How to prepare for alien invasion

[snopes]

When the aliens finally invade Earth, you may wish you had listened to Travis Taylor and Bob Boan.

After all, they have written "An Introduction to Planetary Defense," a primer on how humanity can defend itself if little green men wielding death rays show up at our cosmic doorstep.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oddlyE...34498720070425

[Pseudo_Croat]

Interesting. I wonder where they developed their line of resoning - from some real-world precednt prehaps (though I'm not sure what that might have been)?

- Pseudo_Croat

[Dropbear]

I find it amusing that the next Rueters story along from the one in the OP is this story about a boy with a toilet seat stuck on his head. Perhaps he'll grow up to write quality educational material too.

Dropbear

So if we get invaded, we just become terrorists....

[Don Enrico]

Well, going partisan is a good tactic to defend yourself against an technologically or otherwise overwhelming enemy. The Swiss (and, I believe, the Finish) defence are based on that idea.

In the case of Americans using this tactic against alien invaders, they wouldn't be terrorists, of course. They would be freedom fighters.

Don Enrico

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Pseudo_Croat

Interesting. I wonder where they developed their line of resoning - from some real-world precednt prehaps (though I'm not sure what that might have been)?

- Pseudo_Croat

It says they thought of the idea while talking about asymmetric warfare, when one of them joked that the only way that America would be the underdogs in an asymmetric war was if there was an alien invasion, and everybody laughed, and then paused a moment and said "Hang on..."

So the real-world precedent is Iraq. And as Doug said, they apparently concluded that the best way to deal with the situation where you're the underdogs in an asymmetric war is to form an insurgency similar to the one in Iraq... the aliens are irrelevant, really.

The formula drawn up by U.S. astronomer Frank Drake in 1960 tries to estimate how likely contact with an alien civilisation is given factors such as the number of habitable planets.

Taylor and Boan plugged in what they felt were conservative estimates, such as that aliens cannot travel faster than 10 percent of the speed of light.

After crunching the numbers, they say it is possible that our Milky Way galaxy harbours thousands of intelligent alien species and that there is a "high probability" that one or two of them visit Earth every century.

...

Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used Godlike technology to jump across thousands of light years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy.

They simply may not have stumbled across our neck of the woods yet.

Those two statements are rather contradictory, though. And what Taylor and Boan "feel" to be conservative estimates aren't necessarily real conservative estimates - the trouble is, with a current sample of 1 planet harbouring life (Earth) it's very difficult to extrapolate to others, let alone to predict how many planets that harbour life also harbour intelligent life.

Our own civilization will almost certainly never reach the stage where humans are capable of interstellar travel, in my opinion. (People might just get to Mars, but that's about it, and if they do, then it'll only be in a similar mission or missions to the moon landings.) So not only are you assuming that there's intelligent life on planets within "range", but that it routinely forms more advanced civilizations than even our current sample of 1. I think it's hard to justify that sort of assumption.

Personally I think there may well be other intelligent life in the galaxy, but that we're unlikely ever to know about it and so it's more or less a hypothetical in practise. The idea that other intelligent life necessarily means highly-advanced interstellar civilizations is wrong.

[Nick Theodorakis]

Already done by Niven and Pournelle (and probably many others) in Footfall.

Nick

[Don Enrico]

Taylor and Boan are convinced Fermi got it wrong. Even if aliens used Godlike technology to jump across thousands of light years in a single day, they would still need millions of years to explore all the star systems in the galaxy.

They simply may not have stumbled across our neck of the woods yet.

Or they did, took one look on Earth, and decided they liked it better elsewhere...

Originally Posted by Don Enrico

Or they did, took one look on Earth, and decided they liked it better elsewhere...

"Mostly harmless"

[violetbon]

Why all the fuss? All we need to do is elect Phil Stacey to be our earth/alien liaison and all will be well. (Apologies to non American Idol viewers, who may not be in on the joke.)

[quiltsbypam]

Originally Posted by Don Enrico

Or they did, took one look on Earth, and decided they liked it better elsewhere...

Or they looked and said silly asses.

[Deepfrydegg]

Originally Posted by Don Enrico

Or they did, took one look on Earth, and decided they liked it better elsewhere...

Or perhaps to quote this month's Playboy. A cartoon depicted an alien with a woman and they say, "Our planet isn't as advanced as yours. We celebrate Sex, but consider Violence to be obscene."


Side note: History has demonstrated defeat of an opponent with superior numbers / technology usually relies upon fighting "unconventionally."
One hundred men with rifles does NOT win against 10,000 men with semi-automatic rifles, if the 100 stand out in the open field.
Make the enemy fight "your" war, don't fight theirs.

[Beachlife!]

I'm not going to worry about aliens until I have all my zombie defenses properly in place.

[Mad Jay]

Originally Posted by Richard W

Our own civilization will almost certainly never reach the stage where humans are capable of interstellar travel, in my opinion.

Why do you think so?

[Richard W]

Originally Posted by Mad Jay

Why do you think so?

It's several questions, I suppose:

Routine travel over those distances is still extremely impractical in theory, even if "possible" - travel to a point 20 light years away (say) is still fundamentally restricted by relativistic concerns; it's not a distance where you could pop over to visit your relatives on a two-week holiday (by your own reckoning) and come back to your job afterwards. The types of travel that might make this possible are basically akin to time travel.

So any travel would have to be a one-off journey on a sort of mothership, or whatever the term is. (I know there is one in science fiction but I can't remember it.) The travellers would have no physical contact with Earth after leaving, and their journey (from the point of view of observers on Earth) would probably take centuries. This may be more feasible, but it's an enormous project in itself, and extremely risky - and it probably isn't something where you could wait to see how it turned out before sending off more missions; if you were going to create several missions, you'd have to do so all at once. There would have to be extremely pressing reasons even to try.

The basic reason, though, is that I'm pretty pessimistic about our current civilization. I reckon this is about its peak. In a couple of hundred years (if that), we'll have run out of resources and space and created enough problems that the kind of technology we have even now won't be feasible to produce any more. At some point, people may conclude that there is a pressing enough reason to get off the planet that it's seriously worth trying, but given the usual inertia, by then it will probably be too late to do anything about it. As I said, I can about believe getting to Mars, but even trying to colonize Mars is rather a pipe-dream, I think.

Of course, this might all just be pessimism. But just because humanity has rapidly become very very good at electronics, it doesn't follow that other things you can imagine are equally practical.

[Troberg]

Side note: History has demonstrated defeat of an opponent with superior numbers / technology usually relies upon fighting "unconventionally."
One hundred men with rifles does NOT win against 10,000 men with semi-automatic rifles, if the 100 stand out in the open field.
Make the enemy fight "your" war, don't fight theirs.

Exactly. Even if you are outgunned in the war as a whole, a smaller, more agile force can be stronger locally as they can concentrate their strength while the larger force must spread out and guard a large area.

Just look at the conquistadors. A tiny force (just a few hundred), but their horses allowed them to always remain locally superior even against an army of some 10 000 defenders who had the support of the population as well as local knowledge.

The trick is for the smaller force to strike hard at the weakest points of the stronger force, and fall back and disappear if met by hard resistance.

[TrishDaDish]

Side note: History has demonstrated defeat of an opponent with superior numbers / technology usually relies upon fighting "unconventionally."

Have we learned nothing from Kung Fu Hustle?