I have NEVER seen an alien movie that I enjoyed. Fill me in if there is one out there that can even remotely begin to describe how a true alien invasion would take place. It even makes me angry, especially when it is Independence Day. Let me explain what I mean.
Here is how the 'aliens take over Earth' movie should go.
1. The aliens will not show up, they send surrogates (Ever see that movie? I really liked a lot of the ideas in it. Did you realize that our simplistic 21st century military is becoming nearly completely surrogates?
"DARPA's goal when it opened the competition in 2004 was to encourage development of vehicles that could operate autonomously in war zones, meeting a congressional mandate that 30% of the military's vehicle fleet be robots by 2015."
What will it mean to go to war when you just strap into a sun tan bed device and start shooting Taliban? This whole idea definitely deserves it's own post. Anyway, the aliens will have this idea down. If they bother with us at all, they will clear everything off before they even get here with surrogates.
2. It will happen in less than an hour......probably more like a handful of minutes. There will be no emergency broadcasts. Let me give a little perspective. Do you remember in History class when they mentioned the French cavalry running up to the German tanks in the opening scenes of World War II? The cavalry had just kind of stayed around from the War to End All Wars (World War I). Nobody really was thinking another horrendous war was around the corner. So the cavalry just kind of sat around. When the tanks came they did not know what else to do so they sent the cavalry in. A flesh and blood horse against a tank! And when the trench battles began they were in a similar situation.....they literally had gangs of men charge the opposing line KNOWING they would all be mowed down. Just brutal when an enemy gets that advantage before their opponent does. Can you imagine that World War II technology against Civil War era armies? There would be no chance! If Patton had to face off against Lee the war would wrap up in several months....tops. (That is without the atom bomb)
Now just try to picture our military in Afghanistan going against Lee or Grant...now picture against Washington. I do not doubt that 100 or 200 troops from today could decimate Washington's army, even the British army. They would have the logistics, supply chain, materials, intelligence, weaponry, training and strategies that would let 100 men take out 1,000s of the enemy. They would conquer the colonies in weeks. How about our military against men with swords and long bows? They would sit at a castle for a couple of hours, take it out and move on. Plundering the castle would be the only thing that takes any time.
Do you see where I am going? These aliens would be so far ahead of us that their technology would wipe us out with only a thought - literally (more about this another day).
So it makes me puke when the plucky humans come up with some ingenious way to destroy the aliens.
3. They will never come to take us over in the first place. Have you been reading the news lately? We are finding earths left and right. Do you remember those alien movies trying to come up with a reason to take us out? There was 'using humans for food', there was the 'water is the most precious resource in the universe' crap. There is nothing here that anyone with the ability to travel inter/intra - galactic space would bother with!
Carl Sagan's son, Nick, agrees with me
"Humans having any kind of sporting chance against hostile alien invaders armed with superior technology," Sagan said. "Good luck. If they're advanced enough to cross the enormous distances of interstellar space, they're advanced enough to wipe us out without breaking whatever in their physiology passes for a sweat. Why not just lob a few asteroids at us? How are we going to handle that? The conceit of plucky human underdogs triumphing at the end might make for feel-good popcorn movies but in reality there's just no 'there' there."
Here! Here!
The purpose for aliens to bother coming her stopped making sense, so they started coming up with the 'aliens are like us, they are just violent' idea. They crashed here. There was an intergalactic highway excuse too. But we should get over ourselves and admit that there is nothing here worth an alien's time (not that there will be such a thing as time...but that, too, is another post) unless it is beneficent in nature. A cultural exchange.
Keep this in mind too....if this earth has been around something like 5 billion years and you are going along with the Drake Equation that there is likely life out there, then on one of those similar planets, there would be one thing early on that advanced their progression rate just a bit so that they developed sentient life just 200 years earlier than us. 200 out of 5 billion. Realistically it would much more likely be a few thousand years. But even 200 years. Those two hundred years will easily be so technologically potent that the before and after of those two centuries would look nothing alike. (this is Kurzweil's accelerating technology idea....again, another post).
So, to summarize, it will not happen. If it did it would be over in minutes. We would never see an alien, only their surrogates. That is why there are no real alien movies.....it would be more like an alien invasion commercial. Uh, maybe an alien invasion tweet.
Dr. Who?
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