So They Showed Up In Orbit - What Do We Do Now?

what would happen.

assuming the visitors did nothing to preempt us

1. nasa would verify
2. the amateur astronomer would suddenly be arrested and locked up (for his own safety)
3. a total media lockdown would ensue
4. every icbm on earth would quietly be reassigned to target said ship
5. then there would be a fight about which military power would represent earth
6. the winner would attempt contact
7. the visitors would ignore them and whatever they darn well please

a reply to: eriktheawful

Probably the single best book I've read on this subject (and simultaneously the worst) is a book called Von Neuman's War...

Interestingly, it is literally all 3 scenarios simultaneously to boot!

The gist of the story is that what are essentially self replicating Von Neumann probes which may have been purposefully designed as an automated "pest control/neighborhood watch from hell" function or may have malfunctioned at some point, but when they find us they essentially leapfrog in from the oort cloud building an armada as they go.

The probes are not only self replicating, they are also a "reactionless drive powered" highly adaptable group intelligence which uses a variation on it's reactionless drive technology as a force field and matter assembler/disassembler.

They're basically extremely well adapted to scavenging energy from KE to electricity and etc and preferentially seek out the largest concentrations of the types of energies and molecules easiest to use for their own needs. (Aka they luv eating power plants fighter jets anything digital and etc etc... They don't eat or even really pay attention to biological life at all, but if they strip mine the entire technological and industrial infrastructure of the planet humanity is not going to survive...)

That's actually what i love most about the novel!

Humanity is locked in a life n death cage match with high tech completely unthinking automated equipment that literally only showed up because all the signals coming from Earth told them that it would have lots of complex molecules and easily harvested high grade energy...

In the end a highly paranoid, but extremely smart fringe character and his eastern European mail order bride pretty much save the human race single handedly after said fringer tries to tell NASA darpa ART BELL & etc what's coming and gets ignored...

So he essentially spends the year or two it took from when he saw the gas giants suddenly changing and figured out what was happening doing massive amounts of bank fraud and other cybercrime to buy himself a wife, a totally offgrid shutdown mine and several million dollars worth of tools, instruments, generators and other supplies to build his stealthy and unable to be detected underground labbunker.

Him and his mail order bride manage to capture one single damaged probe w/o a working uplink to his buddies which they use as both a generator (literally harnessed it to a shaft so as it kept trying to fly away it spun the generator LOL) and as a test subject.

Over several months he painstakingly uses his testing equipment etc to learn more about it, how it works, and how to run an exploit that lets them tske over control of probes within the transmission radius of his control transmitter....


Why do i love this book?

1. Age of the geek baby.... Age of the geek!
2. ART BELL FTW
3. Seriously... If aliens ever do show up just pray enough of us paranoid loose cannon mad scientist types manage to get hidden and set up with what we'll need to figure out how to kill them

Because if not, the rest of y'all are borked!


P.S: don't bother responding with but kardashev says.... Kardashev's a commie dickhead with an agenda not a scientist!

If they bother coming all the way into the inner solar system without calling to ask if we feel like having company over first, THEY'RE HOSTILE

Steven Hawking and pretty much every other truly intelligent individual who has looked at this agree with me BTW

a reply to: jimmyx

how stupid would an alien race be, to openly attack us?...even if they were far superior, why waste time?

What you described is how beings of somewhat equal status would plot against each other. I imagine they'd be so much more advanced than us that they wouldn't need strategies like that because we'd simply be like bugs or pests to them.

Put it like this: human technology is far more advanced than anything ants can create. But when we're about to develop new land, we don't go through a sophisticated strategy like what you described to rid the soil of ants. We simply survey the land, start building, and eradicate any pests along the way. We don't ask to be taken to the ants' leader; we don't negotiate w/their workers; and we don't care which colony's been there the longest or its heritage, etc. They're simply viewed as an inferior lifeform whose wants & needs don't matter. If any ants (or other insects like hornets or mosquitoes) try to "defend" their land by attacking us, they simply get killed along the way.

If anything, the only real planning & strategies used would be between themselves (the ET's), and that's if their civilizations had the equivalent of housing codes, environmental protection policies, endangered species policies, etc. If they didn't and their tech was immeasurably better than ours, I think they'd just see us as primitive nuisances.

a reply to: eriktheawful
Im going with scenario 3. Its a colony ship, theres a few million of them. But we are Capitalists right, and this planet is pretty big. Lets allow them to hang out here with us as long as they share some technology. They can join the Prawns in South Africa
Otherwise, we will direct dozens of nukes towards their ship and eliminate their future.
a reply to: enlightenedservant
Lol, they were simply trying to pave an intergalactic super highway. They posted a notice weeks in advance!

a reply to: Konduit
I really liked that show. When does Season 2 drop?

They are already 6000 years integrated, for them the state borders are only pens for livestock. They collect placentas with the blood of infants, rare earth metals and water, and also steal millions of children on the planet every year

originally posted by: mangust69
They are already 6000 years integrated, for them the state borders are only pens for livestock. They collect placentas with the blood of infants, rare earth metals and water, and also steal millions of children on the planet every year

You re discussing a lot of groups...different ones have different agendas.

a reply to: eriktheawful

Excellent thread! The sort of stuff I came to ATS for.

It seems most logical to me that probes would be the first thing we would experience from an extraterrestrial species. You wouldn't want to just pull-up in to someone's neighborhood without knowing a bit about the neighborhood.

That assumes we have the ability to recognize their probes. We may have already been "scouted" by off-world beings through their unmanned probes without noticing.

If they just happen to show up one day to our surprise, there is really not much we can do other than be diplomatic and hope they are peaceful.

If they can travel between stars in order to show up at our doorstep, they are thousands to millions years more advanced and did not show up to say hi if they were not able to defend themselves.

Anyway, again...great thread.

a reply to: eriktheawful

If they are our new overlords, I just hope they thoroughly & utterly defeat our current overlords....starting with Congress.

a reply to: one4all

They have something in common from the shamans of the cannibal tribes to head of the federal reserve and their interests are the most diverse but always predatory unto resources and aborigines

And all of this supposes that we are worth their time to interact with in the first place.

Do we bother asking the ants' permission before we do as we please with a bit of ground they happen to have a colony built in?



You know only for us, it might be like this:

a reply to: eriktheawfulwell if its a pte we either use it to try to establish communication with its creators and or if its really old we try to reverse its tech and see what we can learn from it . if its a colony ship if we can accommodate them we try but if it turns out they really an invasion force we hit them with everything we can and pay it works

a reply to: worldstarcountry

a reply to: enlightenedservant Lol, they were simply trying to pave an intergalactic super highway. They posted a notice weeks in advance!

Yeah, that's more like how I see it. If they're really advanced enough to travel between the galaxy or between galaxies, then we're just another primitive lifeform to them. It's our pride & arrogance that leads us to think we'd be on a somewhat level playing field with them.

Ironically, I talk to insects and other animals when I'm doing yardwork. The same with the plants we grow. I do it mainly out of respect for other lifeforms and because I'm a bit nuts, but that's another topic altogether.

a reply to: enlightenedservant

The gardener is a good metaphor, one that loves his garden.
Why so cynical about aliens? You can do it, they can do it.
Like we replaced horses with motors but we are doing the job of a wood horse now, a lumberjack pony or what you call it.
Tools, it's very likely what would make them advanced are tools. You can't do much with your bare hands. But as the genie asked us what our one wish shall be, we said: being capable to fulfill my own wishes.
We are not that bad. Riled up, jaded, scared, protective of someone, yes, but bad people are rare.
If we can do it, take the birds nest and move it two branches before we cut its original spot, aliens could too.

a reply to: Peeple

I don't understand why you think I'm cynical about them? I firmly expect there to be vast varieties of life throughout the Universe. This includes both simpler & more complex lifeforms than humans. Even on Earth, there are lifeforms which are much smaller than us, much larger than us, much faster, much slower, have better eyesight, can fly, can breathe water, have far more limbs than us, etc. So I start by imagining if one of those creatures had intelligence at our level or superior to it.

Next, I imagine that for any civilization to reach the point of casual interstellar or intergalactic travel, their technology would have to be lightyears beyond our own (such a lame pun...). That makes our tech literally obsolete compared to theirs. Think about the difference between waging war with an atlatl and an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Then, I looked at human behavior towards: 1) other humans with inferior technology, and 2) other species that we can't communicate with. This gave me the impression that these high tech ETs would see us the same way we see more "primitive" civilizations/countries or the same way we see mere animals.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be thrilled if these mega high tech ET's were a bunch of socialist treehuggers who loved all forms of life, hated war, and wanted to share their technology & ideas with our less developed civilizations. But what if they share the same flaws we do, such as greed, warmongering, jealousy, pettiness, etc? What if the manned "probe" that visited Earth was actually just a contractor that was fulfilling a mineral-mining contract with their version of a Monsanto or Halliburton? Would we still have faith in their intentions?

a reply to: eriktheawful

It's such juicy food for thought. You know I have to say that for some reason upon reading your OP, not really checking out who the author was or the forum, thought that it was most probably in Short Stories forum, lol! It was almost a little disappointing to discover it was not going to be some kind of ongoing script.

Have been pretty busy since posting last so need to read the thread to see what others have added. I love this particular subject and actually had an in-depth conversation with my son tonight driving the 45 miles back from the city. What we think is that this whole planet is an experiment, that sometimes gazing up at the full moon one can get the feeling we are all under some microscope in an advanced species classroom...

a reply to: enlightenedservant

Oh me too! And a big hello from Antar!!!

a reply to: enlightenedservant

The key is not intelligence it's thumbs, the ability to build and use tools. We are obviously not that intelligent in average, or the things you say would not be reality.

a reply to: Peeple

True. That and the ability to record our findings. Otherwise, we'd just have to keep reinventing the proverbial wheel. In my head, the next version/evolution of humans will do away with our greed self destructive impulses. Just imagine how quickly we would advance if we didn't intentionally poison or harm ourselves, oppress each other, or keep our new developments secret from each other. Every new development would instantly become available to the rest of that species.

In my mind, that's the kind of creature that should be worthy of interstellar or intergalactic travel. It would be depressing if they were selfish and belligerent like we are. But in a situation like the OP, I'd have to assume they were like us until I saw that they weren't.

originally posted by: antar
a reply to: enlightenedservant

Oh me too! And a big hello from Antar!!!

And a big hello to you.

Seriously?......the first thing we should do is drop to our freaking knees and profusely apologise to every abductee ever taken just before we offer them MASSIVE monetary compensation from our derelict conspiratorial governments.A known terrorist with a verified kill to his credit recently recieved millions from the Canadian government because they abbrogted his charter rights....well....knowingly allowing your citizens to be abducted by rouge groups and refusing to offer them remedial assistance is much much worse.

a reply to: eriktheawful
Sorry, they are already here: UFO or Military?