MovieChat Forums > The 5th Wave (2016) Discussion > If real aliens wanted Earth, without us

If real aliens wanted Earth, without us

posted 9 years ago by cashmccall
5 replies | jump to latest

It would be easy, we would all be dead and never see them or hear them, we wouldn't even know it was them. However, if they needed earth clean, they would have to disarm all fail safe nuclear weapons and prevent meltdowns of nuclear power plants. Tricky, but doable, just keep everything powered up the way they are now. However, if China and Russia have deadman launch switches, the aliens would need to be extra careful. I doubt the US has deadman switches. We're so soft now about nuclear, I think our governments philosophy would be to die first before we destroy the rest of the world with fail safe deadman switches. As for China and Russia, they want everyone to die if they're gonna die. That's the irony of nuclear armed, violent, dictatorships, you can beat them in a war, you can outgun them, but if they have deadman switches, then you're likely to die too, or survive a short time in a radiated world.

[–] MrGKB 9 years ago

If aliens really wanted a human-free planet, I would think they could have just as easily injected an appropriate poison into the atmosphere, wait for it to do its dirty work, and then moved in. Or, as the aliens in "Independence Day" should have done, they could've diverted an asteroid or three toward us. Boom! Nuclear winter, wait a few years, goodbye humanity.

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[–] parkpunk 9 years ago

Something like the plot from Moonraker would be ideal.

[–] bluerisk 8 years ago

A(n) (airborne) poison? I guess you have no idea how much volume the atmosphere takes in. I guess it is nearly impossible.
A virus might be a better way, but even here they will never reach figures like 90% or more like in the books/movie.

Even diseases like Ebola hardly reach a level of 50% or more, and only in countries with a run down health system, densely populated slums, and inadequate food supply.

The last pig flu hit several thousands people in Mexico (the poor), while in Sweden it was in the single digit, and these dead figures mostly because of the vaccine which killed more people with their side effects than the actual flu.

An EMP is also not even close as effective as Hollywood makes us believe.

Honestly: If there are aliens, they will stay away from us.

There is this "galactic zoo" theory that makes the assumption that aliens have discovered us for a long time but they avoid any contact.

But zoo is the wrong term imho. A zoo is an artificial environment for re-located specimen. Earth would be rather a reservation in which the indigene flora and fauna (including us) can continue to develop undisturbed from external shocks, and the first contact with a technological far superior species would be a shock.

We know from our history that any inferior (technological inferior - that's what I'm always referring to) culture was more or less wiped out, or at least assimilated to the state of near extinction.

And we, as human civilization, would suffer the same fate, and I guess any potential alien civilization is very aware of it and it was decided to protect us by avoiding any sort of contact with us.

Already Europe, North America, Japan etc. pp. have reached a level in their cultural evolution which forbades any conduct of genocide or the active and deliberated annihilation of a species, and my guess is that any sophisticated alien civilisation is even more inclined to preserve and protect all kind of live.

Last but not least their technology makes them independent from any need of our resources.

A space lift and thus making the space economically exploitable was one major stop for our future survival.
Huge mining ships could explore the Kuiper belt even with the irony that we return to our roots: the first sources of quality metals/iron were meteoroids.
And now we would tap this source again.

There are clouds of hydrocarbon molecules larger than our solar system. The space provides - for civilization like our - abundant quantities of raw materials.

Ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch, ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer

[–] skat1140 8 years ago

Well, the first mistake was having the alien ship cruise in like it owned the place.

Confusion as to the cause would be a great aid to their invasion.

They could still launch the tsunamis and the diseases and most would think it was some sort of religious apocalypse. but if they can launch one disease they could easily launch one after another, the same way they get rid of tuberculosis or AIDS, by attacking it from multiple vectors at once. no one can be resistant to 3 or 4 strains.

Basically, if you're an alien race with this level of sophistication and superiority, there are a LOT better ways to conquer Earth.

[–] bluerisk 8 years ago

And most likely no need to do it in the first place.
I'm woundering: if this was only ship, why they didn't nuke it. At least with the first hostile action. Military facilities have a protection against EMP attacks.

If a spaceship of this size is appraoching Earth, I'm 90%+ sure it would be an hostile envoy for any responsible alien cililization would leave us alone for certain reasons.

Hence my guess that we will never see any major alien ships/fleets in our live time.

Ich bin kein ausgeklügelt Buch, ich bin ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer