Really? I think we could beat that are hugely aliens less advanced than us in terms of weapons and armor.
1) Harry Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" would like to have a word with you.
2) As long as you have patience interstellar travel just requires the ability to get to Earth's escape velocity, plus a bit more. No magic FTL device need ever be involved.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
We know nothing at all about the aliens in this thought experiment, especially how they think. You seem to assume they will follow a technological path similar to ours but it's totally possible for them to develop their ability to travel massively in advance of their weapons.
Traveling light years is easy.
Step 1) Reach your planet's escape velocity.
Step 2) Don't crash.
And that's it, actually. Your ship is already on its way. We've done that several times: Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, New Horizons.
Surviving the trip is hard, certainly, but life support technology doesn't mean military advancement any more than a reasonably powerful engine does.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
That’s the point no matter what route they take you will need a society that is advance in all aspect of life; science, math, technology etc to achieve this
I don’t see how a hostile alien civilization will not be able to make weapons with the knowledge they need for space travel alone. You make it seem way to easy.
Traveling light years is not easy….You do realize that the probes have only traveled like 0.0017 light years and the closest star is over 4 light years away? We don’t even have the technology or the resources to send long term mission to Mars.
The energy needed to fuel these ships and sustain life is enough to creating planet destroying weapons.
He obviously means a race capable of travelling at light speed, not a race that has travelled light years and taken 70 years to get here. And in that case he would be correct, there is a strong connection between domestic and military application of new inventions. Weaponry/travel are connected, do you not see the connection between Guns and Rocket ships? It makes perfect sense that the advancement of one medium would lend itself the the advancement of another. Take the internal combustion engine as an example.
Any race capable of sustaining faster than light travel, is going to militarily more advanced than us period. Weapons / travel / lifesupport / medicinal. Everything. Because when you invent a new technology you have to invent counter measures at the same time. Imagine how far advanced their life support systems will be for ftl travel. Imagine the armor/shields of the vehicle..imagine the shields/armor of the soldiers onboard the ship. They're hardly gonna have this advance ship and armor, and be shotting a bloody 125mm cannons are they? Of course they're gonna have more advanced weaponry, they'd steam roll the planets world superpowers in a couple hours.
Depends on the number and type of starships (technology) which got them here. I would think we could repel one Daedalus-type starship rather easily. A single Federation-type starship, OTOH, could "lay waste to the entire surface of the world" (from "Bread and Circuses" TOS), easily countering our missiles (or simply staying out of range) and blasting away with phasers, etc.
Actually, either ship could begin an attack with EMPs, now that I think of it. Then drop neutron bombs, viruses designed to kill only humans...
And if a whole fleet arrived...
F*ck. We're toast.
__________________
Shinier than a speeding bullet.
You're assuming that aliens behave anything like us at all. If they do, fine, but that hasn't been established in this thought experiment yet.
Hindsight is always perfect. Truly alien beings might never make such a connection. Even more simply, they might never invent guns due to a lack of appropriate resources but still have the materials to make rockets.
FTL is a completely fictional technology, so it doesn't necessarily require any advancement at all. You only associate it as such because your used to seeing it in popular science fiction.
Like I mentioned before: check out Turtledove's short story "The Road Not Taken", aliens end up inventing FTL travel before revolvers.
Or look at David Gerrold's "The War Against The Chtorr" in which the invading aliens have no technology at all, and wreak ecological carnage on the planet. Or the "Alien" series of movies for another example of aliens with no technology that present a threat to Earth.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
Nukes don't mean a thing if they can't reach their target (eg, target is out of range), or if they are disabled beforehand (eg, EMP). And this is just with known forms of attack. An interstellar technology -- even if STL -- is still a technology way beyond anything we have. And even if they didn't bring any formal weaponry per se, there's always the Kzinti Lesson...
"A reaction drive's efficiency as a weapon is in direct proportion to its efficiency as a drive."
—The Kzinti Lesson, Larry Niven.
Eg, you would not want some alien starship pointing the nozzle of its photon drive down on our planet.
As for fighting off FTL-capable tech...like I said, we're toast.
__________________
Shinier than a speeding bullet.
Last edited by Mindship on Aug 4th, 2010 at 05:20 PM
We need to know more about them. Being attacked by "aliens" leaves an incredible number of possibilities.
If they have spaceships with engines that can reach high speeds we're dead. Nothing on Earth today can defend against a guided weapon going at 100s of miles a second.
On the other hand if invasion has to be carried on asteroids and they try to beat us to death when they pop out, nukes would be more than enough.
Another option is that they're incompetent, like the aliens from "Prince of Space", and send one small ship to invade us in hopes of stealing the technology they need to mount a proper invasion.
__________________
Graffiti outside Latin class.
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
A juvenal prank.
also depends on their motive no? if their intention was only to destroy the earth or kill everyone on it then we wouldnt have a very good chance. but if their trying to occupy it or enslave us any FTL weaponry and the like wouldnt really mean anything.
plus theres the problem of our bacteria. was that point in war of the worlds valid? would it really take an alien species hundreds/thousands of years to adapt to the germs on our planet?
Starflight, especially FTL, is going to require such extraordinary technology, that by the time we have it we will likely have become unimaginably advanced in other areas as well, eg, medical, nano, AI, etc. I can't imagine that an FTL race would send down its people prior to a thorough evaluation of our environment--indeed, they would make such an eval before they even set off for our world: very soon (next 50 yrs, if not less) we will be able to detect specifics about extrasolar worlds, eg, atmospheric composition, and from there infer details about that planet's biosphere. And they won't have to send down troops: they could send robots, nanoscale to megascale. I mean, the options available to a civilization capable of FTL starflight, IMO, are just too many to even enumerate.
The best comparison I can think of is: imagine an aircraft carrier sending out UAVs for multipurpose operations against islands whose inhabitants' best weapons are bows and arrows.
I really don't see any contest here.
__________________
Shinier than a speeding bullet.
Last edited by Mindship on Aug 4th, 2010 at 06:37 PM
All the ways you wish you could be, that's me. I look like you wanna look, I **** like you wanna ****, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.
Again, this would depend on physiology of the aliens. Maybe they'd have evolved entirely differently and do not resemble us in any way (their evolution would depend on environment of their home planet, I'd imagine).
Perhaps bulk of their technology would depend on harnessing different type of materials and/or energy completely alien to us (pun!).
Difficult to tell, overall. If they use materials we have never seen we stand a little chance, however, we could argue that if they need resources from our planet, their needs could be similar to ours...
Possibilities are endless.
__________________
في هذا العالم ثلاثة أشخاص أفسدوا البشرية : راعي غنم , طبيب و راكب الجمال , و راكب الجمال هو أسوأ نشال و أسوأ مشعوذ بين الثلاثة
I think you would have to be arguing that the aliens would have never looked for the military applications of whatever technology they did have.
For instance, in the rocket example you describe, you have also described interplanetary missiles.
For a "hostile" alien race to have not even considered the military applications of the technology they invented for other purposes almost poses an inherent contradiction to the OP, these aren't explorers or the "bug" species from SC or Alien, the OP insinuates this is an intelligent species looking to exploit Earth's resources. From this alone, we can insinuate that they are at a certain level of industrialization.
Arguably, though, there culd be cultural reasons they don't use their technology for weapons, but like Japan, I imagine that changing at the first sign of our anti-satellite missiles (which china has)
KMC Community Forums
Aug 4th, 2010 03:08 AM
