Biological warfare would be effective.
Thought someone would say that but it’s not like the world’s armies were scrambled to take them out.
And for the analogy to be more appropriate we’d probably have to stipulate that the ostriches were confined to an island, that was far enough away that we could safely nuke it dozens of times.
I’m still of the opinion that they could turn every human being inside out and have us dancing a jig before we were even aware of their presence.
But I also think there’s no more reason for them to want to take us out than for them to want to paint every green object purple.
The government has plans for everything…I wouldn’t be at all surprised if somewhere, tucked away in some file cabinet in the Pentagon is a plan for an alien invasion.
It would depend on their goals. If they wanted to capture the planet in tact then that would mean we’d have a chance…a planet is a bit place, and I don’t care how advanced their civilization is, logistics would be a bitch. If they just wanted to wipe us out, that would be a bit more problematic…as someone up thread mentioned, they could simply drop big rocks on us until everyone was dead and then move in to do whatever it is they came to do…or fly off to kill the next set of sentient beings. Sort of the Posleen Wars vs the guys in Empire from the Ashes.
Not a chance. Any civilization that could press through an invasion on interstellar scales isn’t going to be susceptible to anything we can throw at them from inside our own gravity well. We’d be fucked.
They never even managed to get a man on the moon…and that was in their hay day. All our weapons are designed and built around fighting other humans right here on earth, with the exception of a couple specialty weapons retasked to take out some satellites.
Sorry…if the aliens are here to wipe us out then we’ll get wiped out. The only chance would be if for some mysterious reason they want to capture the planet intact, and also preserve the human race (maybe as slaves to fight their interstellar wars, maybe for snacks, maybe…JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT!! :p).
-XT
The MAC Powerbook was effective in stopping a previous invasion back in 1996.
Yeah, but how many Will Smith’s and Jeff Jeff Goldblum’s are there? Plus, I don’t think Obama, for all his many talents, is a jet fighter pilot…
-XT
Which doesn’t tell you how high they go. Things can go much higher than LEO and still not be in a stable orbit, i.e. one that does not intersect the Earth.
LEO starts at about 150 km up. ICBMs were designed to travel on ballistic paths that intersect the Earth at two points about 10,000 km apart. I don’t have the math at hand, but my intuition says that such a path should go much, much higher than 150 km up. No doubt Stranger could give us more specifics.
Sadly, Daleks have got that one licked, now.
If it wasn’t for their main weakness: not killing Doctor Who the very first chance they get, they’d be omnipotent.
Oh yeah, that’ll work right! :rolleyes::smack:
On another biochemistry?
On silicon life, perhaps?
No.
Aliens invade = We Are Boned
On the bright side, the aliens might try forced selective brreding, to make Mankind less stupid. So, Dopers get laid! A lot!
Depends on their body makeup. How are you going to develop bacteria/viruses/whatever capable of doing anything at all to them in time to take them out before they retaliate?
Not if they stay in their spaceships or armored spacesuits.
You’re right a Minuteman has a ceiling of 700 miles… which isn’t too bad. That’s almost half way to the upper limit of LEO. Let’s hope the aliens want to see the whites of our eyes… and not snipe us from L1.
Palin could shoot them from a chopper.
Well in that case we can give them a gift: blankets or a giant horse monument.
(They aren’t aware of our history, they won’t know ;))
Maybe they’ll be the friendly type, easily befriended with Reese’s Pieces.
I think its time for this:
The downside to launching a nuclear weapon in space is the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse which might destroy our satellite systems and pretty much anything that uses electricity. Imagine the fear when aliens come and people’s Iphones stop working and they can’t twitter it.
Let them take the earth captive.
Did you ever read “The Ransom of Red Chief”?
Trust me, they’ll eventually leave and never come back.
Probably post warning beacons in space.
Don’t be silly, it wasn’t the Reese’s Pieces, it was Drew Barrymore.
Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor writes:
> On the bright side, the aliens might try forced selective brreding, to make
> Mankind less stupid. So, Dopers get laid! A lot!
Yeah, you wish. Your scenario is apparently that we Doper men would get lots of beautiful, willing women to have sex with. Such women, on the average, aren’t brilliant themselves. If someone wants to breed brilliant humans, the aliens would have to use both brilliant men and women. So the women on the average won’t be any more beautiful than average, and they will be the sort who are smart enough not to be so impressed by us Doper men either.
But, of course, why bother to keep around a lot of intelligent men who might plot revolution? The aliens would be more likely to just tie down and hook up a sufficient amount of men to machines that automatically withdraw sperm as necessary to impregnate the women and keep them constantly pregnant during their breeding years. And if you’re turned on by the idea of machines that are constantly masturbating you (you sick bastard), it’s also probably the case that the aliens wouldn’t put the men in any situation where they could break out at any point. They would put them in a permanent coma. So enjoy your future as an unconscious sperm donor.
ICBMs deliver their payloads into an elliptical or quasi-elliptical orbit that intercepts Earth’s surface at the target point. (Quasi-elliptical because most modern ICBMs use a post boost vehicle (PBV) to deliver multiple reentry vehicles (RV) to independent targets, and some have a small degree of reentry maneuvering vehicles.) Stable Low Earth Orbit starts at around 150 nmi and goes up to about 1200 nmi. ICBMs generally have an apogee somewhere in the middle of that range. However, in order to remain in orbit you need to have adequate forward velocity, and ICBMs do not have enough impulse to provide sufficient tangential velocity to boost their payloads into a stable orbit.
The situation is actually a little more complicated than this; due to the fact that modern ICBM and SLBM systems use solid propellant motors for main boost propulsion, they expend their impulse at high thrust early in flight, and thus aren’t able to throttle back to shape the trajectory for an orbital insertion the way a space launch vehicle (SLV) does. However, many earlier liquid propellent ICBMs like the Atlas, Titan, and Soviet R-7 and R-36M were adapted for SLV use with only very modest modifications to the booster system (mostly guidance and control, and range safety modifications; no main propulsion system upgrades), and many solid propellant boosters have been adapted for SLV use of light orbital payloads by the addition of small solid motors or liquid engine upper stages ‘kick motors’ or that provide the necessary tangential impulse to shape the trajectory into an orbital insertion.
Actually, air launch of targets using demil ICBM or commercial solid rocket motors is fairly common practice, as with the SRALT and LRALT systems, or the MRT. The Orbital Sciences small lift class Pegasus SLV, which is essentially a Taurus I SLV minus the Castor-120 first stage motor, is carried externally beneath the fuselage of an L-1011 aircraft. While there is a modest improvement in payload capacity from launching from an aircraft at altitude versus a comparable ground launch vehicle, the main advantages are that it allows you far more latitude on selecting a trajectory, reducing or eliminating one stage of the booster, and somewhat reduced complexity in essentially dispensing with a fixed ground launch location, although the last is somewhat negated by the complexity of the air drop carriage and all of the mobile systems associated with that, and so, is really only useful for targets and small payloads. There is no feasible way to deploy a large launch vehicle–anything the size of a Minuteman or larger–from an aircraft, as the weight of the booster would approach or exceed takeoff and landing weight allowables for even the largest cargo aircraft.
EMP is a result of x-rays interacting with the upper atmosphere, creating a broad electromagnetic impulse that affects electronics on the ground. You may be thinking of the creation of radiation belts like that generated by the Starfish Prime high altitude nuclear test. Most modern satellites have protective systems that automatically shut down upon detecting high levels of radiation.
However, this does bring up the point that although we think of nuclear weapons creating massive explosions, this is actually a secondary effect. A nuclear detonation generates a large amount of x-rays and neutrons, and only a small amount of mechanical shock (from the components of the weapon themselves being vaporized or blown apart). In a terrestrial nuclear detonation, the x-rays are absorbed by the atmosphere (which is opaque to x-ray frequencies) which converts them into visible light, thermal pulse (infrared light), and the mechanical shock (pressure wave). In space, on the other hand, the detonation would be unmodified and would just be a large x-ray and neutron source; still damaging, especially at close range, but not necessarily as destructive, especially to a spacecraft designed to copy with the radiation of interplanetary space and the hazards of traveling at what is presumably some significant fraction of c to go from one star to another.
But this is all moot; there is no reason to expect than an alien species, particularly a hostile one, capable of traveling across interstellar distances, is going to be vulnerable to human technology or would expose itself by laying within Low Earth Orbit if it were. Even assuming the species to have just enough of a technological advantage to easily travel between planets, it would be a simple matter to bombard Earth with asteroids too large to effectively deflect or destroy, or inject into orbit clouds of pulverized material to block sunlight and prevent any attempt to launch weapons or satellites into orbit. A species capable of generating and controlled the energies required for interstellar transit will likely have more sophisticated means at their disposal to dismiss any threat from humanity.
There have certainly been studies regarding the feasibility of defending against an alien invasion, both by the US government (and doubtless others) and private think tanks. I strongly doubt there are any firm plans, as the nature and character of the threat are just too vague to be quantifiable.
Stranger