Posted on 06/05/2012 9:15:26 AM PDT by C19fan
As summer blockbuster season kicks into high gear, big-budget action movies like The Avengers, Battleship, and Prometheus remind us that there's one thing that unites Americans: Our shared fear of an alien attack. They also remind us that when the invading space fleet arrives, humanity is not going to surrender without a fight to our intergalactic invaders. Instead, we will band together to fight off their incredibly advanced weaponry with our ... well, with what, exactly? Are we really ready to battle our would-be alien overlords?
Luckily, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as DARPA, as well as some of the world's largest weapons manufacturers, are dreaming up the weapons of the future today. With the help of everything from lasers on jets to hypersonic planes to invisibility cloaks, we just might be able to make the battle for Earth a fair fight. You may think we're joking, but why else would NASA be uploading The Avengers to the International Space Station if not as a training manual? Here's a look at some of the most space-worthy inventions being cooked up now.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
If aliens have the ability to travel far enough to get to Earth from anywhere else, we better hope they are friendly. That kind of technology will probably include some pretty awesome death rays.
“Does the Pentagon have the right weapons to fight off an alien invasion?”
Hummmm...but we can’t keep our borders safe....
Does anybody see the irony in that?
Any aliens intent upon invasion and technologically able to cross the vast gulf of space between where they were and where we are would presumably be of sufficient technological advancement that we wouldn’t stand a chance.
I for one welcome our new alien overlords./s
It is a scenario so unlikely - and one in which any action we take at this time would almost certainly be futile - I wouldn’t waste more than a minute contemplating or planning for such.
I, for one, will welcome our new overlords....
We’re gonna defeat them....riiiiiiiight.
To cross interstellar space, they have access to energies far beyond our capabilities.
Their technology compared to ours is akin to Einstein’s brain compared to the Obamadork.
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One thing which all such scifi flicks have wrong... The cost of interstellar travel would dwarf the value of anything you could hope to take or steal from another star system. The ONLY rational motives there could be for interstellar travel would be knowledge, or escape.
We have the right weapons, we just need a working delivery system to their home planet.
Politicians and lawyers.
QED.
Hard to take a thread like this seriously, are you poking at us?
There can be no ‘alien’ that is not subject to God’s will.
.
How would they cross the vastness of interstellar space? Alpha Centauri is 40 trillion kilometers away from us.
It...is...too...late...Hello McFly.
I'm sure it does, but they have to be deployed at the borders to be effective, and that isn't happening.
Of all the things....how about we focus on defeating the earthbound twin threats of Communism and Islamofacism first.
Food or living space come to mind.
Yet there have been Christan nations invaded by non-christians. I'm not sure what your point is here.
Hopefully interstellar travel is pretty simple like in Harry Turtledove's The Road Not Taken. Otherwise we would be about like the Aztecs and Incas standing up to the Spanish.
I picture the aliens landing, saying howdy to us and ask us why we never made contact with them.
When told that we have satellites and space craft that have been sending signals for the last 50 years, they tell us L Ron Hubbard was their contact here on earth and why didn’t we listen.
Road not Taken is one of my all time favorite stories simply because it is such an unusual concept.
I suspect aliens have already nosed around Earth, studied its inhabitants, and said, “no thanks”.
Playing along with this little game, probably not. We are not even close to being a Type I civilization yet; aliens travelling here would be at least early Type II civ’s and not something we want to mess with.
"They blew up Congress....HA HA HA HA HA HA!"
I believe you've hit upon the definitive answer. Spot on.
Travis Taylor, among others, has actually examined this in a scholarly fashion.
Basically, the only we can win is to swamp them with bodies, and hope their resupply and on-site fabrication can’t keep up. And hope they can’t just exterminate us with an engineered disease, etc.
Or just a styrofoam cup hitting earth at .99c.
Or they need a new home. In which case, we'd be in their way and would be quickly eradicated.
Stephen Hawking has made a pretty compelling argument that maybe we shouldn't try and contact alien civilizations. It wouldn't be anything like Columbus and native Americans. It would be closer to humans vs. ants. When was the last time you tried to engage in diplomatic negotiations with that fire ant hill in your back yard? You didn't. You eradicated it swiftly without any troubling thought.
This is what aliens would do to us.
Just start broadcasting Debbie Wasserman Shultz from every frequency, then stand back and watch their heads exploding.
Exactly. Was it rational to build the pyramids? I reckon to the slaves it was a moot point.
Poul Anderson has a novel called “the High Crusade” where the alien conquerors descend on medieval britan and get their spaceship siezed by the completely savage knights when they charge it.
Freegards
I’ll have to read that. I’ve considered the possibility that we’re missing certain technologies simply because we think inside a certain box. That’s why I think its important to at least consider some pretty wild ideas.
More modern evidence has shown that the great pyramids were built by a paid labor force. One of the things they paid them in, was beer.
> “Does the Pentagon have the right weapons to fight off an alien invasion?”
> Hummmm...but we can’t keep our borders safe....
> Does anybody see the irony in that?
We already have a alien invasion. It’s taking place at our Southern border.
We could always try out new weapons on the South of the border aliens as we prepare for invasion by space aliens.
Spending money on this would be as big a waste as trying to prevent global warming. The energies and technologies involved in FTL space ships would outclass anything we will be able to produce for at least 100 years. Our greatest weapon is our minds and our indomitable spirits.
The conquistadors who landed in South America has awesome weapons relative to the Indians they found there. They also were a hell of a long way from resupply, which would be a vulnerability.
Any actual alien invader would probably not bother with death rays. They would just tow a few asteroids into intercept orbits against the Earth. A few hundred-megaton-equivalent hits on major cities and the governments of Earth would be very compliant.
They are either folding space (the space-time continuum), simply moving between dimensions with technology, or projecting themselves holographically into our dimension without actually entering it.
We have a expanding protective sphere 20+ light years out of “Prairie Home Companion” that will convince anyone that if they approach closer the levels of boredom will become lethal.
Freegards
In his Playboy interview many years ago, this subject was brought up with Stanley Kubrick. He said, “If an alien ant at my feet scrawls out ‘Let’s talk’ in the sand, I’m not going to step on him.”
Yeah, I have actually heard that before. Either way, they were built, rational or not.
Freegards
This role is delegated to 3rd grade classrooms, where the students have been provided with soda straws and asked to manufacture their own spitwads.
It will be more than sufficient.
“TO SERVE MAN”
It’s a COOKBOOK.
We are so full of our selves. Why would an alien want to come to an obscure planet in an obscure galaxy?
I welcome Christ's return.
There was a Science Channel documentary on this a few months ago. According to them, the only real hope we’d have of surviving it and defeating the aliens would be to fight them with guerrilla warfare tactics, which is the classical way an inferior force can defeat a superior force.
Out here, far from their resupply lines, they would have a finite number of “men” (robots?) and a finite amount of equipment. If we could somehow continue the struggle for years, their losses would add up and make it too costly for them to continue. So they would give up and leave, go look for easier pickings. So says the Science Channel.
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