Originally posted by StarCraft2
its a hypothetical q. my guess is that we are able to travel in a speed of lite or very close to speed of light by harnessing some kind of reusable energy but i could be wrong.
lets assume that traveling at a speed of lite or close to speed of lite is viable just for the sake of arguement/answering the original q
Then the war becomes based around boiling entire planets. If you take an object with a reasonable amount of rest mass (lets say 2000lb) and fling it at a planet at 99% the speed of light you get 5x10^20 Joules of energy released at impact. We'll come back to that in a minute.
At speeds that high the object will probably explode in the upper atmosphere. If you've ever bellyflopped into a pool (or just slapped a pool of water really hard) you're familiar with the concept. When you strike a fluid (be it a liquid or a gas) fast enough it acts like it's solid. The explosion would irradiate a large area beneath it and superheat the atmosphere, x-rays emitted from the explosion would fry electronics from horizon to horizon.
Back to those numbers up top. 4.2 Joules will raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree C. 500 Joules will cause one gram of water to flash into steam hot enough to cause burns. So if we dump 5e20 Joules (e is short for "times 10 to the power of"😉 into the ocean then a quadrillion kilograms of water (2.2 quadrillion pounds) will transform into a blast of steam. Realistically only a fraction of the mass would turn to steam but it would be much much hotter.
But as I said, it will explode in the atmosphere. Air is easier to heat than water is. If you can cheaply accelerate something to 99% the speed of light then you can set a planets atmosphere on fire pretty easily.
Originally posted by StarCraft2
aliens will not blast us down because they have detected precious resources at our planet. once they harvested all that (once we lose the war) then they can blast us into oblivion
Saturation bombing an entire planet is wasteful anyway, they'll just target our cities and military bases.
Originally posted by StarCraft2Then we could get Nomad, or worse, a V'Ger. 😉 Neither leaves me hopeful re: human survival.
we make our first contact by our probes and alien probes meet/send signals. then alien probe destroyed ours thus categorizing them as hostile.
von Neumann-type probes would also not be a good thing, and many scientists speculate that this might be the most realistic scenario, especially if FTL proves impossible.
Re: If Hostile Alien/Extraterestrial exist. Are We Ready to defend ourselves?
Originally posted by StarCraft2If they have the tech to get here from another planet millions of light years away, we probably aren't.
Lets say alien life form wanted resources from earth, are we ready to defend our planet earth and save human race?(topic inspired by independence day and starcraft)
Discuss this.
Re: If Hostile Alien/Extraterestrial exist. Are We Ready to defend ourselves?
Originally posted by StarCraft2
Lets say alien life form wanted resources from earth, are we ready to defend our planet earth and save human race?(topic inspired by independence day and starcraft)
Discuss this.
No, we're too busy fighting among ourselves the Aliens with all their high tech weapons won't have to lift a finger (or paw, tentacle, etc) to defeat us....they're just sit and eat popcorn while we kill each other....they can wait...why do you think they haven't shown up yet?
Originally posted by namorsubby
I assume that if aliens have amassed the technology neccesary to traverse space with a spacecraft that can support enough of them for a hostile invasion, then they can beat us.
What if they're natively able to survive in space. Then their lifesupport technology could suck.
If some race of Aliens have the technology to travel vast distances through space, then were havn´t got a chance.
Unless of course the idea of violent combat isn´t know to them, then we might have a chance. But if that was the case they wouldn´t attack anyway.
Maybe they are already here and brought in the banking system to enslave us all into working without us knowing it, that would be my approach if I was and "invader", why destroy what you can control.
Originally posted by Bicnarok
If some race of Aliens have the technology to travel vast distances through space, then were havn´t got a chance.Unless of course the idea of violent combat isn´t know to them, then we might have a chance. But if that was the case they wouldn´t attack anyway.
Maybe they are already here and brought in the banking system to enslave us all into working without us knowing it, that would be my approach if I was and "invader", why destroy what you can control.
Yeah, that's what I'd do, too, introduce a system which created the most rapid advancement in human history. I like a challenge. I also like having people work for the sake of it, I don't want them to work for me, just work...random things...cause, you know, whatever, amirite?
Originally posted by Bardock42
Yeah, that's what I'd do, too, introduce a system which created the most rapid advancement in human history. I like a challenge. I also like having people work for the sake of it, I don't want them to work for me, just work...random things...cause, you know, whatever, amirite?
How did banks cause rapid advancement?
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
How did banks cause rapid advancement?
Banking and the whole monetary system really is the groundwork for most of the 19th century advancement, without it there wouldn't have been as much reason to develop so fast. Money is an excellent incentive for people to work hard and good and fast. Which is not to say that it is necessarily the best way or even a great way.
Seems logical to me that if an alien race were able to travel through space and discovered us before we became aware of them and they were hostile - we would be pretty much stuffed.
Since they are able to travel through space at will, that would seem to imply their technology are better than ours. Our technology MIGHT have been as good, but we chose to use that technology to blow each other up (admittedly, we are pretty good at that). So our defences against an attack from Earth would be pretty good (;-)) - but from space?
But seriously - do we even have anything to protect us from an attack from the moon? Say an alien race were to set up base on the moon - do we have anything that could reach that far in time to protect ourselves? As far as I know it would take quite a while before we could send anything up that far.
And all they would need to do was cut out a chunk, give it some velocity and drop it - well, anywhere on Earth, right? Apparently, "an asteroid approximately 10 meters in diameter... contained an estimated energy of 50 kilotons of TNT, or about twice the Hiroshima atomic bomb." Wikipedia.
Would it be that difficult to cut a chunk of rock big enough from the moon and drop it on Earth? I doubt it - if you can travel through space, that would seem child's play. In Anathema (brilliant book by Neal Stephenson) he describes how a race drops a rod from their ship into a volcano - and the devastation that follows.
See - no lasers, no phasers, no tasers - just drop something big enough at a high enough speed and let physics take care of the rest! Then wait a few years, or a few hundred years, in cryo-sleep and voila - one planet, good as new - and no pesky humans.
Originally posted by Dreampanther
But seriously - do we even have anything to protect us from an attack from the moon? Say an alien race were to set up base on the moon - do we have anything that could reach that far in time to protect ourselves? As far as I know it would take quite a while before we could send anything up that far.
That's a good point. Reaching the moon historically took a few days. Even if it only took one day to reach the moon, a point defense system there would be able to shred a missile or ship it with ease.
Originally posted by Bardock42
Banking and the whole monetary system really is the groundwork for most of the 19th century advancement, without it there wouldn't have been as much reason to develop so fast. Money is an excellent incentive for people to work hard and good and fast. Which is not to say that it is necessarily the best way or even a great way.
Huh, I don't think of bankers as being one of the driving forces behind that change.
Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Huh, I don't think of bankers as being one of the driving forces behind that change.
Well, the system that Bicarnok refers to is largely a driving force behind that change, individual bankers perhaps not. But the ability to produce for international markets, and generate capital for worthy endeavors is a huge, huge, huge part of the advancements we humans experienced over the last 100s of years.