First of all I at least HOPE our government at the very least as a basic outline or power point slide of their “plans”. What if a huge fleet just appeared over earth and started attacking from orbit. What could we do? How high can our ICBMs get? Could we even set them to go off in space and not high atmo? I know the shuttle doesn’t have a rang higher than LEO but what about the Russians? Could they put a nuke in one of their rockets and set it to head their way? Not getting into shields and all that stuff.
…as Clint Eastwood said in some movie.
We could act like one of those storied Japanese movies with the planes attacking Godzilla. Yes, we could update it some with the same stuff we are testing to intercept missiles. But we have nothing designed in that direction and it would be futile. The instant we perceived we were under siege, we should surrender or try to talk and see what they wanted. Why assume they were unfriendly? I doubt they would even come here without knowing all about us from afar to begin with.
If I wanted to really discourage them, I might point out our major cities. They might feel sorry for us and help in some way. Or they might leave in disgust. If not that, then earth might be their needed resource and the dead carbon units would be as good as live ones. Bend over and kiss it good-bye.
Surrender unconditionally and beg for mercy. Seriously we’d be up against a civilization advanced enought to travel across intersteller space. Unless they this is some kind of game for them and they deliberatly use less advanced weapons & tactics than they otherwise could (ala Predator) we’d never even see the “invasion fleet” coming until it was too late.
Well they could not take out every military silo at once. I mean we are talking about aliens here so they just might but we have silos all over the country side hidden away in the hills. We have nuclear boomers that can launch nukes. Could we get one high enough into orbit? I am not asking if we would win but the logistics. Just because they are aliens doesn’t mean they do not have a way to repel the laws of physics. Enough kinetic force will destroy anything
Even if they were technologically not much more advanced than us, we’d still be screwed. They could just tow a few asteroids into our atmosphere, and take us out pretty easily.
Planets are actually pretty vulnerable; sitting at the bottom of a gravity well.
However, given the age of the universe, it’s much more likely they’ll be a bigger difference between them and us than there is between us and cavemen. We’d be no threat whatsoever.
In fact, as we’re no threat, and as we’re on such a tiny, insignificant rock from the POV of an interstellar capable species, it’s rather difficult to say why they’d feel the need to attack us.
I’d break out my 1920s Style Death Ray. Then use my Jedi mind tricks.
There are no plans, we’d be fucked.
FWIW I used to work in a military planning division.
Yup, we are talking about a species that has conquered engineering challenges we only theorize are possible, and possibly a few we think are impossible. Imagining that they would not have better offensive and defensive ground combat capabilities would be just silly.
They could probably just nuke us from orbit, since they would know its the only way to be sure.
ICBM’s are pretty much sub-orbital… by design.
Then… there’s this study(pdf) about air-launching them… which might just give them oomph to hit LEO. Still, the terminal guidance would probably be a joke, but I guess with nukes close enough is in fact close enough.
Based on years of sci-fi… the best bet for mankind would be an Oriontype system powerful enough to boost some sort of fighting platform to space… Orions scale up pretty nicely… and can do some serious lifting. Once there, just use weaponry we already have… a KEW-A1 at orbital speeds ought to pack quite a punch.
“Aliens” aren’t something you can plan for. What are we shooting those nukes at? Why are those aliens in orbit rather than landing? How far away are they? Are they moving? What sized ships are they in? How did they just appear without warning? What does that imply?
Either we have plans against an earth foe in space or we don’t. But magical aliens aren’t worth taking time away from real threats.
Given that the aliens are clearly more advanced than us, seems to me missiles would probably be pointless. If they have the technology to make it across umpty-ump light years I would expect them to be packing beamed weapons (e.g. lasers, particle beams, etc.). They could just fry the missiles as they were launched (or maybe, just as they left the atmosphere, to keep the beams from being affected by atmospheric distortion). Aren’t beamed weapons already being researched by us Terrans?
Bacteria worked when the Martians invaded back in the '90s. 1890s that would be, you young whipper-snappers.
What if the aliens actually have only bronze age technology, and found a spaceship built by older aliens, but the spaceship or ships are controlled like the alien version of an ipod or something, so they can drive around, and perhaps use defensive weaponry, but can’t nuke us or figure out how to move asteroids around and stuff, so they have to beam down in their alien chariots and try to take us on with swords?
Why not? I mean, maybe (at least conceivably, though I really doubt it) they’re hidden well enough that the aliens couldn’t find them. So? If they have the technology to get here at all, then they have the technology to easily carpet-bomb every square inch of the planet’s surface, if they so chose.
Our only hope would be to find out what it is they want, and either hold that whatever-it-is hostage somehow, or find a way for them to get it that’s even easier than them killing all of us. But until they actually show up, there’s no way to even begin to guess what that something is, so we can’t make contingency plans. And God help us if they’re just really xenophobic, and what they want in the first place is for us to be dead.
I for one welcome our new alien overlords
Our best bet would be to upload a virus into their network and take out all their ships at once.
They most likely would not be able to use Earth as-is so there would be no reason for them to come down or attack us. Their first order of business would be to repair and resupply their ships. They would get water and air from comets, iron and some other materials from asteroids. For rarer metals and other elements they would ask us to ship them up from Earth. Maybe they would offer us information and technology in trade. Most likely they would just start lobbing asteroids into our cities until we complied. No real options for fighting back.
After they had built new space habitats, power stations, etc. and settled in they might look into un-terraforming Earth for future settlement. By the time they started moving down, we’d all be dead.
Michael Crichton’s novel “Sphere” addresses this indirectly. While combat with aliens doesn’t occur, the protagonist, a psychologist who works with disaster victims and response teams, gets roped into investigating a crashed spacecraft because years ago the pentagon hired him to write up a report on how people would react to encountering extraterrestrials- which he though was an absurd request, but hey, it was a paycheck. So he gets called to this crash site thinking a plane has gone down and they need him to debrief some traumatized passengers or something, and it turns out they want him because his name is at the top of some crazy thing he penned ten years ago at their request. The report doesn’t get dealt with too much during the book, but many of my favorite passages involve references to it.
I seriously wonder if our government has in fact commissioned such a report at some time- and considering that the F.B.I. conducted an official investigation into the lyrics of “Louie Louie”, I wouldn’t be surprised. If anybody knows of such a report, could you tell me?
Attempting to answering the OP more directly: We know of no examples of extraterrestrials, and therefore cannot even begin to define what their forces, technologies, strategies, tactics, or even goals during a hypothetical attack on earth might be. If you want to know what earth might use to itself defend against aliens, I suggest you just read up on the military forces of the world and space technology in general.
Some places to start on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia: War
Wikipedia: Military Strategy
Wikipedia: Military Aviation
Wikipedia: Strategic Defense Initiative
Wikipedia: Spaceflight
Wikipedia: Anti-satellite Weapon
Wikipedia: Asteroid Impact Avoidance
And one of my favorite sites about the real future of space travel and how it compares to science fiction:
You’re underestimating your enemy.
A civilization capable of crossing interstellar space and fixin’ on some ass-kicking is not coming in looking like the Colonial Marines from “Aliens,” or the Cylons from “Battlestar Galactica.” The difference in technological capability is going to be about the same as the difference between human beings today and ostriches. If we set about to defeat the world’s ostrich population do you really think they’d have a chance?
Your alien invaders are going to be so far past us we will never have a chance in hell to react. You don’t think they’ll check us out ahead of time and know we have fusion weapons? Dude, they crossed interstellar space. They mastered fusion weapons before we learned to WRITE.
There is of course no point in spending even five minutes preparing for this.
I hope they invade while Will Smith is still alive
Given Cecil’s recent column on our failure to take out Emus, I’m not sure we’d do that much better against the ostriches.
Although that does make me think that the best tactic is not to worry about beating the aliens, it would be all about making it less worthwhile to fight us than to find another way to get what they want (unless they’re Daleks who just want to Exterminate! But then we’d all just run up a flight of stairs)