORAD is located. But if you do that and use the terraforming justification as suggested (and which is what I used), it won't be realistic for the humans to win. Alien Invasion stories rely on the Idiot Ball (like in Independence Day) or Deus ex Machina (like War of the Worlds). If your aliens are any kind of genre savvy (or you go all out like I did and take the "How to Invade an Alien Planet" guide as it is) humans are screwed (I spent a long time looking for a Drama-Preserving Handicap, and if you use the terraforming justification, you'll probably have to too).

Yeah, now try taking out all the SSB Ns and other mobile missile launchers. Also, I'm sure drop nukes (the ones carried by aeroplanes) could be re-engineered to explode on the ground. Really, there's lot's of ways of doing massive damage, so unless the enemy is prepared to commit genocide...

Vaporizing NORAD isn't really a good idea, since that was classically interpreted as a decapitation strike on the US by a nuclear power, which would trigger a Taking You with Me launch, even if against the wrong people. That last bit doesn't really matter; the inhabitable ecosystem is still toast.

Even if we detonated all currently (known) available nuclear missile into the atmosphere it wouldn't have that much effect on the ecosystem.

Dumping thousands of tons of radioactive dust into the atmosphere isn't going to have much effect on the ecosystem?

Well, it wouldn't require genocide when you have pinpoint accuracy (in relation to vehicles). The only thing my aliens don't get are the subs, and I also do a kind of halfass hand wave in that none of the human nations are willing to commit suicide (they can't kill the alien ships; they have really good PD and shields) just to spite the aliens. Plus, the alien plan requires humanity alive, so they throw them a bone and leave SE Asia and Australia alone. They, along with other nations' remnant military forces, form an alliance... and promptly devolve into political infighting between the US, China, Russia, and the host countries over who's in charge.

It helps that the aliens, in their initial ten minute aerial offensive, destroy: the satellite grid in orbit, most of the world's military aircraft, and all of the ones in the air (including Air Force One and the POTUS), Washington DC, Bejing, and Moscow in heavy-duty plasma torpedo bombings (and heavily damage London, Paris, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, and Brasilla), and OHKO the US Pacific Squadron in San Francisco (they were escorting the USS Constitution for Independence Day celebrations). I really tried to stop the nuclear spite situation...

edited 16th Jun '11 4:14:32 PM by USAF713

Wait, you'd destroyed or damaged a good few of the world's capitals, and you're expecting the response to be less than absolute?

They attempt to nuke the main alien command ship with the few missiles they have left. It just shoots them down. This is where they realize they can't, and I decided it'd be more interesting if it wasn't a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story where humanity commits suicide with nukes. I acknowledge that it's not perfect, but it's about as close as I think I could get to eliminating the nuke option (the subs are, obviously, a Chekovs Gun).

edited 16th Jun '11 6:19:41 PM by USAF713

My motivation for my alien invasion is that they see the effects we're having on the planet and how uncooperative we are in fixing it and decide to save the ecosystem. To them we're just an invasive species.

Edited by Belisaurius on Oct 9th 2023 at 9:21:33 AM

The one thing Earth has, that very few other systems will (so far as we know) is advanced forms of life. Make that valuable, and there you go for your motivation, and for why they can't just mass nuke us. That makes it an asymmetric warfare situation, in which humans have some ability to deny the aliens their goals, while being out gunned in ever other sense.