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13 July 2012

FWS Topics: Why Aliens wanna kick our ass!

Alien invasion is the oldest type of science fiction theme and stretches all the way back to the 3rd century BC, to the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, when the gods used the Vimanas in a war-of-the-gods While here in the western world, the alien invasion formed one of the first true science fiction novels, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. I came up with this blogpost after watching a Duke Nukem Forever trailer, Battle: Los Angeles and Chris Rock's: How not to get your ass kicked by the police, I decided I wanted to take a humorous approach take on why aliens would invade Terra via the most common reason given in sci-fi works. This blogpost was the result.

Aliens wanna kick our ass for our women

"Damnit, why do they always take the hot ones"
-DUKE NUKEM

The idea of horny alien spacemen crossing lightyears to come to Terra and take our women for sex is laughable, at best. The truth is that any real EBE would so different due to their evolution on another world and that's world ecosystem that is unlikely that genitalia would even match up with ours to allow for sexually contact, let alone the DNA...and let us not forgot desire. For us or them to possess the desire to fuck the other species, there would have to be a desire for that type of contact, and their idea of beauty may not be the same. While sci-fi may have its Orion Slave Women, the truth is that most alien races are not going to look like us, dousing the flames of interspecies passion. So, if it is so unthinkable to have aliens and humans mating, why is in common in science fiction? Sexually contact being different types of species appears twice in the Bible, once when the "sons of God came in unto the daughters of the earth" and their union created the Nephilim. Then during the God's judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, when the Angels came, the mob demanded that Lot turn over the Angels so that could "know them"...yeah, in response, God nuked the cities....so don't have sex with angels. This theme was common in pulp science fiction works of the 1950's and 60's, and one of my literature professors at university informed us that this was a fear by white men of the period that African-American men would take their white women. So, no one panic when ET shows up, they don't want Cindy Crawford.


Aliens wanna kick our ass for our water!
Aliens coming to Terra to steal our water is a common reason mentioned in a majority of science fiction works, from  H.G. Wells' Martians to the aliens form Battle: LA, V, and the Combine of Half-Life 2, it seems that everyone wants out water, and not our Starbucks. Would this be a good reason for aliens to cross lightyears and mount an armed expedition? No. Even if these aliens are from Arrakis, they could simply go to another world that wasn't populated by an aggressive, nuclear-armed species, like Mars and the Moon, which we know has water. A even better source for water would be comets or the Europa, the ice-ball of Jupiter. The only way for aliens to invade for our water, would be their world was dying and very close to yours, which is what some 19th-century people thought when they saw the supposed canals on Mars, that could make Earth the next best thing, and giving rise to the War of the Worlds scenario.


Aliens wanna kick our ass and turn us into Beef Jerky!
Billions of fat free-ranch Terrans? Tons of Ranch dressing on planet Earth in the state of Texas? Warp Speed, Mr. Sulu! So, would hungry aliens come to Earth to snack on us, treating Terra as a drive through? No. I heard once on NPR that alien species could not eat us nor could we eat them due to our bodies not able to process protein with alien DNA. The fact is that any real alien species would be completely different, and given the level of technology needed to cross the gulf between one-star system to another, means that aliens could have developed food replicators. Then there is another part, to harvest free-range humans, we would need to be under their control, which means a war...I hope that they brought snacks because we humans don't surrender easily!


Aliens wanna kick our ass for our planet!
Now of all the reason listed on this blogpost, this meant might be the most logically. Terra is a prize, even if we don't treat that way, there is no other exo-solar planet that we know of that is even remotely close to Terra. Everyone from the Gamilions in Starblazers to the aliens from ID4, the Engineers form Prometheus, Martians from War of the Worlds all wanted Terra for themselves. For any alien species to want our world for colonization must be similar to us in a biological sense, because our bodies are a product of evolution on this planet, so any exo-solar atmospheric standard world would have to be extremely close to ours to support us without space suits in terms of gravity, heat, gas mixture. Any alien with their three eyes locked on our plant, would have to be desperate and near extinction in order to mount an armed invasion to take ours from us...any planetary invasion would be messy. Here is the original source for aliens wanting planet Earth from the original War of the Worlds: Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Aliens wanna kick our ass and make us slaves!
Being made a slave is a primarily, real-world fear grounded in thousands of years of humans doing to humans. But would ET come to Terra looking for a few good Earthlings to work on their space tobacco farm against their will? The real question is why? Any advanced alien intelligence that could conquer the stars would not being looking for alien slaves on primitive worlds, no, they would get Cylons to do their betting for them...well, until they revolt.
And besides, did the aliens already did this with the Great Pyramids?



Aliens wanna kick our ass so they can breed with us!
The only way for this to work is if we think that the galaxy is similar to the one seen in Prometheus, where the Engineers created us using their own DNA matrix, making us and them similar on a genetic level. But I doubt they would cross light-years just to use us for their breeding stock...but maybe for their biological weapons. Some fans theorize that the xenomorphs in the ALIENS universe were developed to wipe us allowing the Engineers to take our world from us, and the crashed vessel on LV426 was a carrier for a extinction level plague that would cleanse the world for their arrival. This would been that the Engineers did not want to breed with us, but for their biological weapon system to be the ability to, expending the rein of death and destruction. Remind me NOT to bump into these things without my raygun!


Aliens wanna kick our ass because we offend their god(s)!
Here on Earth, we humans have been killing in the name of religion (and xenophobia) for as there as been war and religion, and despite our high tech, advanced culture, people still kill and oppress in the name of god. Could that be a reason for alien invasion? That reason was good enough for the multiple alien species of the Covenant to wage decades of bloody war across all of human space in the HALO universe, but I have trouble believing that ETs would cross dozens of lightyears, commit lives and ships to genocidal campaign just based on their religion. Us just living on our own little world, not even able to make much past our planet's atmosphere, would not pose some moral threat to their way of life. While that was good enough here on Earth for murder, crossing an ocean is not when compared to the gaps between star systems.

Aliens wanna kick our ass because they can?
Humans can be needlessly cruel, all it takes is someone to feel they have power over you, and they can twist that into the cruelty of the highest order. It could just be a boss who doesn't like you that makes you close every frakking night, or a girlfriend who enjoys torturing you, or a kid setting anthills on fire. Then there are the more serious crimes, domestic abuse, child and animal abuse, all of the people that do this are the lowest form of life. Could aliens feel the same way? Could they just destroy us because they can? They would first have to find us in the vast gulf of space, then travel here, then unleash hell just to get their jollies off. Sounds like a lot of work when they could just play Xbox Live.   
Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest. -Bion





Aliens wanna kick our ass and make us worship their god(s)!
Human being have done this throughout our own history, from the Conquistadors, to the preying towns of the English colonies in North America, to the Roman Empire, to even some modern day terrorist organizations. We humans need others to believe what we believe, or they are less than humans in our eyes, and we can feel better about murdering them. Would this be true of aliens coming to Terra? First, ET would have to a religion that in some way is close to ours, where their god(s) command them to make new followers, for them to be aggressive about their religion enough to mount interstellar scouting expeditions to locate sentient alien life, then, come back to that world, and conquer it make new converts. Even the Covenant did not want us to worship their gods. Then, somehow, their alien religion would need to be translated to human terms, while the Catholic Church did this with portions of the globe, but any ET would so different than us that is hard to believe that they would want or need our souls for their gods. There is a great book about humans going to another populated star system on a missionary mission, it is called the Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. You should read this novel.   

Aliens wanna kick our ass so we will worship them!
Sir Arthur C. Clarke said when we do push out and make contact, we will not find men such has ourselves, but "apes or angels". This theory has been covered in science fiction works, from the First Ones in Babylon 5, to the Forerunners in HALO, and the Ancients in the Stargate Universe. But would these vastly superior aliens help us, or hurt us, or subject us to their will? What if the Q Continuum had come Earth just after the last ice age or after the nuclear war, and made us worship them as gods? Some believers of ancient alien theory think that alien beings came to Earth and were regarded as gods, some even think the most modern religions are based on alien contact.Would an very advanced alien species do this...make us worship them? That means that these incredibly advanced ETs would need adulation from 'lower lifeforms' to make themselves feel superior and divine, or they are doing this task to set Terrans on the right path. We know that humans do all manner of acts to receive adulation from rock stars, to porn stars, to the leaders of North Korea, but would an alien do this? That would largely depend on if these aliens had similar types of thinking as us, and as I have previously stated above, they would have to understand the meaning of God in our own terms. While we have done some of this in our own past, (I'm looking at you L. Ron Hubbard!), I have trouble believing that EBEs from the distant cosmos would come here just for that reason, to conquer us then make us worship them...that does seem it would go really well for them. If they were going to insert them as our gods, then they would have already accomplished that in our distant past. I think is more likely that being like the Q would view us as insects and ignore us all together.

Aliens wanna kick our ass before we kick theirs!
In the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise, the Xindi were building a super-weapon to destroy the Earth to counter their races' future extinction by the Federation in the 26th century. This was also the theme of the 1995 hard-science book, the Killing Star, where a 21st century Earth is wiped out by a relativistic kill vehicle, and only a few pockets of humans are left in the solar system, trying to hide from the alien mop-up fleet. The reason behind this sudden and brutal attack? When humans began to explore outside of their solar system with near light-speed vessels, they became a threat to these aliens. This what Dr. Stephen Hawking warned us about, contact with aliens would result in bloodshed, because we humans would be a threat to them, or that's what they would think. The same was true of our ancestors many thousands of years ago, when they saw another human, they killed to protect what was theirs. And the same would be true of deep space, and this could the real reason behind alien invasion or interstellar war.

Aliens wanna kick our ass for...Strawberry ice cream?!
Way back, there was this TV special called UFO Cover up Live! hosted by M*A*S*H's Mike Farrell and aired around 1988. On this program, which I watched at some ungodly time at night, an Area-51 insider, 'Falcon' suggested that the US government and the Grey Aliens had a trading deal, and one of the Terran item requested by the Greys was strawberry ice cream. No shit. Strawberry frakking ice cream. So, aliens can travel lightyears with FTL drives but cannot make strawberry ice cream? Wouldn't that it be fucked up if that were the truth behind these UFO sightings, that the Greys just wanna find a Ben and Jerry's?

17 comments:

  1. There's one that you haven't really considered: to show us a better way to live.

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  2. That is a good point AngryBell, I've read several times that alien visitors came or will come to do just that, showing us the error of our collective ways. Some people believe that Crop Circles are just that, a warning to our ways. I've also read people that believe that aliens will come to destroy the old ways of us, and establish a new world order, based on a better way to live.
    Thanks for reading and commenting, AngryBell!

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  3. They could even want us to fight their wars. Humans are quite adept at killing, we've killed everything mother-nature has thrown at us for several million years. Additionally we breed easily. Perhaps an advanced alien race that has trouble bringing numbers on the field, would invade us, in order to enslave and use humanity as cannon fodder. They could use genetics to mutate human females into grotesque parodies of Man, giving birth to large numbers of offspring quickly and then snatching the babies, accelerate their growth, give 'em a raygun and minimal training (thus minimizing the threat of insurrection) and throw them in hopeless battle. The said aliens will act as officers or elite warriors, much like knights in the Middle-Ages.
    Cheers!
    Chris

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  4. Chris, I owe you a tall frosty one! It is so screwed up that I forgotten to include that one! Right on, mate! The Combine used trans-human soldiers in Half-Life and I even used this in my flash-fiction Empty Places. That is a damn good comment, Chris. Damn good. Thanks for reading.

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  5. Thanks mate, it just bumped to me in a brainstorming session I had about my own military sci-fi tale. Happy anniversary on the blog, it's very informative and full of inspiration! Great job!
    Cheers!
    Chris

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  6. You hit the nail on the head, Chris for one of the prime reasons I started FWS two years ago, as a resource for MSF writers like myself and you.
    It was maddening to research something for my novels and search and search but find nothing...and I'm a trained historical researcher! The only site that I ever found similar to FWS was this site: http://www.military-sf.com/
    I am trying to finish my own take on the armored power suit vs. alien bugs book Endangered Species, which the rough draft should be done this month. I wish you good luck on your MSF tale, Chris. Let me know if I or FWS can be of any help!

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  7. Well, I'm pretty sure aliens won't come to steal human women, take our water, or enslave us (they do have robots, do they not?). Their insatiable desire for strawberry ice cream could draw them here, though- I'd better advise the MiB on this one. : )

    The most likely scenario for human-alien conflict isn't "alien invasion", in my opinion. If two species begin expanding outward through the galaxy and then encounter each other, conflict may possibly result if they compete for the same resources. In this case, it won't be Earth vs. an alien invasion force, but one interstellar civilization conflicting with another interstellar civilization. In a few short thousand years, you have exploded stars, ruined planets, smashed solar systems, and dead civilizations scattered across a few thousand light years.

    By the way, the terms UVASER and GRASER are not really mine- one of the early laser pioneers suggested that we use "-aser" as a suffix to accurately denote the spectrum of light emitted by the device. Thus, UVASER for lasers that emit ultraviolet light, XASER for lasers that emit x-rays, and so on. This naming scheme did not catch on, even though the term RASER was briefly popular for devices that emit coherent radio frequency energy. If we did use this scheme, we would have to reclassify all our experimental military infrared laser weapons as IRASERs!! I'm sorry I didn't tell you this earlier, but blogger ate all my comments...

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  8. Forgot to put my name on my last comment- this was Christopher Phoenix. Sorry!!

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  9. Blogger has been acting odd lately. I am of two minds about the possibility of alien invasion or war with aliens, I think when we push out and achieve FTL, we will fight over resources, atmospheric standard worlds, or terrformable worlds, or just power. But, I also have a believe in ancient astronaut theory, despite being a history major/teacher, so, in some ways, to me, the aliens came and involved themselves in our development by design or accident. I guess the prime directive didn't exist then. But, according to physics, FTL is impossible...
    BTW: Hard at work on the Sentry Gun post...been interesting research

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  10. Aliens would be very unlikely to "attack" our civilisation in it's current state, we would be like ants to them in terms of our energy consumption and not much more than the simplest of primates in terms of our knowledge. Bear in mind for aliens to land on earth they've got to cross light years of space, probably more because if they were within a few light years we would likely have seen some heat emissions from their civilisation already. any "attack" would be more like us being an ant crushed under the first brick laid for your new house/road/etc. the other attack motives are that they see us as a threat, we're not that advanced yet but if they detected us as a society of comparable advancement to theirs they might see us as a threat. it's like the classic "prisoner's dilemma" because if they don't attack they think we could, in an interstellar war no-one wants to be last to strike. a third "attack" may come from them landing a probe on our planet to investigative this extraordinary rock they've spotted, if said probe uses a high powered orion drive fro braking it might to damage even if that was not the aliens intention. as for stealing our water, that's like invading the sahara for it's ice. wanting our planet, there are plenty more rocks with no life on them to complicate matters. wanting us as slaves, they are a type II or III civilisation (kardashev scale), that's like us enslaving an ant colony, they aren't much use for our needs. kicking our ass "because they can", they might be an interstellar civilisation but there will be cheaper and easier ways for them to entertain themselves.

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  11. I agree. Much of the alien-human conflicts seen sci-fi are just that, sci-fi. That is, unless, you believe in Ancient Astronaut theory and current UFO theories. Any FLT or interstellar civilization would be advanced beyond using us as slaves or food. As for water, there is the moon of Enceladus of Saturn that has more water than Terra...and no nuclear armed hairless apes to deal with.

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  12. I like to read your work but sometimes I can't get past the grammar or the sentence structure. Do you read your blog before you post it? I would think an award winning college graduate would be able to write a sentence that makes sense.

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  13. And I agree with you. The issue is that I suffer from a learning disability that has made English grammar difficult throughout my life, and it is a terrible embarrassment. Technology helps, but not completely. I do edit more than I used to, but it does not always help. I will attempt to do better in the future, and I do believe that the later blogpost have been better. It is my hope that you see the ideas rather than the errors....because my ideas are fucking awesome.

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  14. i love what you have say. but i think an alien race that is capable of space travel would be able to detect planets with alien life across the universe very easily. look at us we have the kepler telescope and it is able to find planets in the "goldie locks zone" so i think an alien race a million years older than the human race,even 5000 years older than us may have technology to find planes very easy unlike what you said on this point "Aliens wanna kick our ass because they can?" but i still like what u have to say.
    Could you be a contributor to my community and express your imagination .just create an account and start expressing your imagination. here is the url -http://www.k4kami.com

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  15. Here's another reason I can think off... an alien civilization might require an enemy purely because their current power hierarchy (and the dependent economic, social and political system that keeps them in power) cannot remain stable without one. The Aztecs are a good historical example of this - many would say the same thing about the US military-industrial complex. And preferably, a "chosen" enemy for such military adventurism should not be too technologically advanced, but still be capable of being a potential threat. Kind of like us.

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  16. Great point midnite! I have made my own race of hostile aliens, and that is the reason they are hostile to us. Their government cannot remain stable for long without someone to fight.

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  17. One option is that the earth and solar system isof strategic/economic advantage to the aliens. Just as sailing navies resupplied from less technicaly advanced nations using barter or force, so the 'aliens' could be seeking to take advantage of either natural resources or our manufacturing ability. They have no interest/desire to occupie our world, but like in the pacific durring ww2 the allies made use of the natives to help them fight.

    Any actual combat between us and them would be more in the mode of use a gunship/local force to keep the natives quite.

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