Reading through this thread, I noticed a couple of patterns.
1. Many people are assuming that the aliens will travel in spaceships, have armies, and try to conquer us or bombard us from orbit. But the aliens might be nothing like us at all. They could be self-replicating machines (see below) or organisms that live in the vacuum of space like Tin Man or the Crystalline Entity.
Heck, even when it comes to colonization or strip mining our planets for resources, aliens wouldn't necessarily need to physically invade the planet. They could just launch something like a Von Neumann probe, and let machines do all the dirty work. Even more unsettling is the idea that our planet could be invaded and consumed by such a thing that was launched by an alien civilization that didn't even know we existed; they simply launched a bunch that were programmed to go out and strip mine whole star systems for useful materials, the possible but seemingly slim existence of other life be damned.
The von Neumann probes could be more than the tools of the aliens; they could be the aliens themselves, or what they turned themselves into long ago in their ancient history. Think the Borg, but smaller: self-replicating nanomachines or bacteria, or a cybernetic lifeform that's something in between. Better yet, think the Borg, but both smaller and bigger. They don't just assimilate entire civilizations; they assimilate whole star systems and galaxies. "Assimilate" doesn't mean take over the cities and a few space stations; it means eat all the planets and the asteroid belt for raw materials, build a Dyson sphere around the sun, and add it to their galaxy spanning network. It's not that the Earth has any resources that are particularly rare; it's that they're after any and all resources to make more of themselves.
2. Many people assume that the aliens would have FTL. As far as we know, FTL requires new physics. Traveling the old-fashioned way just requires really good engineering. A von Neumann probe wouldn't have to be very big. They just have to send it somewhere with enough raw materials to start replicating. The invasion force, if you want to call it that, would then spread like a plague.
If you want something more anthropomorphic, the aliens could travel in a generation ship, or they could put themselves in stasis.
3. Some people have suggested that the aliens might want colonies or slaves. But if they're self-replicating machines or starfish aliens, then they wouldn't necessarily have human motivations. They might not even have a government, society, or culture in any sense that we would understand. They might want resources, but they wouldn't necessarily process them in the same way we would. As I said before, they might eat whole planets for the raw material to build Dyson spheres.
That being said, here's an interesting anthropomorphic motivation that I've encountered. The Consu in Old Man's War fight for religious reasons. They are more advanced than every other race in that book, and deliberately lower themselves to the technological level of their opponent when fighting a war. According to their religion, the war somehow helps the lesser race. They're not just trying to wipe out the heathens. Maybe, they're trying to convert them, but they don't proselytize in any sense that we would understand. They just start a war, fight, and then leave when it's over.
Any alien that comes to Earth will be apex-predators, a cow don't have time to build space-ships, they need to eat the whole day, only the one that eat others have time to do other stuff, like building space-ships.
That's a very large assumption. It's quite possible to conceive of a sapient species which evolved intelligence in response to apex predators, such as the Pierson's puppeteers of Niven's Known Space (herding herbivores who used to live on a world where even the plant life was hazardous; by the first time a human sees the puppeteer homeworld, the predatory plants have become thoroughly tamed, with only a slight thermotropy left to make them shiver a few limbs in the direction of Louis and Teela). Cattle need to eat all day to fuel large bodies with our world's plantlife; shrink the bodies (i.e., deer) or make the plantlife more energy-dense, and the parameters change.
For that matter, a large brain can be a disadvantage for an apex predator. It takes a lot of food to fuel these organic computers we carry around - that's why we're not really "apex predators", but in fact are thoroughly omnivorous. We have learned to use intelligence to help protect us from the apex predators, but there's a darn good reason the big cats are little more accomplished intellectually than their housebound cousins; for a pure predator, there simply isn't enough evolutionary advantage to greater intellect to offset the evolutionary cost of bigger brains. It could be argued that sapience will only evolve in creatures that aren't apex predators, but rather have to defend themselves and their fellows from such beings.
1. Many people are assuming that the aliens will travel in spaceships, have armies, and try to conquer us or bombard us from orbit.
Without setting some reasonable boundaries, any discussion of such a topic would deteriorate into unhindered fantasy. Any argument or position - even the most absurd ones - would carry the same amount of validity. Which would be a good way to determine which contributor is smoking the strongest weed. But not much else.
IMO three assumptions may be necessary to put this discussion on a firm foundation: That the aliens may be biological or technological in nature, and that the laws of nature apply to them just as they apply to us. And that they have travelled with some kind of space ship. Without these assumptions, all bets would be off.
"Let's assume an alien civilization that has mastered high-speed (90% of speed of light) sublight space travel, or even FTL travel. Nothing fancy like instant dimensional jumps or wormholes, just flying in a straight line through space from A to B."
That alone would indicate a mega huge gap between us and them in terms of technology and capabillity. Some people in this thread understand the significance of this, and some people appearantly do not.
Some people here unknowingly utilize 'Mel Gibson' type hypothesis: That aliens may be too stupid to turn a door TRIBBLE, thus we would win.
If hollywood movies turned your brain into applesauce, please consult a doctor.
It may be worth a try to sneeze on them and hope they get a flu. Or to hide behind locked wooden doors with TRIBBLE. After all, in a war for survival we should try every weapon in our arsenal. I suppose we could pray for aliens never having developed anti-biotics or anti-door-TRIBBLE technology, but we shouldn't get our hopes too high. And if the aliens are indeed robots, no amount of sneezing will help us.
We can merely draw reasonable conclusions based on how life and intelligence evolved on earth and how human history unfolded.
If alien evolution followed similar principles, there would be a fairly high chance intelligent aliens evolved from predators. Not really a comforting thought.
Whenever the technological gap between two cultures was too big, the less developed culture always lost. Human history 101. Native americans may have won the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but they lost the war badly.
No cunning or wits ever saved a spear-wielding native tribe from military defeat against a serious campaign from an industrial nation.
No spear-wielding tribe suddenly 'out-teched' an industrial nation in anything.
If people base human survival on some miracles happening, well that's not really proper plan.
If they have FTL technology and are invading Earth, they're already making strategic errors - the only thing on this planet you can't get more easily in space is us - so hoping for tactical errors as well isn't that far-fetched, one would think.
^
And this post wins. There is absolutely nothing of value in this planet in terms of materials. The only unique thing in this planet is its biology, and there is only a slim chance that there would be something of value to them in that department.
Without setting some reasonable boundaries, any discussion of such a topic would deteriorate into unhindered fantasy. Any argument or position - even the most absurd ones - would carry the same amount of validity. Which would be a good way to determine which contributor is smoking the strongest weed. But not much else.
IMO three assumptions may be necessary to put this discussion on a firm foundation: That the aliens may be biological or technological in nature, and that the laws of nature apply to them just as they apply to us. And that they have travelled with some kind of space ship. Without these assumptions, all bets would be off.
"Let's assume an alien civilization that has mastered high-speed (90% of speed of light) sublight space travel, or even FTL travel. Nothing fancy like instant dimensional jumps or wormholes, just flying in a straight line through space from A to B."
That alone would indicate a mega huge gap between us and them in terms of technology and capabillity. Some people in this thread understand the significance of this, and some people appearantly do not.
Some people here unknowingly utilize 'Mel Gibson' type hypothesis: That aliens may be too stupid to turn a door TRIBBLE, thus we would win.
If hollywood movies turned your brain into applesauce, please consult a doctor.
It may be worth a try to sneeze on them and hope they get a flu. After all, in a war for survival we should try every weapon in our arsenal. I suppose we could pray for aliens never having developed anti-biotics, but we shouldn't get our hopes too high. And if the aliens are indeed robots, no amount of sneezing will help us.
We can merely draw reasonable conclusions based on how life and intelligence evolved on earth and how human history unfolded.
If alien evolution followed similar principles, there would be a fairly high chance intelligent aliens evolved from predators. Not really a comforting thought.
Whenever the technological gap between two cultures was too big, the less developed culture always lost. Human history 101. Native americans may have won the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but they lost the war badly.
No cunning or wits ever saved a spear-wielding native tribe from military defeat against a serious campaign from an industrial nation.
No spear-wielding tribe suddenly 'out-teched' an industrial nation in anything.
If people base human survival on some miracles happening, well that's not really proper plan.
I'd say the Anglo-Zulu war would be a better comparison, yes the Zulu scored a few victories over the industrialized British empire, but in the end they could not win the war.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I'd say the Anglo-Zulu war would be a better comparison, yes the Zulu scored a few victories over the industrialized British empire, but in the end they could not win the war.
Exactly. In most wars even superior forces usually have some small casualties. The root cause for most such casualties often was some form of stupidity however. But at least in human history, defeat was always unavoidable.
I stated an example. A possibility. I started by saying there are many, and perhaps many we can't even consider, for a multitude of reasons. I didn't list all the possibilities, nor did I order them from the most to the least likely. And again, I couldn't because what is mostly likely to me, may not be to other people, nor an alien race.
There were indeed human groups and ideologies that made people act in a given standard even in conflict and war time. Things they would not do, even if they were "a moron, not to take the advantage". Some people do care about the means to the end. If an alien race would indulge such a notion? I don't know, but again it's possible.
As for the ships with weapons, it depends on their level of technology and what they can or can't do (engineering, construction, power, etc...)
You want real answeres to things that are only "what ifs"
Many of your suggestions work on the premise that the aliens would be stupid and/or illogical. It doesn't matter how culturally different they were, at some point they're going to realize that certain tactics will assure better chances at victory. Otherwise, they likely wouldn't be warlike at all and thus would likely not be invading us in the first place.
And frankly, if they have the technology to get from there to here, their technology will be vastly superior to our own in any case. And considering that the only thing that's preventing Uncle Sam from putting nukes on satellites in orbit are treaties as well as the threat of the Russians and Chinese doing the same, chances are putting weapons on a spaceship are not that much of a challenge.
Orbital bombardment until all opposition is suppressed would have the minor side effect of destroying the biosphere, rendering the whole question of "invasion" pretty much moot. It's well known that if your goal is simple planetary destruction, the best methods of doing so are pretty well foolproof and unstoppable. However, the initial question, the one proposed for debate, is one of invasion - that is, attempting to seize and control the planet with its biosphere still intact (exact reasons why are unimportant. Maybe they're just sentimental that way).
Unless the aliens evolved in a biosphere exactly like ours, I highly doubt they care about the ecological damage orbital bombardment would inflict upon it. Chances are, they'd probably be terraforming it afterwards anyway.
The boy with the glass burning the ants certainly has no interest in subjugating the insects, nor in controlling their hill - he is merely being casually cruel. He's not invading, just destroying, certainly the easier of the two.
Yes, the question is not why they but if we stand a chance if they do. But that inevitably leads to a pile of other questions of which are why they do and at what power/techlevel they operate.
And the question ist still "would we have a chance if they invade us" not "if they plan to annihilate us" which is what your answers are mostly based on. You have some very valid ideas these cases; but again, these where the right answers to the wrong question.
The plan for "invasion" already "limits" the possible scale from godlike beings we cannot grasp, cannot even be aware of even if they want (ant vs humans again) to something we can.
Both you and Jon are missing the general point. If they can get from there to here, then their technology would be vastly, hugely superior to our own. We're looking at a gap probably many times larger than that between modern day humans and the cave man. That means, if they wanted, they could destroy us utterly. Anyone with that level of technology thus could win an invasion with relative ease. Just because I said they can annihilate us doesn't mean they have to. They could simply sufficiently bomb us back to the Stone Age and then take over once the smoke cleared.
Considering the nearly endless pool of human imagination that still leaves a massive amount of what could happen. Maybe they are nearly godlike and pop in to our existance and mindcontrol the whole in 10 minutes without even a shot fired; not even requireing spaceships. Maybe they something else that has only slightly better ground combat equippment but never had any experience in ground warfare situations (less warlike among themself then we & humans their first contact).
The instant mind control is another valid theory, but it obviously means that our loss is quite certain. Your second hypothesis rekindles the flawed thinking that they'd be stupid enough to enter our atmosphere before destroying all of our means of mounting reasonable resistance. If they got from there to here, they are most certainly not idiots.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
It is a stretch of the imagination to envisage a civilization of beings with the intellect to accomplish interstellar travel and then consider that they would have any truck with the inhabitants of Earth.
Consider what we have to offer a race of such advanced beings?
Politics. War. Disease. Taxes. More Politics.
To these visitors we would seem as backward and uninteresting,nay,downright Boring,as a day out to a small town Cattle Market is to a N.A.S.A engineer.
With that sort of freedom I am pretty sure Earth would be marked down as a 'maybe' for the future and then they would just pass us by..
Exactly. In most wars even superior forces usually have some small casualties. The root cause for most such casualties often was some form of stupidity however. But at least in human history, defeat was always unavoidable.
In a conventional conflict, we'd gain a few victories here and there but in the end we'd be overwhelmed by an advanced alien race much like the Zulu were overwhelmed by the British in 1879
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
In a conventional conflict, we'd gain a few victories here and there but in the end we'd be overwhelmed by an advanced alien race much like the Zulu were overwhelmed by the British in 1879
Actually, the Zulu Nation did pretty well for an army whose equipment was at least an R&D generation out of date. They slaughtered the redcoats to a man at Isandhlwana and the only reason they lost the next day at Rorke's Drift was because their general, a guy with more bravery than brains named Dabulamanzi kaMpande (the brother of the Zulu king Cetshwayo kaMpande, who had been in charge at Isandhlwana) basically wasted 5000 warriors by throwing them at an entrenched position as human waves. And even then, the Brits only called it a victory: the Zulus withdrew voluntarily as a sign of respect, not because they didn't have the troops left to overrun the Brits despite Dabulamanzi's idiocy.
The idea of defeat being "unavoidable" in any conflict is a myth. Even the Japanese and Germans had more than a few opportunities to win WWII (the single biggest problem they had was their own institutionalized racism, which kept them from using people like the Ukrainians and Vietnamese as pawns because they were too busy committing genocide).
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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The instant mind control is another valid theory, but it obviously means that our loss is quite certain. Your second hypothesis rekindles the flawed thinking that they'd be stupid enough to enter our atmosphere before destroying all of our means of mounting reasonable resistance. If they got from there to here, they are most certainly not idiots.
Maybe, maybe not. Here again it depends on what they even want because it might get broken. Would they not be idiots by making the whole trip just to accidentally destroy the reason for the trip?
Also do not apply the cultural evolved reasoning of us to an alien race. A stupid move might be done since it was the most logical & foolproof way of doing something on Planet Gonzo since the invention of the two legged tripod. It might for them be completely stupid and illogical to not surrender to a technological superior force instantly to avoid any loss of life. It might be so deep in their nature & cultural evolution to keep losses at a minimum and malign actions like "heroic sacrifices" that they don't even consider to facing such behavior in others.
Just like we often consider Alien visitors to be guys that want us harm
Meh, wipe-out might probably the most likely reaction anyway. Too many are still too willing to kill to stroke their egos and/or fill their pockets even more. Stumbling blocks of human evolution like the IS or relentless corporate greet as some of the worst examples our species have to show.
Actually, the Zulu Nation did pretty well for an army whose equipment was at least an R&D generation out of date.
From a military-historical perspective, the outcome of the Battle of Isandlwana is an anomaly. It would be delusional to treat it as some sort of referential norm of how an alien invasion may play out.
The brits were "poorly led and badly deployed", in addition they ran out of ammuntion, forcing them into hand-to-hand combat, bayonets versus spears, outnumbered by about 10 to 1.
There is no meaningful technological gap to speak of between a bayonette and a spear. This kind of stuff happens when your armies are being run by dimwitted morons.
When the brits finally got their **** together, things turned out differently. The last decisive battle just took about 2 hours, and the Zulu kingdom was gone.
Sure, if the aliens are indeed stupid aliens, then we may give them a run for their money. All we need to pray for is that the invasion force is being led by the alien equivalent of Kanye West and Snookie. And that they run out of lazor beams and photon torpedos, so that they are forced to use AK47's and our own tanks against us.
The idea of defeat being "unavoidable" in any conflict is a myth. Even the Japanese and Germans had more than a few opportunities to win WWII (the single biggest problem they had was their own institutionalized racism, which kept them from using people like the Ukrainians and Vietnamese as pawns because they were too busy committing genocide).
You are missing the point. All main parties in WWII were more or less on the same technological level, the actual outcome was not set in stone. The germans were not fighting with bows and arrows against russian Mammoth tanks, and the Japanese didn't use some death ray Mecha tripods to attack spear-wielding Americans at Pearl Harbour.
Maybe, maybe not. Here again it depends on what they even want because it might get broken. Would they not be idiots by making the whole trip just to accidentally destroy the reason for the trip?
Also do not apply the cultural evolved reasoning of us to an alien race. A stupid move might be done since it was the most logical & foolproof way of doing something on Planet Gonzo since the invention of the two legged tripod. It might for them be completely stupid and illogical to not surrender to a technological superior force instantly to avoid any loss of life. It might be so deep in their nature & cultural evolution to keep losses at a minimum and malign actions like "heroic sacrifices" that they don't even consider to facing such behavior in others.
Just like we often consider Alien visitors to be guys that want us harm
Just because they're alien doesn't mean that they have to be so alien to act completely stupid. Some things would appear universally pragmatic regardless of your genome. If you have one, that is.
Nevermind that there are other reasons than "future competition" and "living space" for why they'd invade. For instance, they might want to simply strip mine the entire solar system to build one of their ridiculous superstructures. After all, you need a lot of raw material to build something like a Dyson Sphere.
The not-part-of-planet-Earth inorganic resources of the Solar System are nearly five hundred times as great as the mass of the Earth. Squeezing that last 0.2% may not be worth the bother unless we make an annoyance of ourselves by trying to shoot at them.
I
There's also chirality to consider - the "handedness" of their chemical makeup. Most chemicals on Earth, including DNA, are dextrorotary - that is, they "wind to the right", as it were. There's no special reason, however, why an alien ecology might not be built on a levorotary basis; we've seen that in, for instance, the Mass Effect games, where turians and quarians are levorotary life forms. (That's why, for instance, the bartender on Ilium advises you not to eat the nuts in the red bowls - "they'll give you cramps.") Levorotary life forms couldn't eat anything on Earth, and would be well-advised to boil and filter their water to make sure there aren't any dextrorotary bacteria or virii hiding in there...
A minor nitpick: Earth life uses right-handed carbohydrates, but left-handed amino acids. In Mass Effect, it is the humans who are levo-protein and the turians and quarians who are dexo-protein.
The not-part-of-planet-Earth inorganic resources of the Solar System are nearly five hundred times as great as the mass of the Earth. Squeezing that last 0.2% may not be worth the bother unless we make an annoyance of ourselves by trying to shoot at them.
Obviously you've never seen the numbers on the resources required to build a real life Dyson sphere. From what I read, it would literally require dismantling all of the inner planets and some of the outer moons, and making use of the entire asteroid belt as well.
Comments
1. Many people are assuming that the aliens will travel in spaceships, have armies, and try to conquer us or bombard us from orbit. But the aliens might be nothing like us at all. They could be self-replicating machines (see below) or organisms that live in the vacuum of space like Tin Man or the Crystalline Entity.
The von Neumann probes could be more than the tools of the aliens; they could be the aliens themselves, or what they turned themselves into long ago in their ancient history. Think the Borg, but smaller: self-replicating nanomachines or bacteria, or a cybernetic lifeform that's something in between. Better yet, think the Borg, but both smaller and bigger. They don't just assimilate entire civilizations; they assimilate whole star systems and galaxies. "Assimilate" doesn't mean take over the cities and a few space stations; it means eat all the planets and the asteroid belt for raw materials, build a Dyson sphere around the sun, and add it to their galaxy spanning network. It's not that the Earth has any resources that are particularly rare; it's that they're after any and all resources to make more of themselves.
2. Many people assume that the aliens would have FTL. As far as we know, FTL requires new physics. Traveling the old-fashioned way just requires really good engineering. A von Neumann probe wouldn't have to be very big. They just have to send it somewhere with enough raw materials to start replicating. The invasion force, if you want to call it that, would then spread like a plague.
If you want something more anthropomorphic, the aliens could travel in a generation ship, or they could put themselves in stasis.
3. Some people have suggested that the aliens might want colonies or slaves. But if they're self-replicating machines or starfish aliens, then they wouldn't necessarily have human motivations. They might not even have a government, society, or culture in any sense that we would understand. They might want resources, but they wouldn't necessarily process them in the same way we would. As I said before, they might eat whole planets for the raw material to build Dyson spheres.
That being said, here's an interesting anthropomorphic motivation that I've encountered. The Consu in Old Man's War fight for religious reasons. They are more advanced than every other race in that book, and deliberately lower themselves to the technological level of their opponent when fighting a war. According to their religion, the war somehow helps the lesser race. They're not just trying to wipe out the heathens. Maybe, they're trying to convert them, but they don't proselytize in any sense that we would understand. They just start a war, fight, and then leave when it's over.
For that matter, a large brain can be a disadvantage for an apex predator. It takes a lot of food to fuel these organic computers we carry around - that's why we're not really "apex predators", but in fact are thoroughly omnivorous. We have learned to use intelligence to help protect us from the apex predators, but there's a darn good reason the big cats are little more accomplished intellectually than their housebound cousins; for a pure predator, there simply isn't enough evolutionary advantage to greater intellect to offset the evolutionary cost of bigger brains. It could be argued that sapience will only evolve in creatures that aren't apex predators, but rather have to defend themselves and their fellows from such beings.
Without setting some reasonable boundaries, any discussion of such a topic would deteriorate into unhindered fantasy. Any argument or position - even the most absurd ones - would carry the same amount of validity. Which would be a good way to determine which contributor is smoking the strongest weed. But not much else.
IMO three assumptions may be necessary to put this discussion on a firm foundation: That the aliens may be biological or technological in nature, and that the laws of nature apply to them just as they apply to us. And that they have travelled with some kind of space ship. Without these assumptions, all bets would be off.
"Let's assume an alien civilization that has mastered high-speed (90% of speed of light) sublight space travel, or even FTL travel. Nothing fancy like instant dimensional jumps or wormholes, just flying in a straight line through space from A to B."
That alone would indicate a mega huge gap between us and them in terms of technology and capabillity. Some people in this thread understand the significance of this, and some people appearantly do not.
Some people here unknowingly utilize 'Mel Gibson' type hypothesis: That aliens may be too stupid to turn a door TRIBBLE, thus we would win.
If hollywood movies turned your brain into applesauce, please consult a doctor.
It may be worth a try to sneeze on them and hope they get a flu. Or to hide behind locked wooden doors with TRIBBLE. After all, in a war for survival we should try every weapon in our arsenal. I suppose we could pray for aliens never having developed anti-biotics or anti-door-TRIBBLE technology, but we shouldn't get our hopes too high. And if the aliens are indeed robots, no amount of sneezing will help us.
We can merely draw reasonable conclusions based on how life and intelligence evolved on earth and how human history unfolded.
If alien evolution followed similar principles, there would be a fairly high chance intelligent aliens evolved from predators. Not really a comforting thought.
Whenever the technological gap between two cultures was too big, the less developed culture always lost. Human history 101. Native americans may have won the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but they lost the war badly.
No cunning or wits ever saved a spear-wielding native tribe from military defeat against a serious campaign from an industrial nation.
No spear-wielding tribe suddenly 'out-teched' an industrial nation in anything.
If people base human survival on some miracles happening, well that's not really proper plan.
^
And this post wins. There is absolutely nothing of value in this planet in terms of materials. The only unique thing in this planet is its biology, and there is only a slim chance that there would be something of value to them in that department.
I'd say the Anglo-Zulu war would be a better comparison, yes the Zulu scored a few victories over the industrialized British empire, but in the end they could not win the war.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Exactly. In most wars even superior forces usually have some small casualties. The root cause for most such casualties often was some form of stupidity however. But at least in human history, defeat was always unavoidable.
Many of your suggestions work on the premise that the aliens would be stupid and/or illogical. It doesn't matter how culturally different they were, at some point they're going to realize that certain tactics will assure better chances at victory. Otherwise, they likely wouldn't be warlike at all and thus would likely not be invading us in the first place.
And frankly, if they have the technology to get from there to here, their technology will be vastly superior to our own in any case. And considering that the only thing that's preventing Uncle Sam from putting nukes on satellites in orbit are treaties as well as the threat of the Russians and Chinese doing the same, chances are putting weapons on a spaceship are not that much of a challenge.
Unless the aliens evolved in a biosphere exactly like ours, I highly doubt they care about the ecological damage orbital bombardment would inflict upon it. Chances are, they'd probably be terraforming it afterwards anyway.
Both you and Jon are missing the general point. If they can get from there to here, then their technology would be vastly, hugely superior to our own. We're looking at a gap probably many times larger than that between modern day humans and the cave man. That means, if they wanted, they could destroy us utterly. Anyone with that level of technology thus could win an invasion with relative ease. Just because I said they can annihilate us doesn't mean they have to. They could simply sufficiently bomb us back to the Stone Age and then take over once the smoke cleared.
The instant mind control is another valid theory, but it obviously means that our loss is quite certain. Your second hypothesis rekindles the flawed thinking that they'd be stupid enough to enter our atmosphere before destroying all of our means of mounting reasonable resistance. If they got from there to here, they are most certainly not idiots.
I'd like to think that actual alien invaders would be intelligent enough to realize that they can probably get whatever it is they want without even needing to come into visual range of Earth, and that conquering 7 billion people is going to be logistically ridiculous regardless of what tech they have.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
It is a stretch of the imagination to envisage a civilization of beings with the intellect to accomplish interstellar travel and then consider that they would have any truck with the inhabitants of Earth.
Consider what we have to offer a race of such advanced beings?
Politics. War. Disease. Taxes. More Politics.
To these visitors we would seem as backward and uninteresting,nay,downright Boring,as a day out to a small town Cattle Market is to a N.A.S.A engineer.
With that sort of freedom I am pretty sure Earth would be marked down as a 'maybe' for the future and then they would just pass us by..
In a conventional conflict, we'd gain a few victories here and there but in the end we'd be overwhelmed by an advanced alien race much like the Zulu were overwhelmed by the British in 1879
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Actually, the Zulu Nation did pretty well for an army whose equipment was at least an R&D generation out of date. They slaughtered the redcoats to a man at Isandhlwana and the only reason they lost the next day at Rorke's Drift was because their general, a guy with more bravery than brains named Dabulamanzi kaMpande (the brother of the Zulu king Cetshwayo kaMpande, who had been in charge at Isandhlwana) basically wasted 5000 warriors by throwing them at an entrenched position as human waves. And even then, the Brits only called it a victory: the Zulus withdrew voluntarily as a sign of respect, not because they didn't have the troops left to overrun the Brits despite Dabulamanzi's idiocy.
The idea of defeat being "unavoidable" in any conflict is a myth. Even the Japanese and Germans had more than a few opportunities to win WWII (the single biggest problem they had was their own institutionalized racism, which kept them from using people like the Ukrainians and Vietnamese as pawns because they were too busy committing genocide).
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Maybe, maybe not. Here again it depends on what they even want because it might get broken. Would they not be idiots by making the whole trip just to accidentally destroy the reason for the trip?
Also do not apply the cultural evolved reasoning of us to an alien race. A stupid move might be done since it was the most logical & foolproof way of doing something on Planet Gonzo since the invention of the two legged tripod. It might for them be completely stupid and illogical to not surrender to a technological superior force instantly to avoid any loss of life. It might be so deep in their nature & cultural evolution to keep losses at a minimum and malign actions like "heroic sacrifices" that they don't even consider to facing such behavior in others.
Just like we often consider Alien visitors to be guys that want us harm
Meh, wipe-out might probably the most likely reaction anyway. Too many are still too willing to kill to stroke their egos and/or fill their pockets even more. Stumbling blocks of human evolution like the IS or relentless corporate greet as some of the worst examples our species have to show.
From a military-historical perspective, the outcome of the Battle of Isandlwana is an anomaly. It would be delusional to treat it as some sort of referential norm of how an alien invasion may play out.
The brits were "poorly led and badly deployed", in addition they ran out of ammuntion, forcing them into hand-to-hand combat, bayonets versus spears, outnumbered by about 10 to 1.
There is no meaningful technological gap to speak of between a bayonette and a spear. This kind of stuff happens when your armies are being run by dimwitted morons.
When the brits finally got their **** together, things turned out differently. The last decisive battle just took about 2 hours, and the Zulu kingdom was gone.
Sure, if the aliens are indeed stupid aliens, then we may give them a run for their money. All we need to pray for is that the invasion force is being led by the alien equivalent of Kanye West and Snookie. And that they run out of lazor beams and photon torpedos, so that they are forced to use AK47's and our own tanks against us.
Then we may beat them.
You are missing the point. All main parties in WWII were more or less on the same technological level, the actual outcome was not set in stone. The germans were not fighting with bows and arrows against russian Mammoth tanks, and the Japanese didn't use some death ray Mecha tripods to attack spear-wielding Americans at Pearl Harbour.
Just because they're alien doesn't mean that they have to be so alien to act completely stupid. Some things would appear universally pragmatic regardless of your genome. If you have one, that is.
The not-part-of-planet-Earth inorganic resources of the Solar System are nearly five hundred times as great as the mass of the Earth. Squeezing that last 0.2% may not be worth the bother unless we make an annoyance of ourselves by trying to shoot at them.
A minor nitpick: Earth life uses right-handed carbohydrates, but left-handed amino acids. In Mass Effect, it is the humans who are levo-protein and the turians and quarians who are dexo-protein.
Obviously you've never seen the numbers on the resources required to build a real life Dyson sphere. From what I read, it would literally require dismantling all of the inner planets and some of the outer moons, and making use of the entire asteroid belt as well.