Space Invaders

[Deepwater6]

http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/space-invaders-unlikely-for-now-130214.htm

 

The author in the article suggests we won't get any alien company until we become the galactic equivalent of Iran.

 

I can see the downside of a counter attack that would take so long as to give the opposing civilization so much time to evolve.

 

I do not agree with his assumption that they would not want to have our planet. Just because they have the capability to live in space doesn't mean they wouldn't be interested in our resources.

 

I also think we will see signs of their presence in the form of probes long before the mother-ship shows up. I'd like to believe they would be friendly. I would give them the benefit of the doubt on that until they prove otherwise, but that's just me.

Edited February 16, 2013 by Deepwater6

[Moontanman]

I have my doubts that aliens would have any interest at all in gravity wells for resources. My hypothesis for UFOs is they are aliens, possibly numerous species that already inhabit the outer solar system ort cloud and have only a passing interest in us at all.

 

We could falsify this idea with a infrared telescope that is designed to allow it to focus on small objects. if they have colonies out there they should glow in the infrared. The entire galaxy could already be colonized by many species of aliens if they live in manufactured colonies instead of on planets.

 

Warp Drive would change the ball game in a big way but the abundance of resources in small bodies all over the galaxy would seem to negate the idea of aliens being interested in the Earth.

Edited February 16, 2013 by Moontanman

[CraigD]

Suggestions by Steven Hawking and others that we should not use powerful radio transmitters or other means to send “messages in bottles” to possible extraterrestrial people in the hope that we will make contact and share beneficial information with them, because it might alert people who would want to hurt or kill us all, is IMHO prudent, because the likelihood of successfully contacting friendlies or unfriendlies appears to be small. I think it’s practically impossible to make reliable estimates of the probabilities that, if such contact could be made, the contactees would be friendly, indifferent, or unfriendly, so assessing the risk vs. benefits, where a risk is our complete annihilation, I think we should not intentionally announce or presence to all who can hear.

 

The argument advanced by Janne Korhonena in this paper, which the Discovery News article linked in post #1 is mostly about, strikes me as an example of the 20-21st century equivalent-in-importance of medieval-renaissance arguments about the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. We know so little about the likelihood of any of the scenarios entertained, which are determined primarily not by physics and astrometric principles and data, but by sociological ones applied to possible alien people and societies, that such speculation is essentially a what-if exercise in the realm of fantasy. It can be a lot of fun, but I don’t think it warrants serious study by many people, other than folk intending to use it in works of SF.

 

I think smartly written alien contact stories have both entertainment and educational value, the latter because they can be allegories about how we Earthlings treat and mistreat one another. Rather than, as Korhonena does, applying human history to hypothetical aliens, such SF stories apply fictional aliens to imagined future human history.

[Moontanman]

http://news.discovery.com/space/alien-life-exoplanets/space-invaders-unlikely-for-now-130214.htm

 

The author in the article suggests we won't get any alien company until we become the galactic equivalent of Iran.

 

I can see the downside of a counter attack that would take so long as to give the opposing civilization so much time to evolve.

 

I do not agree with his assumption that they would not want to have our planet. Just because they have the capability to live in space doesn't mean they wouldn't be interested in our resources.

 

I also think we will see signs of their presence in the form of probes long before the mother-ship shows up. I'd like to believe they would be friendly. I would give them the benefit of the doubt on that until they prove otherwise, but that's just me.

 

 

This is a good post deepwater6... unfortunately it reminds me of two of my fav science fiction films/TV shows. Spaced Invaders and Resistance is futile but as i said in my last post resources in space are so much easier to get than getting them from a gravity well i can't figure out anything we could have they couldn't get much easier in space... well unless they want to eat us... :unsure:

[Deepwater6]

I agree Moontanman, they can get what they need from other resources in space. A "Battle Los Angeles" scenario is very unlikely. If they have the capability to travel here from their home planet, they surely would have developed weapons that could obliterate a city.

 

They would be advanced enough to gather everthing they need from a planet while in space, because it would be rare that they would find a similar atmosphere to what they evolved in.

 

I guess the question is, as a species advances and evolves well beyond where we are do they become more or less congenial?

[Moontanman]

I agree Moontanman, they can get what they need from other resources in space. A "Battle Los Angeles" scenario is very unlikely. If they have the capability to travel here from their home planet, they surely would have developed weapons that could obliterate a city.

 

I agree as well but a scorched earth/city policy would destroy the value of the area being conquered and render it useless for the conquered as well as the conqueror. Radioactivity released by city busting weapons would be problematical to the invaders as well.

 

But a bigger issue with Battle for Los Angeles was the similarity to our own technology, the aliens weren't very far advanced over us yet they traveled from another star to take us over... a simple bio weapons would be far more effective, could be targeted to effect only humans and leave the planet untouched and ready for colonization...

 

A great series of science fiction books about an alien invasion, one of those alternate time line books I like so well, was based on Aliens invading during WW2 and how that would have played out...

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldwar

 

There is at least one more series that continues the story, maybe 8-10 novels in all, a great cold snowy weekend read...

 

They would be advanced enough to gather everything they need from a planet while in space, because it would be rare that they would find a similar atmosphere to what they evolved in.

 

I agree, it wouldn't take much of a difference in atmosphere to exclude us from colonizing a planet, a few percentage points in CO2 would be a deal breaker... imagine a planet twice as big as the Earth 4 times as massive, twice the gravity but due to the size of the planet compared to the mass an enormous atmosphere, maybe 10 bar 150 psi 1% CH4 1% NH3 5% CO2 20% Ar 10% O2 53% N2 such minor changes would be deadly to a human, the high pressure would be very difficult to over come with technology, requiring suits like deep sea diver wear. but a large low mass planet will have a deep atmosphere due to gravity falling off slower, this effect is partially why Saturn's moon Titan has such a high pressure atmosphere and such low gravity, temperature is a large factor as well for Titan but a really large planet wouldn't have to be cold to support this effect. you would expect lots of volcanic activity and a strong magnetic field.

 

i think it can be asserted that such a planet is more conductive to life than our earth is... OT sorry deepwater6

 

I guess the question is, as a species advances and evolves well beyond where we are do they become more or less congenial?

 

This is another idea that assumes quite a bit, I read an article about it a few months ago, i can't remember where now but if I find I'll give a link but what it said was basically that the idea that aliens would be willing or even able to socialize with us is debatable, they gave the example of the Star trek universe where wide spread species all seem to come to the same level of sophistication at the same time, the assertion was that this is highly improbable even allowing for FTL travel...

 

if there are widely differing species of aliens and they are commonly everywhere and at least a few are not god like compared to us then i can see the possibility of a few aliens being able and willing to socialize with us in some way the problem is that all we have is one data point, hard to draw a curve from that one point...

[Deepwater6]

I have asked this question before and never got a concise answer. Although very unlikely how would a "District 9" scenario over the US be handled? Who would make first contact, the military? the CIA? the NSA? Or if SETI gets a signal as in the movie "Contact" What would be the government protocol?

 

Would they use instructions to build a communication device? Would they build a transport?

 

To me there are just as many questions about how we would react to first contact as there are about the how the aliens will conduct themselves. :huh:

Edited February 24, 2013 by Deepwater6

[Moontanman]

I have asked this question before and never got a concise answer. Although very unlikely how would a "District 9" scenario over the US be handled? Who would make first contact, the military? the CIA? the NSA? Or if SETI gets a signal as in the movie "Contact" What would be the government protocol?

 

Would they use instructions to build a communication device? Would they build a transport?

 

To me there are just as many questions about how we would react to first contact as there are about the how the aliens will conduct themselves. :huh:

 

 

i think only the ones like the Ferengi will likely contact us.. then they will take us to the cleaners and leave us poor and wondering what happened...

[LaurieAG]

Too late Moontanman LOL.

[Deepwater6]

Ahhh yes, politcal parties and organized religion from space, of course, it all makes sense to me now. :angry:

Edited February 24, 2013 by Deepwater6

[CraigD]

I have my doubts that aliens would have any interest at all in gravity wells for resources. My hypothesis for UFOs is they are aliens, possibly numerous species that already inhabit the outer solar system ort cloud and have only a passing interest in us at all.

I’ve read some interesting fiction and non-fiction speculation along these lines, for which I give fiction originators credit to Greg Benford’s 1979 short story Dark Sanctuary, and personally like the scenario a lot. It reminds me of Russell's teapot, except it has nothing to do with theology, our unnoticed microgravity-loving solar system co-tenants would be easier to spot than a teapot, and there’re sensible explanations of how they could have gotten there.

 

However, such scenarios, makes a critical assumption: that these neighbors would be satisfied with the resources available from the solar system’s small bodies. If you need a lot – say more than 10²³ kg – of iron, collecting it from small bodies, which have a total mass on the order of 10% of the Earth – isn’t an option. The inner planets - Mercury (2.8% of their total mass), Venus (41.2%), Earth (50.6%), and Mars (5.4%) – are.

 

Assuming you’re patient, and good at gigantic-scale space engineering of the accelerating large bodies kind, but not very good at making super-strong materials and the like, a solution to the stuff-you-want-is-at-the-bottom-of-a-deep-gassy-gravity-well-and-hard-packed problem is to pulverize the planet. We discussed the specifics of how to do something like this 8 years ago in How to destroy the Earth.

 

So I don’t think it’s not beyond reason that a large-scale space-engineering civilization might demolish the Earth for its resources. The scenario I sketch above avoids Korhonena’s and others “do they like/hate/feel threatened by us” considerations – we’re just collateral damage. If they have life-revering moral codes like some of ours, they might evacuate a fraction or even most of us to safety before destroying our homeworld, or perhaps even declare leave Earth intact, but if their material-acquiring goals take precedence, they might do none of these, or evacuate only a tiny sample of Earth life.

 

On a bright note, since we’re getting increasingly good at detecting and imaging extrasolar planets, there’s a good chance we’d see this sort of thing coming, as it was done to systems approaching our own.

[Moontanman]

I think they would build things with carbon fibers and other light weight elements, their needs for heavy metals like iron and nickle would be limited...

[Moontanman]

Ahhh yes, politcal parties and organized religion from space, of course, it all makes sense to me now. :angry:

 

 

You have to give the idea some credence, I can see us sending out missionaries, in fact we did it to our own people, forced our political and religious views on primitives... Aliens might do the same... :(

[CraigD]

I think they would build things with carbon fibers and other light weight elements, their needs for heavy metals like iron and nickle would be limited...

It’s hard to imagine precisely what mix of materials an advanced space-engineering entity (about as generic a term I can pull up – though I’ve used them, more usual nouns like “civilization”, “culture”, or “people” presume perhaps too much) would want, but regardless, most of it is not to be found in low-gravity bodies, but in the various big clumps comprising the planets and the biggest clump of all, the Sun. Carbon, for example, is about as common as a fraction of the mass of the Earth as throughout the solar system, small and large bodies alike.

 

Bottom line, the inner planets have about the bulk chemical compositions of the systems small bodies. What makes asteroid mining and similar stuff-getting approaches attractive to our present – or at least, I hope, are near-future – technology is that the small bodies haven’t mass-segregated the valuable heavy elements – gold, platinum, etc. into a difficult (practically impossible for us now)-to-access core. If you need a lot of some chemically simple material, practically any one, just a few of the big bodies have more of it, by a factor of more than 100, than all of the little ones.

 

Folk (I just don’t find “entity” a comfortable term for writing, even if ones like “folk” presume a lot) who can mine and manufacture on planet-breaking scales wouldn’t be concerned with Earths put-the-good-stuff-in-the-core structure, as they could reduce it all to small bodies by pulverizing the whole planet. The inner planets are poor in light elements like hydrogen and helium, but I imagine advanced space-engineers wouldn’t find skimming these from the giant planets or the Sun too difficult. Light elements are even more rare in small bodies.

 

So far, we’ve just been considering the solar systems mater resources. Assuming they don’t have some sort of fundamental physics energy-getting trickery, advanced space traveling/building folk would likely be as or more hungry for energy, which in our or any other system is to be had mostly in the Sun(s) radiation, so a reasonable scenario for what such folk would do upon arrival in a new system is build some engineering-plausible Dyson shell variant to convert as much of that into useful work they can, a basic approach of “anything that isn’t the star, make into stuff spread to receive its radiation, with a small fraction of the mass used to build stuff to use all that energy. I imagine a good use of it would be to store it in the highest possible energy-density form, which is neutrally charged antimatter, which could then be used for portable needs, such as spacecraft.

 

As with the planet-breaking space miner scenario in my last post, we should be able to see this coming at a fair distance, as the brightness and spectrum of a star that’s getting enclosed in nearly any variant of a Dyson shell. Fermilab’s been running a pretty serious infrared telescope survey for signs of these since 2005 – see this section of the Dyson shell article.

 

I’d say the future of Earth would be in as much or more broken-up-for-its-raw-mass trouble under the “colonial power makes everything that isn’t the Sun into a Dyson shell” scenario as under the previous one I mentioned, and us be about as helpless to stop it. The smart move, if we saw it coming, might be to learn as much about the approaching visitors society and laws (if we’re lucky, and they have anything like this we could recognize) and set ourselves up as the owners and sellers of our system, grabbing as large a share of the products of its re-configuring as we can. “The contract is mightier than the sword” can be a civilization-saving principle, especially if you don’t have a comparatively mighty sword.

 

You have to give the idea some credence, I can see us sending out missionaries, in fact we did it to our own people, forced our political and religious views on primitives... Aliens might do the same... :(

If you gotta join their church to have legal rights, it might be the wisest choice. Though the assumption that aliens would have something we’d recognize as religion again requires we presume perhaps too much. The SF tradition is full of alien contract stories where the aliens either have never seen anything like our religions, or remember them only as long-obsolete traditions from their ancient history.

 

As for legal and political views, I can think of no precedent in our history where the those of the invading aliens didn’t effectively replace those of the natives. IMHO, in the case of space invaders, this would likely be a good thing, as legal and political systems that allow folk to travel among the stars seems to me a better one than once that doesn’t, as our present day ones may prove. Given the choice of our own traditional laws and politics, or advances technology including space travel, I know which I’d choose – assuming, optimistically, that we’d get that choice.

[Moontanman]

Lots of carbon in the outer solar system, methane ices, Titan has more hydrocarbons than the earth by orders of magnitude and the gravity is low enough to actually pump it from the surface by pipe line... methane ices are quite common in the outer solar system. Asteroids have lots of metals and processing them in orbit is much easier than dragging mega tons of material out of an earth sized gravity well.

 

Disrupting an earth sized planet is problematical at best and would disperse the planet over a huge area and make it even harder to mine..

 

Ooo Ooo Oooo there is the report from Bob Lazar that aliens bred humans from lesser hominids to mine gold for them...

Edited February 26, 2013 by Moontanman

[CraigD]

Lots of carbon in the outer solar system, methane ices, Titan has more hydrocarbons than the earth by orders of magnitude and the gravity is low enough to actually pump it from the surface by pipe line... methane ices are quite common in the outer solar system. Asteroids have lots of metals and processing them in orbit is much easier than dragging mega tons of material out of an earth sized gravity well.

Sure, there’s “lots”, by historic Earth engineering standards, of all the elements in the small solar bodies,

 

However, there’s about 20 times as much in the inner planets. They’re concentrated in a much, much smaller volume, so can be mined (“harvested” or “collected” might be a better term) in much less time and with much less distance traveled.

 

Disrupting an earth sized planet is problematical at best and would disperse the planet over a huge area and make it even harder to mine..

Breaking Earth would not in every case disperse it over an impractically large volume.

 

Consider the low energy case, which resembles the giant impact hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, in which about from about 2% to 10% of the Earth’s mass was ejected into a disk of small bodies which lasted up to 100 years before forming the Moon (about .012 Earth masses) and rejoining the Earth.

 

Next, consider a higher energy case, in which most of Earth’s mass is accelerated to greater than Earth escape speed (about 11000 m/s) but less than Sol escape speed (about 42000 m/s). In this case, the resulting small bodies would occupy a belt close to Earth’s usual orbit, which would last for many thousands of years, until, as planets do, “clearing its orbit” again, a process that takes millions of years.

 

Finally, there is the highest energy case, in which most of Earth’s mass is accelerated to greater than Sol escape velocity. This case truly obliterates the Earth, resulting it leaving the solar system within a few 10s or 100s or years, expanding into a volume greater than all of the naturally occurring small bodies.

 

Except for the last case, the result is essentially a short-lived (by astronomical standards) planet accretion disk or similar to the asteroid belt, but on the order of 100 times denser. It could be mined the same way one would mine the asteroid belt, but with much (100s of times) greater efficiency, and yielding about 20 times as much total material.

 

The Kuiper belt is about 2 times as massive as the asteroid belt, but occupies over 400 times its volume.

 

As I’ve been stressing since my first post in this thread, what bodies you’d harvest depend on how much matter you need. If you only need on the order of 10²³ kg – a few percent of an Earth mass, harvesting asteroid and KBOs is feasible. If you need 10 times more, you’ve got to break some of the dwarf planets or large moone. If you need 10 times more, you need to break some inner planet. If you need 100 times more, you need to break some giant planets. If you need 100 times more, you’ve got to harvest from the Sun itself.

 

Anything but the first case would be practically impossible not to notice from Earth, and unless special, advance technology care is taken, bad for it and any of us are living on it.

 

So far, we’ve been assuming that any sort of engineering like this would be done by aliens – which we must, to keep with the threads “space invaders” topic. However, it might be done by the only beings we know are, in principle, capable of it – us. This is something of a SF genre staple – good example include Charles Stross’s 2005 novel Accelerando (one of my favorite stories) and Sean Williams and Shane Dix’s softer SF 2002 novel Echoes of Earth.