Have aliens invaded and we just don’t know about it, the government holding them off lowkey?
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
Edit: Now China’s shooting them down! https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/02/12/china-says...
People don’t write popular sci fi novels about realistic alien invasions because they would be so utterly one sided and brief that it simply wouldn’t make a good story.
The one civilization that somehow missed gravity manipulation is Earth. Having missed that we developed a bunch of other technology which everyone else does not have.
So when the alien invaders arrive with the FTL ships and release their conquering armies...our automatic machine guns and missiles and tanks and bazookas and such totally outmatch the aliens troops who have flintlock rifles and black powder.
That doesn't even make sense. Why would having simple gravity manipulation stop progress on the development of other technologies, particularly weapons?
Especially if, as it seems, those weapons aren't mitigated by having gravity manipulation? Literally no one in the universe realized the potential of having gravity manipulation and modern technology?
It’s kinda like asking - why have some of the world’s brightest minds spent the past 20 years trying to get people to watch more ads? What else might they have achieved or discovered instead?
Just think of what kind of technological advancement it would take for _us_ to determine there was life on some planet, and then the subsequent advancement we'd need to actually send something there. And then, imagine actually bothering to do so, when you're at the level of technology that it would imply to have the ability.
Why bother?
This, and I'd raise the bar even further: if we were to be attacked by any alien civilization, no matter if they have FTL or other Clarke tech or even if they have no special tech at all, we're incredibly f**ed.
It would be trivial to hurl asteroids at us until we're all dead. It would be trivial to engineer deadly pathogens, or to flood our planet with hunter-killer drones, or to roast the Earth with solar mirrors. And those are just the low tech options. We chose not to colonize the solar system, and thus we have no possible way of countering a civilization even if it was on the same developmental level as us.
Maybe we'd be able to mount a counter strike against one alien craft if they're unlucky and don't eradicate us outright. But that's a very big if.
However, I sleep well at night knowing that we have so far not seen anyone else out there, and we definitely have not seen a large space ship entering our system. Assuming they're bound to known physics, we'd definitely pick up their deceleration burn as they approach. If someone wants to eradicate us, a risk-free strategy would probably be to bombard us from outside the solar system.
So in that case, it was called the "7-hour war" for a reason.
If anyone imagines fighting alien invaders with small arms they’re already stupidly out of touch.
Same thing for aliens, imagine an alien refugee ship capable of FTL but needs a special fuel that it has to collect from deep Earth ocean very slowly, perhaps for a few million years because Earth only has very very few of such fuel. There is not much the refugees can do. They don't have weapons, they still habe to gather food and energy, they can't do a lot of bad things to locals (us)
Pirates with FTL ships pop in, destroy your outer gas mining stations. You scramble your planetside navy, which begins to burn toward your system's equivalent of Jupiter. They'll be there in 4 months. In a matter of seconds, the pirates zip out beyond the Oort Cloud. Your navy are currently half-way between Earth and Jupiter, and, at that moment, the pirates pop-in next to your Earthside starport and have their way with your home base. You call your navy back, even as you know it'll make no difference.
(On the flip side, later, once you unlock warp and can zip across your star system in seconds, you feel like a god. Repeat with interstellar travel.)
0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/Distant_Worlds_Uni...
Most dolphins are smaller than a compact car, but I bet they would break apart upon impact with a frozen sea after dropping out of the sky. This might be the correct answer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAAHgAuti84
Also, in the Watchman comic the world is made believe in an alien invasion to bring world peace (the ending is different in the move).
So let's hope that if these are (real of fake) aliens, the result will be a more peaceful world.
I wish that I could believe this. We have all seen the deleterious effect of Q and Fox News, and the zeal that goes along with them. At this point I believe that there are those who are so far gone into the partisan abyss that they would rather collaborate with alien invaders than with their fellow countrymen, if those countrymen were Democrats.
There’s something hilarious about the idea that, if this was the start of an alien invasion, our journalists and politicians started off the coverage not being curious about what on Earth these objects were, but instead slinging political slime at each other