<p>I am starting this thread as an accidental offshoot from the contentious “China is prepared to attack US with nuclear weapons”.</p>
<p>What are your thoughts in regards to …</p>
<p>having watched “War of the Worlds” scared the bejeevah out of me. What if aliens arrive, and they did not come in peace? I am for keeping our nukes for this ultimate armageddon.</p>
<p>We used to have 30000 nukes. Recently its like 7000, and Bush is proposing getting them down to 2000. Is that foolish ?</p>
<p>B.u.m.p…b.u.m.p…b.u.m.p</p>
<p>“Bush is proposing getting them down to 2000. Is that foolish ?”</p>
<p>Sounds like there is a good intention behind this, but its definitely foolish. How the hell is America gonna protect themselves?</p>
<p>Two comments on the War of Worlds scenario:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There are no other habitable planets in our solar system. So If aliens invade it means they have come from other star systems. For any civilization that has developed interstellar flight technology, our primitive nuclear weapons will look like so many rocks and spears.</p></li>
<li><p>H.G. Wells’ (and the movie’s) solution of having the aliens defeated by earth’s bacteria probably wouldn’t happen. Life from another planet would have arisen and evolved completely independently of life on earth. It is very unlikely that earth germs could infect the aliens. The two biological systems would very likely be too incompatible.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>We don’t know if there are advanced civilizations out there. You seem to be saying if as a force arrive, we might as well give up. Hmm I don’t go along w this logic. Just remember a line from “catch me if you can” - 2 mouse fell into a jar of cream, one gave up and drown, the other kicked and kicked to try to get out of there eventually churned the cream into butter and got out." If earth people is like the first kind of mice, then it deserved to be vanquished.</p>
<p>There Are No Aliens, Guys</p>
<p>I hope ur right, Rick.</p>
<p>There is so much dumbness here that it’s hard to know where to begin.<br>
If even 2,000 nukes detonated, the planet Earth would be left in a hell of a condition. Then there’s the question of targeting: one of the reasons for the downwards spiral of warheads between the U.S. and the XSSR is that even allowing for multiple redundancies to account for warheads being lost as casualities to an enemy first strike, we were down to targeting piddly things not much larger than police stations in Outer Yak Station, Siberia.</p>
<p>About 200 warheads knocks China back into the Pre-Industrial Age. The same number knocks America back to Victorian England with distressing side effects. Best hope for everyone is that we don’t get to that point.</p>
<p>As for aliens, if they have interstellar travel, taking care of Earth is child’s play. Given the time/distance scales, they could just put thrusters on some very large asteroids, lob them Inward to Earth, wait for the dust to settle after a few decades, and then land and plunk down their real estate signs.</p>
<p>If they want to take over the civilization per se in working order, it’s a little trickier, but I have little doubt, as a thought experiment, that they could remotely hack our communications, transportation, data, and financial systems to bring the industrialized portion of the world to standstill.</p>
<p>As a tagential point, seen from the Other Side, folks might want to read Vernor Vinge’s A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, one of the best hard SF books of the past 15 years, imo.</p>
<p>Do you believe in aliens, TheDad?</p>
<p>I am not talking about detonating nukes here against the aliens. Its pointless. I am talking about nukes on space stations and can set off missiles that explode into thousands of nuclear bomblets. The kind that would can wipe out an alien invasion fleet. </p>
<p>However, I must admit we are limited by our own imagination. Until now, our vision of bad aliens is what we saw on “independence day”. that there is an incoming armada we can target. If they lob spiked asteroids toward earth, we have to have vehicles that can deflect their projectory. We have done such a thing recently by the way.</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean. </p>
<p>Do I believe there is [another?] intelligent native life in the Solar System? No.</p>
<p>Do I believe we are under obervation by extraterrestrial civilizations?<br>
Exceedingly unlikely but not impossible.</p>
<p>Do I believe there are other civilizations in the galaxy? Many. Many have probably already risen and fallen. Many are doubtlessly in the process of evolving. </p>
<p>The lightspeed constraint on travel/transmission of information is a *****. I’m aware of some of the theories of how to beat this…Dr. Robert L. Forward of the Hughes Research Lab has all sorts of nifty theoretical approaches. </p>
<p>However, travel in normal 3-D space would appear to limit exploration to but a small fingernail sliver of the galaxy as a whole. The odds of two intelligent species being in a mutually accessible “geographic” area in the same slice of time are low. N.B., for time scale, look how far humans have come in the last 8,000 years, a blink on an astronomical time scale. For that matter, it’s been only 125 generations or so since the fall of Homer’s Troy.</p>
<p>On further thought, if I were an alien field marshal that wanted to take over this lovely planet, I’d capture a few sample humans, do quite a genetic work-up, and then tailor a virus that wouldn’t harm my race but would wipe out 80-95 percent of the human race, assuming that I was interested in the leftovers as non-dangerous cultural artifacts.</p>
<p>YW, you’re living in a comic-book reality.</p>
<p>“Space stations with nukes” would be mostly likely taken out before we were even aware of anything out there. You can’t hit what you can’t see and if your communications, detection, and command/control are hosed you can do even less. The problem of doing so, positing a technology that can cover interstellar distances, are trivial. If you send a couple of dozen asteroids miles across with controllable thrusters on an impact course with earth, odds are that you won’t even detect them until it’s too late. A few nukes lobbed from the bottom of the gravity well would be a trivial obstacle to anyone other than a Hollywood scriptwriter.</p>
<p>TDad, what exactly is your defense for the earth. Are you submitting to the fact that the probability of 2 interstellar civilizations in collision in the same time space is so low that is not worth worrying about it?</p>
<p>This discussion has come up among Christian thinkers as well. Why haven’t the aliens contacted us if they exist? One of the explanations given - now this is from a Christian perspective not a scientific perspective - is that because of sin that this planet is under a kind of a “quarantine” in terms of other intelligent beings visiting us. Its an interesting concept an of course totally untestable, but since we had launched this thread I thought I would throw it into the mix.</p>
<p>Md: I often wonder why we seem to be alone. Can you site some biblical references to the points you made ?</p>
<p>This has no biblical reference. This was late 19th century speculation in light of the scientific discoveries of the time. There are too many stars out there. There’s got to be some that have planets capable of supporting life. TheDad’s post points out some of the reasons that scientists pose for why we don’t have any visitors, but it does seem like we might pick up some electromagnetic radiation from an advanced civilization even if they can’t make the journey. Then again electromagnetic radiation intensity does decrease with the square of the distance.</p>
<p>YW, partly a vanishingly low probability of two civs coexisting in time and space with us and partly a vanishingly low probability that any defense Earth could mount would be non-trivial against any array of assets that an alien race capable of interstellar travel could bring to bear. You could bankrupt the Earth to defend against one threat only to have aliens, if they existed and if they were hostile, use a different mode of attack. Cf., the Maginot Line.</p>
<p>Even with adaptations of known technology, I can let you take every defensive asset of earth, array it as you will, and come up with the solution that lets aliens take over Earth, with or without the annnoying human population, as they choose. And that’s without conceding to any alien technology that particularly beyond the reach of us now, say, anything 100 or so years in our future. Let the aliens be more advanced than that and technologically speaking it’s a case of the Europeans meeting the Australian aborigines.</p>
<p>MarDad, there is actually a canon of religious SF written over the past few decades looking at the impact on established religion from extraterrestrial contact, everything from “What direction is Mecca when you’re light years from home?” to alien-human mutual proselytizing to complete alien bewilderment. (I vote for Door #3.)</p>