Our Technology Future - Alien Apocalypse

This is a very simple, very direct topic. Doesn’t take much to get through this topic, and I honestly think most imagination on the subject is overblown. How will we fight aliens if they come to destroy us?

The answer is, we won’t. We will not fight because we will be dead. If aliens come to our planet and decide they, for whatever reason, want us dead and gone, we will be dead and gone and that is that. There will not be an epic struggle. There will not be a David and Goliath epic tale of how we through determination and moxy overcame the evil oppressors.

Lots of sci-fi stories on the topic justifiably make it out that we as humans would fight tooth and nail and somehow overcome the evil aliens coming to take us over. And yeah, there isn’t even a question that given the chance we would fight back. But those stories are crafted that way to make for an interesting and engaging story. One based on the reality would be really boring.

Here’s how it would go: “the alien spacecraft was spotted as it approached the planet at incredible speed. The nations of the world scrambled to communicate with the alien ship, but it was to no avail. And then, humanity was wiped out”.

The reason for this is that us fighting an intergalactic species, our fighting a civilization intent on killing us and has travelled across the vast reaches of space to reach us, would take as much effort and care in killing us as we do in killing insects that enter our house.

Oftentimes sci-fi movies and stories depict the aliens as going through unrealistic scenarios to try to kill us. From the way they show up and sit around for a while in Independence Day, the common depiction of them choosing to engage in guerilla warfare fighting with armies running from house to house, or the simplistic fallacy that they might be stupid enough to come to a planet and invade knowing that the first rainy day, let alone a kid with a water balloon, might kill them, is the height of stupidity.

Any alien civilization that can travel across space with sufficient incredulity to decide to offensively target another planet and/or the civilization living there, will have more than enough intelligence and technology to not only destroy us, but do it with little effort, and likely with us hardly knowing at all what hit us. There would be no chance.

The main problem that seems to be had is the assumption that some sort of Rude Goldberg device type scheme would be their choice of tactics - that they will go about some long, complicated, complex plan. That is again a fallacy in thinking. There is no reason to think they would go about a scheme that is complicated in the least relative to their capabilities. The more complicated a system is, the more points of failure there are. Diminish the complexity, diminish the points of failure.

So, sorry to say, but we will not survive an alien invasion intent on our destruction. We should hope it never comes to that. Given more time we may develop the means to better protect ourselves - more powerful weapons, shields, etc - but if attacked in the next decade or two, possibly longer, we would not stand a chance. It is why Stephen Hawking suggested that we perhaps should not be calling out to other civilizations in space, effectively broadcasting where we are and how ill-prepared we likely are to defend ourselves. He’s a smart man. Maybe we should listen to him?