Ridiculously small numbers for galactic or even interstellar-sized armies. Remember that the United States mobilized some 12 million men in World War 2-and that was just one country that occupies a portion of a continent of a single planet.
Well, Doctor Who used the “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” bit a number of times, precisely because it was scientific nonsense (which Jon Pertwee loved).
Oh, hang on.
The Doctor would never take all night to do that.
Yeesh. :rolleyes:
Have we ever seen a scenario where landing ten billion troops on a planet would be the best strategy? In space 99% of whether one wins or loses in decided by space forces. And in Star Wars for example, what we’ve primarily seen are dedicated rapid-response teams or garrisons sized for their mission.
Controlling space always seemed pretty pointless to me. Space is mostly empty space and having control of it seems to offer little in the way of profit. Controlling planets means controlling resources, but planetary resources can be had from any planet of the right type. Even in Dune, they eventually reached a point where Spice was no longer the key. I think even comic books are past the idea of unique elements that can be found on only one planet in the whole universe. And space is really really big, so if the Evil Empire controls some piece of it, there is still an essentially infinite amount of it left in which you can found your own Evil Empire.
Controlling space is everything. In real life, you can get most resources much easier from asteroids and moons, and if there’s something you really have to have from a planet’s surface, you can sit up in space and strike with impunity until the people on the surface surrender.
There is still an effectively infinite universe full of stars, asteroids, planets, and shit. Two factions who both possess faster than light travel would have to both be controlled by irrationally greedy retards to fight over any given sector of it.
I also love it, both because it’s nonsense and because it’s mocking the stupid ‘reverse the polarity’ trope.
My wife has a trope she dislikes: that the final conflict between two super-advanced cultures must be settled with a fistfight between two members of those culture. Instead of, you know, advanced weaponry or clever ruses. She first pointed it out in the case of the original “Stargate” movie which was settled, I believe, by three simultaneous fistfights at the end.
But I seem to recall James T. Kirk duking it out with aliens a lot in TOS.
It doesn’t HAVE to be this way. AS I recall, in the “Wrath of Khan” movie, clever ruses involving coded phrases and subterfuge were involved, as well as 3-Dimensional vs. 2-Dimensional thinking for space battles. It’s regarded as the best Star Trek movie by many … imagine that!
Kind and wise aliens, who are concerned about humans and want to stop us from destroying ourselves (via nuclear war). I am sure that any aliens advanced enough to come here would regard us as intelligent cockroaches.
Yeah, I’m working on a story where an artificial intelligence transcends and becomes many times more intelligent than human beings, but at some part of its development realizes that soon it will not give a fig about human beings, so develops an advanced (REALLY ADVANCED) subroutine to help us along our way. Because I can’t see a superhuman intelligence wanting or needing to pay the slightest attention to the needs of human beings as we are now constituted.
Why not superhuman compassion? Or scientific interest.
That’s probably the only reasons for any spacefaring civilization to seek us out; odds are we don’t have anything they need that can’t be got closer to them.
Or even worse, aliens who regard us as so violent, warlike and genocidal that they… exterminate us.:smack:
Totally agree. Now, how many humans do you know of who are irrationally greedy retards who have controlled nations in history?
Is it a trope that millions of years of evolution culminates in humans becoming energy beings? I am thinking of the last episode of B5, and humanoids evolving into energy in some STNG episodes.
“Nukes” being somehow more morally reprehensible than other, more powerful future weapons of mass destruction. Jeff Goldblum’s speech in ID4 and I recall John Crighton making similar comments in Farscape. I get it. As 20th century Earthmen, you have a cultural aversion to nukes. That doesn’t make your plasma anti-mater planet destroyer better.
Elaborate alien invasion strategies that don’t make sense. Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow.
Also stealing our water. Go steal Saturn’s water. Or Europa’s. You probably passed them on the way in.
Don’t even get me started on Doctor Who. I get that he tries to be a “good” guy, but when you are a thousand year old time traveler, it seems fairly arbitrary which tyrant he stops from taking power or which small band of astronauts he saves from eaten by a space monster. Does he ever just land on a space station, say “sorry, you’re that group of astronauts that were eaten by a space cockroach in 2523 on Space Station Alpha, peace out.” and hop back in his Tardis?
The Doctor almost never sets out to change history; he just deals with whatever turns up under his nose where he happens to go. This led to a conflict in the episode “The Fires of Pompeii” when the Doctor discovered that he would have to indirectly cause the eruption rather than let something worse happen. And his companion Donna had to cajole him to save one single family that they’d gotten to know personally from the eruption.
Then there was the one time I can recall that the Doctor decided to try thumbing his nose at history, “The Waters of Mars”. Deciding that as the last and only* Time Lord he can do what he wants, he tries to save someone whose death is a pivotal event in history. Only they rebuke the Doctor and deliberately kill themselves to prevent altering time.
*so he thought.
Said irrationally greedy retards in Urth history got something out of the deal. Resources, slaves, enforcing their will on others…something. Not really seeing what your would-be Space Emperor gets out of conquest that would make the effort of crossing light years (and dealing with the temporal issues that involves) worth it. Planetary tyrants will, I expect, be fairly easy to find. Maybe even despots who manage to rule an entire solar system. Beyond that? Such an empire would be effectively impossible to rule.
I was thinking of the sound on exterior shots in pretty much every space show. Star Wars, BSG, etc. Sound doesn’t travel very well in space!
I hate that but in a different way.
The whole of humanity is on the verge of being totally and utterly destroyed, and they are reluctant to use a single nuke, like somehow that means we’ve gone too far. That using them is a line WE WILL NOT CROSS (!). Hollywood hates nukes so much they won’t let their characters use them in cases they should, like preventing total annihilation. I guess they think it’s better to die morally than live having used nukes. I disagree!
In ID4 not only should they have not even hesitated to nuke Houston, they should have used more of them. And used them at the end instead of pinpricking the alien craft with air-to-air missiles. Of all the stupidity in the movie, that’s my personal worst (even more than outrunning the fireball). You got nukes? Use em! They used their space laser canon to obliterate NYC and countless other cities without warning. We have the moral high ground here, people!
The whole “Star Wars” meme-think about it-a technologically advanced civilization,where people dress like medieval peasants. Back in the 1930s. the Sci Fi had people living in high tech Art Deco-style houses…and neat futuristic clothing-I always like how “Ming The Merciless” dressed! Give me Flash Gordon any day.