Species was the one I was thinking of. Aliens send broadcast out to universe, explaining how to do wonderful biological engineering things. People stupid enough to try it essentially open up a back door into their own species and wind up turning themselves into aliens. No FTL, no huge intersteller ships. Just a virus.
The bacteria thing, was what I meant. From the OP:
Basically, their execution was perfect, their attack was perfect. We couldn’t have survived them, IMO. Tho humans were their vital food so they couldn’t have killed us all I guess…but we’d be their pets, their slaves, and their fodder. The way we raise sheep.
Unfortunately, they neglected to study bacteria, I guess.
I don’t know if it counts as an invasion story or not, but I thought Arthur C. Clarke’s *Childhood’s End * was a very plausible and realistic description of aliens taking over the Earth. There’s no movie, but BBC did a nice radio drama version.
It’s difficult for me to conceive of aliens using us for food or mating with us as their pyisiology would likely be very different.
I also disagree with the whole War of the Worlds/Signs/ID:4 premise of aliens in giant vehicles obliterating everything until they die of Earthly diseases or have their systems hacked into. More likely it would be the other way around and they would unleash their own bio-weapons and computer viruses on us or swarms of nano-machines or armed drones that simply kill everything like you would kill an ant infestation.
Compare a 50-100 years difference in technology just on Earth. Most likely their technology would be 1000s of years ahead of ours.
Surprisingly enough — very surprising, I’d say — there are apparently no bacteria on Mars. Some excerpts:
Maybe, but this thread is about being logical about it, not the emotional impact. I agree, the movie strikes a lot of the right notes to keep me wondering, watching, on the edge of my seat; that’s precisely why I felt so terribly let down by the silly conclusion.
Surprisingly enough — very surprising, I’d say — there are apparently no bacteria on Mars. Some excerpts from the novel:
Gaaah! Apologies for the double post.
But the conclusion wasn’t about the aliens. It was about faith, belief, and the existence of God.
Why? The odds are that they’re carbon based, probably using the same amino acids that create life on Earth. Thus, Earth animals would likely be edible.
In form, they’d be subject to similar evolutionary forces, so they could look roughly humanoid.
I agree mating is unlikely, but, then again, there is bestiality in humans; a bunch of humanoid male aliens cooped up in a spaceship might just be desperate enough to try to mate with human females.
The best invasion would be to show up and act and look like dogs.
Get all your food provided for. Take naps all day. Get to pee and poop outside and you don’t have to wear clothes. Hump other members of your species whenever they walk by.
Maybe you showed up with a plan to take over the planet. . .but after a couple thousand years have gone by you realize. . .
you already have
Does anyone remember a book where the Aliens showed up and took people with cancer because they thought cancer itself was really cool.
I read somewhere that Mr. Niven liked to make Irish coffees at conventions, to keep himself from getting bored. Was he doing this when you met him?
Reminds me of The Voice of Cephais ( sp ), which had an AI version of that. Broadcast data on advanced communications/computer technology, and techniques that let biological beings download their minds into them. The biologicals build a system of computers and comm networks that can support minds and download themselves into it to obtain immortality. At some point, some of the alien “data” will be an AI virus that will wake up and infect the system. Being an AI, it is better adapted to such an environment, and will wipe out the biological minds, like a shark versus a dog in water. The AIs get a world’s resources and a computer system that can support them, and the biologicals do the work.
Before either of those you had Fred Hoyle’s A for Andromeda, where folks out in the distant Andromeda galaxy send plans for a robot.
Ya know, my quoting War Of The Worlds was only to illustrate how quickly Humans would be brought to heel after a conquest.
I would submit the invasion scheme–if, indeed, there is a “scheme” at all–in David Gerrold’s War Against the Chtorr series. While the books themselves were less than stellar (and the series seems to be on long-term hold, at best), the premise was very interesting.
It’s an ecological invasion. The alien ecology is evidently hyper-competitive, and has developed or been engineered to be more adaptable than that of Earth. The first wave was a series of plagues; no one even realized that it was an attack for some time. Then alien plants started turning up; with no local herbivores adapted to their defense mechanisms, they outcompeted local flora in enough areas to establish a foothold. Small animals appeared among the alien plants, followed by larger varieties, including apparent top predators (some of which were sentient or semi-sentient, and all of which happily dined on native creatures). As of the last book I read in the series, it still wasn’t clear who or what was behind the invasion.
Since I simply cannot accept the idea of faster-than-light travel, the most realistic, or most likely scenario is The Andromina Strain.
In that pseudo-scince stuff was the idea that another race might release a space-virus as a low-cost way of communicating. Of course once it gets here, it could go nuts.
No no no, that’s cats!
But maybe the cats and dogs are competing alien species, waging a millenia-long war for control of the useful slave species known as homo sapiens… hmm.
Unless I missed it, no one has yet suggested The Andromeda Strain. I think that’s the most likely way for an alien life form to invade. Catch a ride on a micrometeorite embedded in something that falls to earth.
Another likely possibility is what the military feared in Contact, that the plans for the device were to a weapon or a portal of some kind. Just send out some information with a hidden exploit.
I do like the stories (like H.G. Welles “War of the Worlds”) in which the aliens regard the earth as a potentail colony…or interstellar beef ranch. But how many (convincing) SCIFI stories portray the aliens as compassionate and kind? Kinda like mormon missionaries in new Guinea? Of course, one reason why I think mars is worth exploring is the theory of panspermia-that life has made it around the universe. It would be amazing to find some martian bacteria, and find it had the same DNA as earth life.
I’m willing to consider the possibility of the Signs aliens being the equivalent of interstellar daredevils – “Let’s go to a planet that’s pretty much completely poisonous to us! It’d be COOOOOL!” But I watched the last few minutes and was unimpressed by how it played out. It’s like the alien beast had a sign pinned to his chest saying, “Gosh, Mel, would you like me to stand here like a dumbass while you put together what this movie was about?”