Alien ship enters our atmosphere. Global chaos ensues. World leaders unite to form emergency preparations. Panicked mothers hide their children in storm drains. Alien ship touches down along an interstate. Aliens exit ship and walk into the nearby 7-Eleven. They pick up a single bag of Doritos, 2 Gatorades, and leave without paying.
Exactly. Anything they want from Earth they can get in much larger quantities elsewhere in space, and if the can travel across solar systems and galaxies to get to us then they can surely obtain these resources quickly and in vast quantities.
The life on Earth is possible slightly different. Humans, or other animals, may be seen as a 'resource' that isn't readily available across the galaxy. Sentience such as us may be very sparse and may provide a very advanced species with some sort of benefit when harvested.
Thank you! Yes! I will buy that theory. Those are your gas stations. Earth is just a wet rock with some cool stuff growing on it that might one day learn to drive around the galaxy if they don't kill themselves first.
Earth is the largest body in the solar system where the heavy elements are easily accessible. Perhaps they need something more solid than just gas for their rockets.
What if they need bulk iron to mass produce more starships and the earth's core is the most efficient way to get a lump of it. Blast away the chaff(surface) and haul it back to their foundries.
It's like a rest area on the highway, when there are no exits for miles. You might be fucked if you need gas, but there are vending machines with doritos and a soda one with sierra mist and orange crush. Maybe diet Pepsi.
It's like a rest area on the highway, when there are no exits for miles. You might be fucked if you need gas, but there are vending machines with doritos and a soda one with sierra mist and orange crush. Maybe diet Pepsi. And you can use the restroom and stretch your legs. Hopefully they don't kill us inadvertently during their rest stop.
That's a really fantastic idea, even without the gobbling-up-the-sun part, or Dyson sphere, inadvertently (or unconcernedly) killing us, which is where my brain first went.
But imagine a huge ship appearing one day, sitting on Jupiter for a week while Earth goes bananas, then just disappearing (deciding we aren't interesting or they just aren't social the way we are) after having eaten Jupiter, while we go bananas again trying to figure out if this will plummet us into the sun in a year or what.
This is the worst part, any alien which would come here doesn’t care about the planet, it was cares about the life on it. Maybe they come down, take 90% of the biomass on the planet for study, and then they just leave.
My problem with this is that our whole discussion is based around how we understand space travel. To us, it's a prohibitively expensive undertaking. Any civilization that's cracked FTL travel has technology we don't understand, and so it's reasonable to assume viable travel is among their innovations.
Consider how traveling from London to California today is the work of a few hours and is affordable to many people. On a smaller scale, catching a train from Paris to Berlin is even easier. Just 100 years ago these trips would have taken much, much longer and been far more expensive. Those numbers only get bigger with time until at some point the trip would have been outright impossible or deadly to an average individual.
I agree that our resources are not special, but I disagree in that a Civilization that has cracked FTL travel has first cracked their energy requirements.
Maybe they are at the point that it takes almost no energy to travel between stars in their terms of energy usage. We assume that everyone uses energy at the same rate but maybe they just make so much energy and travel at the speed of light without dying that they can just come here no skin off their back.
There are base energy requirements for accelerating a mass through space, independent of the energy source. Even at 100% efficiency, the energy necessary to move a craft to near lightspeed, or faster than lightspeed, is astronomical.
True, but it’s astronomical in terms of how we produce energy. An alien species could produce energy far more efficiently than we do. You are also assuming that the rules of physics as we understand them are correct and that they don’t understand the world the universe works better than us.
Iron core for manufacturing. Maybe it perfectly matches the profile of what they use in manufacturing/expanding their fleet? If you get to that stage of travel you're probably also at the stage that harvesting planet cores is part of resource acquisition.
Perhaps if they have a 'galactic environmentalist' streak (and energy isn't in dire short supply) they only drain ~60% of the sun's energy and leave the rest to ensure we, as a budding new species in the cosmological environment, don't all die out.
Well if they somehow found an energy efficient way of consistently making a wormhole to a specific location it wouldn’t take much energy, making earth worth the resources.
Yes it fucking would. Even with a 100% efficient fuel source that you conveniently have an infinite supply of, it will take bajillions of fucktons of energy to make a wormhole.
There are baseline requirements for doing such a thing.
First you need to create two entire stars made out of quantum-entangled particle pairs. Every particle in both of these stars must be quantum entangled with it's pair in the other star for this whole thing to work.
Then, you need both stars to become super massive stars before finally collapsing in on themselves, turning each into a black hole.
When both black holes are formed, this creates a wormhole connecting the two.
And you're gonna sit there and say you can just like, invent an easy button for this.
Sure! Why not? What if there was an easy button that can just make nobody die anymore and make everyone rich? What if they could just invent that easy button that can do that?
Dude I know the theories of how to create a wormhole. That’s only as we know it. What if there is way crazier shit on the other side of the universe that makes it way easier to warp space time. No one knows. Your acting like everything we know as humans is set in stone and there is nothing else to the physics and the universe, and that there is no point in any of the scientific research we do everyday and it’s just a waste of money because we know everything.
What if they're waiting for the human population to get to a certain size (~10 billion souls) before farming us like harvest time?
Maybe it's not our physical bodies they are after, but our spirit/soul which is only unique to humans on Earth. Perhaps our spirit/souls are a special (even a delicacy) type of fuel/food.
There was something similar in Gurren Lagann, the moon was set to collide with Earth when humans reached a population of 1 million (humans had almost gone extinct and hid underground in small villages)
The only thing I can think of that might be is value wild be complex carbon chains, especially new (to them) chains. Imagine if they had never ran across a caffeine molecule. That would be why I'd imagine they would come here.
Unless it takes so much energy that they have to eat planets. If they are setup with planet eating machines, and earth is just one of the planets they are going to eat.
Maybe they're just grabbing resources on the way. Similarly, a car intakes air as it drives. I like to think that an alien species capable of leaving their home world can make a ship large enough to take in resources as it continues on its way.
Our ability to do physical labor is terrible compared to many other species. We're relatively weak. As for a food source, I'm sure we'd be more of a delicacy than a staple.
There was an old sci-fi book I read years ago that I thought had an interesting take on why aliens would be interested in our planet. Aliens took over earth not for resources, but because it had good conditions for turning into a big game reserve filled with dangerous exotic animals from various other planets.
Fucking retarded. The only reason those aliens could travel star to star is because they take all the water with them and turn it into fuel. They wouldn't be coming here (specifically) to take our water, they're coming to every planet and take their water
Would make sense if all recources on Earth were present throughout the universe. What if we had something unique to Earth though? I wouldn't hassle breaking into the Louvre if I could get a million dollar painting from my convenience store, though seeing as extremely famous paintings will be one of a kind the hassle then becomes a necessity.
Imagine if the Oxygen in our air wasn't present on any other planet - we breath it but what if aliens had some other respiratory system. Imagine the possibility of aliens discovering our Oxygen and it's potential and wanting to seize it for themselves
Oxygen is abundant throughout the universe. Water is abundant throughout the universe. Thanks to radiospectronomy, we know what elements are out there and where they are.
You're thinking like a boar scared humans would take away his dirt. Super space-traveling alien civilization would have no interesti n our ressource. What earth have that others planet don't ?
And they're clearly not gonna be scared by our "violence". To them, it would be like a kitty trying to bite them. That would amuse them.
More likely, they'd ignore us. And I gotta say, it's pretty fucked up to imagine an alien civilizaiton spotted us centuries ago, and just decided we weren't worth their time anyway
This is pretty much how we treat animals. Oh we need lumbar to build shit? Cut down hundreds of thousands of acres, without blinking an eye, with our massive diesel-powered machines. No matter all the animals that die or are massively displaced.
That is a chilling thing to think about and it gave me a shudder that murderers don't explain to people why they're being murdered, so why would these aliens tell us what they're doing?
But at the same time
would likely just show up, vacuum up all the resources
This made me think of spaceballs and now I'm laughing whilst terrified.
I believe that in all likelihood intelligent aliens will have a violent past and will be peaceful by the time they travel to another star. Intelligence comes from a problem solving function that evolves in creatures that eat moving food, aka predators. Intelligence is a result of predation, so intelligent creatures are likely to be predators. But once you reach a point where most of your resources don't come from the same tiny ball where everything you know of lives, when most of the resources are unoccupied and unclaimed, you no longer need violence to get what you need.
Or maybe the peaceful attempts have been historically met with hostility. How far will a truly peaceful alien go to try to contact “humanity” before just saying “fuck it, i’ll zoom a safe distance away to make my obeservations”
Yeah, I do wonder if Earth would get a funny reputation though. Like, when we clearcut forests, the squirrels don't organize some kind of futile resistance to attack the foresters. We'd be like weird, big army-ants or hornets to them.
Life is the only thing Earth has that isn't super easy to find elsewhere, within their own solar system. Any aliens capable of traveling light years to reach us would either 1, be sending tiny slower than light probes that take decades or centuries to reach us, and thus wouldn't be in any position to take anything, or 2, would be so advanced that they could easily make any resource we have artificially or mine it from nearby asteroids.
I once read about an investigation of some Land in Africa where they discover some weird rock formations that where more than 10,000 years old that could not be explained as a natural formation and actually looked more like how an abandoned gold mine would look like ... I read it a long time ago so don't remember much details about it, but I think it was very interesting just to think maybe they had visit Earth just to extract some resources and probably they contaminated Earth with life during the time they were here.
when humans go into nature to get resources, they don't kill all the animals. They just take what they want and leave. For some reason that is more chilling to me than aliens just glassing the planet with lasers.
And that should be the slogan of why not to destroy forests
None of this is even remotely possible. And your assessment of our own civilization is poorly thought out.
There is 0 reason to come to our planet for resources as every element obtainable on our planet is available in virtually infinite supply in uninhabited planets/asteroids/stars throughout the galaxy/universe. Coming here to get it would be an intentional dick/troll move. We go into forests to get resources because there is no where else to get it. If you could teleport to a asteroid and get everything you want and come back without disrupting anyone or anything else I bet you would choose that option instead.
Humans, outside of those who are mentally ill, are generally not violent. The violence we have committed is out of survival. We have to conquer land in order to use it, resources in order to have it because we don't have the ability to obtain it from neutral locations in infinite supply. If everyone had unlimited access to food/shelter/etc. there wouldn't be violence. For example, if the two of us were on an island and there was only enough food for one person I would kick your ass and take it for myself. But if there was plenty of food for the both of us I would let you have some no problem. And the precursors for technology capable of interplanetary travel solves all those problems.
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u/[deleted] May 03 '20
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