Anthrax, right?
One thing to consider is that the aliens may want to save us. Picture a ship full of evangelical Christians.
Hardly anyone seems to think that aliens would be interested in our local flora and fauna. Frankly, if I was to travel to an alien civilization their biodiversity would be one of the most interesting things for me.
We will die of alien infection. Death by Reticulum Rot or Cygnus crotch decay.
Given that humans live permanently and willingly in the high arctic and the hottest deserts. it is very doubtful if anything climatic will bother an alien race capable of interstellar travel.
The problem with this is that ozone is a product of UV reacting with oxygen. It can’t vary a great deal unless the oxygen level in the atmosphere varies wildy, and that isn’t really possible for reasons I’ll detail below.
Not really possible. Oxygen levels will always balance out at about the same level in any vaguely earth like system. Plants will produce oxygen until it reaches a level in the 20-30% range, whereupon the vegetation becomes so highly flammable that it ignites and consume the oxygen. It can’t remain excessively low or excessively high unless something is consuming it. Maybe these organisms evolved so rapidly that the minerals are still sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere, but that’s pretty unlikely.
Unlikely given the way that terrestrial planets form. To be troublesome the hevay metals would need to be 10 times higher than what we have here on Earth. It’s hard to see how that could occur.
Not really. If we assume an humanlike lifeform then it’s going to be hard for the planet to be any less hospitable than some of the desert or arctic environments that humans have naturally and willingly occupied.
This isn’t really a major objection, because if you can travel through interstellar space you certainly know enough t be able to convert biomass using microbes. Even us humans can readily convert toxic material such as pufferfish, or inedible material like wood or nutritionally deficient material like sugar into highly nutritious complete, safe food using microbial vats.
A more realistically objection is that when you can hurl billion of people and arms across space you certainly have enough energy and technology to capture carbon directly form the atmosphere, and much more efificently.
Once again, we have to ask what sort of technology would make it more efficient to hurl material across the universe at sizable fraction of lightspeed than to simply mine the neighbouring planet. Seriousuly, when would it ever be cheaper to go and pick up shopping carts from Alpha Centauri than to mine the metal from Mars? It may be more concentrated, but the time and energy involve din transporting it would be prohibitive unless we have a magic technology that makes travel free. And if we have a magic technology that makes space travel free then the depth we have to travel into a planet to get materials ceases to be an issue as well.
Oh the horror!
In the end it’s pointless trying to ascribe motive to an unknowable and hypothetical alien race. However, I’d consider it fairly unlikely that a race capable of crossing intersteller space would turn up and try and enslave us (anything we could do could be more easily done my machines) or steal our planet (they could go and find a nice clean one instead).
What I consider more likely is they either ignore us or just blow us up. Afterall, why would they share our moral code? And does a morale code even apply to a different sentient species? In a dangerous universe shouldn’t you just look after your own species by elliminating potential competition as early as possible?
If they have the capacity to visit us (which is really bloody unlikely), it’s unlikely they would need anything we have when they get here that they couldn’t get more easily somewhere else.
The only reasons I can think of that they might exterminate or conquer us:
[ul]
[li]They have some pathological, but irrational need to conquer/assimilate (Klingons, or missionaries)[/li][li]They perceive us as a threat at imminent risk of expansion into their sphere of control (which we’re not, and not about to be)[/li][li]They do it out of some kind of (possibly misguided) altruism, as an attempt to uplift or improve us.[/li][/ul]
I’d be more worried about aliens drive-by bombing us for shits and giggles.
A friend of mine thinks we need the threat of an alien invasion to bring us humans together.
Tbh, I’d be all for settling our petty squabbles and getting together to kick some alien ass, or whatever equivalent they may have.
When your enemy has got tendrils instead of arms and a gaping maw for a mouth, that guy with the turban doesn’t seem so bad after all.
Your friend doesn’t happen to love The Watchmen, does he?
It’s a she, and she’s also an OAP who has never had an interest in action comics, so I doubt it.
On second thoughts, there’s no doubt… I know it. She’s more of a Steven Seagal fan - hey, we aren’t all perfect!
You are a desperate, desperate man. I can relate.
They’d probably just be really confused that we’re made of meat.
Thanks for the link, that was hilarious.
Not a bad solution to Fermi’s Paradox.
Would extra-terrestrials find us tasty?
I always remember that old “Twilight Zone” episode…“To Serve Man”. Or are we probably unfit to eat?
Of course, their intentions toward us might be even worse . . .
They very likely will be capable of thinking in terms of millenia-long time scales, or even longer (unlike our short-attention-span species which apparently cannot conceive of or worry about anything which might happen after c. 1 year), and, if they have developed the technology to get here from Far Far Away (which means it is possible), then we eventually will too, at which point we might become a threat to them. They may come to the very logical conclusion that we need to be nuked purely for that reason. This assumes that interstellar tech eventually will hit a wall, in the same manner in which jet transport hit a wall in the 60’s, and they worry that we will indeed catch up one day. If they are confident that they will always stay one step ahead of us, casually neutralizing our puny weapons at every turn, then we have less to worry about.
Just in case, here is a handy tip sheet that we should all commit to memory or carry in our wallets:
