Thread: What if we were invaded?

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I recently saw the movie Independence Day and it set me wondering. If we
were ever to be invaded by another planet....would we win? If the movies
they always save the day, but would that happen in real life? Do we have
the technical know how to defeat an alien invasion? What do you think?

If something like that were to happen I think aliens would win because they're more advanced than us. That is, if they exist.

The real question is if we advance far enough where we can travel out, given history and our unsustainable population growth rate, who believes WE would not be the invaders if we found a less advanced civilization living on a planet similar to Earth?

We've done it before on this planet, we'd do it again.

Well, they might come for the scenery and the Pizza, but they wouldn't stay long once they got to know that we still have POLITICIANS and PARKING METERS!

I always thought the possibilities presented in the miniseries "V" were an overt possibility. Humans as a food crop for aliens makes sense.

Originally Posted by sumrtym

The real question is if we advance far enough where we can travel out, given history and our unsustainable population growth rate, who believes WE would not be the invaders if we found a less advanced civilization living on a planet similar to Earth?

We've done it before on this planet, we'd do it again.

That's an interesting thought. I've never thought of it from that perspective. I'd hope that we've become much more civilized in the last 450 years when we stole another society's land and basically killed off most of the American Indians. That was one of the larger, more recent land grabs in modern history. I'd hate to think that we'd journey to a distant land and kill off whatever life we found. One of the oldest questions in science is "Is there life on other planets." I'd hate to think that we finally discover the answer to that question, and then decide to kill off whatever life we actually found.

Originally Posted by dariusobells

I always thought the possibilities presented in the miniseries "V" were an overt possibility. Humans as a food crop for aliens makes sense.

In a small way, it's a similar idea to what The Matrix is about, but rather than aliens, it's human made AI that is harvesting humans in crops.

I think we will destroy ourselves long before aliens ever get the chance

this is in the wrong section.

I like to think a more advanced race would have been watching us already and want nothing to do with us! Maybe wait until we all wipe ourselves out first.
But if they do show up, it probably IS like V and they plan to eat us....

Just like the movies, we'll come up with a clever method of defeating the invading alien forces, take them by surprise, and reclaim our planet after a short, destructive war, because humans kick ass!

But, in all seriousness, I believe that if extraterrestrials were to come to earth with the intent of claiming it for their own, we'd have little chance of stopping them (assuming it's within a span of time that is before we find a way to explore outside our solar system...with any efficiency or replication).
Any species that has become capable of handling the fiercely inhospitable conditions that exist in interstellar space, will have little trouble handling anything we can throw at them (outside of thermonuclear weapons...and even then, no telling how those would affect them).

As for our invasion of other worlds?
If we make it as "humans", in our animal bodies, keep in mind what will likely be the driving force behind such explorations in the first place: profit and/or expansionism. Other life forms will be relegated to isolated areas - a zoo, if you will - regardless of whether said life forms are sentient or not.

If we make it as machine intelligences, then the existing life forms will certainly have a chance at being left alone, or having their way of life improved.

I personally believe machine intelligence is how we, as Earthlings, will explore the cosmos - it will allow us much more resiliency against heat / cold / radiation / impacts, not to mention the lack of need for food, water, air, or other necessities of life.
At the rate our computers are progressing, within a few short years a typical desktop machine will be capable of more computations than the human brain per second (about 1 petaflop, which has been exceeded by IBM's Roadrunner system this past June).

So, now the task is to convert neurons to bits, upload our life experiences onto a hard drive, and send ourselves into the void as AI's - and for that, I'll gladly sign up!