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We have all seen it. ET shows up travelling interstellar distances in an impossibly advanced vessel from some place else and whamo! is wiped out by the Human Race with nothing more than A Rock and Two sticks...cue Humans are awesome music and end credits.
But really what would an Alien really do?
When the Decepticons show up on Earth and fight it out with Autobots - by the third film the USA is using their awesome energon detection systems to protect it self while Autobots conduct Covert Raids into Iran for the CIA. All this implies the Autobots and the USA are not sharing technology with the rest of the Kids...
What if the Decepticons had instead taken the Space bridge technology and provided it to all nations around the globe long before the Autobots show up allowing them to fight it out using Transformer Tech that results in One superpower in control of the World which the Decepticons control?
What do the Aliens need to do more than just push in like a tidal wave with no plan other than overwhelm with inferior tactics like a butterfly trying to create a cyclone.

Shifty |

Start a reality show.
All the aliens should have the same first letter on the first name, I dunno lets call it K... as in Kim, Khloe, etc.
Like I mean the above sounds silly until you realise that other aliens all had the name John in another high end movie - greatest alien movie of all time.
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Friendly Neighborhood Cultist |

I didn't mention that the new alien overlord were actually my spawn? How silly of me.
I cannot tell you how relieved I am, mylord (really, I cannot, since you seem to be your old self I prefer to keep a healthy distance until the time is right and the stars tell us of your awakening in full glory)

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Nuke every city from orbit with mass drivers, a lot of the rest really depends on whether they do homework before tossing in their hat.
The real question is that unless faster than light travel actually emerges and becomes rather cheap to do, there's nothing really here worth invading for. Most resources that you could want can be obtained without dealing with a hideous gravity well. If it's volatiles, just mine Jupiter. If it's water, lug a few comets home. If they've come for Colbert... they can have him. :)

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Nuke every city from orbit with mass drivers, a lot of the rest really depends on whether they do homework before tossing in their hat.
The real question is that unless faster than light travel actually emerges and becomes rather cheap to do, there's nothing really here worth invading for. Most resources that you could want can be obtained without dealing with a hideous gravity well. If it's volatiles, just mine Jupiter. If it's water, lug a few comets home. If they've come for Colbert... they can have him. :)
What if the resource they are after is a habitable planet. One suitable for colonization.

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LazarX wrote:What if the resource they are after is a habitable planet. One suitable for colonization.Nuke every city from orbit with mass drivers, a lot of the rest really depends on whether they do homework before tossing in their hat.
The real question is that unless faster than light travel actually emerges and becomes rather cheap to do, there's nothing really here worth invading for. Most resources that you could want can be obtained without dealing with a hideous gravity well. If it's volatiles, just mine Jupiter. If it's water, lug a few comets home. If they've come for Colbert... they can have him. :)
I would say that if they have the resources AND THE TIME to cross unimaginable distances... they could probably build a planet in the right orbit to suit. For every Earth with intelligent life, there's probably thousands with life no more complicated than moss. Fighting a war when you don't have to simply doesn't make sense.

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Just stand back and let the silly, stupid, foolish humans destroy themselves. After all, I am an immortal robot. I have plenty of time and patience.
When every second feels like an eon, you might not have as much patience as you'd think.

illuminar |

genetically engineer a virus to kill 90 percent of the population. let civilization collapse. mop up. collect the unobtanium you came for
Ironically this would be the way to stike back, if needed.
But I highly doubt an alien race would travel so far just to kill whoever they run into. More likely is that we'll do something stupid...

The 8th Dwarf |
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To paraphrase one of the foremost philosophers of the last century If a civilization had the technology to either travel faster than the speed of light or to warp, compress or fold space and could be bothered to travel "far out into the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy and visit an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. "... then we are in for an arse kicking.
The only thing unique about Earth is its biomass and biodiversity. Water, minerals all that stuff is easy to get in space. DNA now that is rare, the first thing we would know about an alien invasion is when 99% of humanity dies of a bio-enginered disease. The aliens will then move in harvest the earth for its biology.
Maybe they will be nice enough to put the survivors on a "reservation". More than likely we would be nothing but ants or cockroaches to them.

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"terraform" Earth (yeah, it would be called something else really, but 'glaxnorgsixform' just sounds silly).
Seriously, why invade a planet, which has all sorts of potential environmental hazards for you when you can just modify the planet's environment to better fit your needs? An ecological invasion would be a definite means to gain a foothold subtly and would most likely go unnoticed or unrecognized for longer than an direct invasion.

Tiny Coffee Golem |

It really depends on what they want. If they want our resources then all they have to do is wipe out all life in any number of ways.
If they want to enslave us for whatever reason they would take a different tact.
If I were an alien with advanced technology and really wanted to destroy all humand while maintaining the majority of our resources I would take the "grey goo" tact. Release a few (or a few million) nanites programmed to reproduce using carbon as a base. A short time latere we have a planet full of nanites that have eaten all life on earth that I can reprogram for whatever use I want. Also I have full access to water or whatever other resource I want.
If it's enslavement I want I'd go into polotics or marketing.

Tiny Coffee Golem |

Stealth and diplomacy also work well. Why fight your battles when you can get someone else to fight them for you. OTOH, winning the inital battle is the easy part. Keeping us DOWN is the hard part.
If time is a factor then Stealth and Diplomacy aren't good plans. But if it isn't and they want to subjugate us then that's one of the better plans.

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if the goal is destruction, just hang back at the asteroid belt and keep flinging rocks until the planet is just a charred ball of slag. Theyy could make a game out of it and see who can hit land mass the most before the oceans vaporize completely.
if the goal is invasion without enslavement, introducing a virus would be the best bet. Or the 'grey goo' scenario mentioned up thread. Follow either one up with a series of EMPs to knock any survivors back 100 years or more (depending on the survivors' skill sets) and clean up would be a breeze.
if the goal is invasion with enslavement (or securing a large alternative food source), then a virus could still work if they show up with a 'miracle cure' if they want to go the 'false savior' route. Or orbital bombardment would work for a classic means to completely demoralize the primitive, planet bound inhabitan ... us, yeah, us.

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yellowdingo wrote:
But really what would an Alien really do?
Depending on motivation?
Unleash tailored viruses to eliminate opposition while leaving desired resources intact.
Its not like it would even take a technology more advanced than what we currently possess.
But if you got here with an interstellar vessel - why wouldn't you know all about how to build a neutron bomb and how to drop them from orbit on the stupid monkeys - instead of descending in your landing craft so you can personally test your skill in combat with the rock and stick wielding monkeys?

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Have it turn out that the aliens are just slightly different humans and they have come to bring us back under the rule of the Emperor because we are lost world and if we don't acknowledge the Emperor's Authority the Astartes will come in and enforce compliance.
Yeah but I hate religion with my scifi...it smacks of an inferiority complex where I am not my own God.

Spanky the Leprechaun |

Artanthos wrote:But if you got here with an interstellar vessel - why wouldn't you know all about how to build a neutron bomb and how to drop them from orbit on the stupid monkeys - instead of descending in your landing craft so you can personally test your skill in combat with the rock and stick wielding monkeys?yellowdingo wrote:
But really what would an Alien really do?
Depending on motivation?
Unleash tailored viruses to eliminate opposition while leaving desired resources intact.
Its not like it would even take a technology more advanced than what we currently possess.
Client/slave race did the technological development. An intellectually unsophisticated race is the master; the top dogs aren't smart enough to do nuclear physics, and their servitors have so far kept the secret of the atom from their medieval masters.

meatrace |

My entirely honest answer to a sort of silly question goes like this:
Just wait. Our species is a herd of bison heading towards a cliff. Even the ones of us who are screaming "holy s#@#, a cliff, STOP!" are dragged along by the stampede. The cliff being metaphorical representation of the multiple SYMPTOMS of a single cause: addiction to fossil fuel and the concurrent population boom over the past century.
Basically, any alien force who wanted merely to destroy us could wait a hundred years, maybe 2, until either global warming, a population crash, an economic collapse based on a global economy predicated on infinite growth and finite fossil fuel resources, or some combination thereof, destroys any meager defense infrastructure we might have had. Then mop up.

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"terraform" Earth (yeah, it would be called something else really, but 'glaxnorgsixform' just sounds silly).
Seriously, why invade a planet, which has all sorts of potential environmental hazards for you when you can just modify the planet's environment to better fit your needs? An ecological invasion would be a definite means to gain a foothold subtly and would most likely go unnoticed or unrecognized for longer than an direct invasion.
Covered in David "Tribble" Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr. He even had the virus. Most annoying of all is that he is still trying to finish the heptalogy.
I guess an ecological war would take decades to write up...