All humans are vermin in the eyes of Morbo!
"If aliens were sadistic they could just infect our brains and drive us insane. Fun to think about, huh?"
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I can find no rational reason for aliens to invade the
Earth.
If they need energy, water, metals or radioactives there are
plenty in space to mined or harvested without dealing with pesky
natives. If some super-civilization needed all the metals,
silicates and carbon from our asteroid belt, they could just haul
it all away without ever visiting the Earth and, we could do
nothing to stop it. If they needed to enclose the Sun within a
dyson sphere to harvest all the energy from it, they could do so
and our technology would so primitive in comparison that we could
do nothing to stop it. If they wanted to mine all the silicates and
iron from the Earth, they’d just pulverize it into manageable
pieces by slamming a few other planets or moons into it.
In any case they’d never have to set foot on the Earth at
all.
The key thing to keep in mind here is the enormous differences
technology. Science fiction is often wildly inaccurate on this
score because they only posit differences of a few decades or
centuries. It would not be like British maxim guns versus Zulu
infantry.
Either the alien creatures will be millions of years more
advanced than us or we’d be millions of years more advanced than
them. This is a difference that is simply impossible for us to
imagine. The nearest instructive analogy would the difference
between humans and mice or ants. At best the mice would be
nuisance, never a real threat. HG Wells got it right the first
time. There could be no more war between humans and aliens than
there can be war between humans and mice.
(I have a few more thoughts about interstellar warfare which
I’ll discuss later.)
Nor do they need slaves. They would have built robots and
automation to do all their dirty work long before they expanded to
the stars. Robots are cheaper than slaves and far easier to
control.
Nor do they need to harvest rare proteins or biochemicals from
us. Any rare, complex molecules they need could easily be
synthesized with solar energy, local resources and nanotechnology.
It’s a lot cheaper to make these molecules locally than to trek
across light-years of empty space to get them.
Population growth is also a non-starter.
I do agree that colonizing other worlds is essential to a
technological species to survive over very long time scales. This
is because it increases redundancy. If some disaster strikes the
home world, the colonies, once they are self-sufficient, and they’d
have to be self-sufficient almost from their foundation, can carry
on so the civilization and culture doesn’t die. I think for the
best long term survival of a civilization, a species would have to
differentiate into new species (More on this at another time.) and
spread widely and thinly over the whole universe. They wouldn’t
have to conquer the whole universe. They just have to spread little
pockets of themselves everywhere. This ensures the best chances
against supernovae, exploding galaxies, cometary strikes, stars
evolving off the main sequence, colliding galaxies and so on.
Having said that colonizing other solar systems does absolutely
nothing to control or reduce population growth in the home worlds.
When humans colonized new lands in successive waves, this did
almost nothing to reduce populations in the originating
territories.
In fact if we don’t get our population growth firmly under
control, we will never gather the resources needed to build the
infrastructure needed to colonize nearby solar systems. To colonize
another solar system would be an enormous strain on a local
economy. It will be one of the hardest things we’ve ever done. I’m
not saying it’s impossible, in fact I’m saying it’s likely in the
long run. I’m just saying it’s expensive. Better to have our
population under control first before having that issue drain money
from our first stellar colonization effort.
So this leaves the irrational reasons.
- Perhaps they are sadists and they can’t abide intelligent,
tool-using lifeforms living in freedom in neighboring solar
systems. - Perhaps they have some bizarre art form that requires
inflicting cruelty on other species. - Perhaps they have religious reasons. Perhaps their religion
compels them to convert all intelligent life to one way of thinking
and one way of life.
Invading other solar systems just to indulge these reasons would
be extremely expensive.
The next thing to consider is how old the oldest technological
civilization is. If this first civilization is as nearly old as the
universe, then it’s likely that most planets are already colonized
by offshoots from this prime civilization. This civilization would
be so advanced that no one would be stupid enough to pick a fight
with them. In such a universe, territory would have to be shared
and negotiated for.
If the first civilizations are still very young, while still
being millions of years more advanced than we are, there are
probably plenty of empty worlds for them to colonize anyway. And if
not, they can manufacture their own artificial worlds out of
asteroid or cometary materials.
Again none of this supports any rational reason to invade the
Earth. If aliens wanted the real estate, there several
comparatively simple ways to sterilize the Earth of humans and then
terraform the planet to their needs. Again, I’m thinking of
nanotechnological weapons here.
How would the conquest of Earth look to us? Simple. Just one day
we’d all fall to sleep.
The aliens would just dust the planet with small crop of
nanorobots, probably sent down with a meteorite. These robots would
reproduce, infect us and study our biology for a few days. Then,
upon being sent a chemical or radio signal, they’d just make a few
adjustments to our biochemistry to put us all into comas. We’d
never wake up again.
Afterwards they could use nanorobots to completely transform the
biosphere. Like I said, HG Wells got it right the first time: We
wouldn’t stand a chance against this.
But again this is just my opinion. Do any of you out there have good reasons to think that aliens will invade the Earth?
Fun discussion, and lots of good thoughts.
Much of your discussion is predicated upon the assumption that the aliens are *much* farther ahead of us, but that need not be the case. What if they *are* (as you dismiss) only moderately ahead of us?
Or what if–although it’s heresy to suggest it–there really is a limit to technology? No faster-than-light, no nanotech bots, no artificial intelligence? Maybe their technology would still be in the range that’s not that far ahead of us, even if they are an old species.
One other reason they might decide to actively limit our development is that they don’t want competition or the danger we might pose, and yet recognize the value of maintaining biodiversity and thus don’t want to wipe us–and the rest of the species on our planet–out. However, I admit they’re unlikely to need to land to do that; they could just stay nearby and talk to us remotely.
But what if there is a type of technology that is incredibly dangerous, and they just need to make sure we don’t develop it? Depending on the nature of that technology and their own technological level, the might need to be actively involved here to prevent that. (Assuming, again, they don’t want to just wipe out all other species.)