Four Reasons Aliens Won't Invade Earth
Okay so we’ll assume that you are not Amish or living in a cabin in Montana composing anti-technology manifestos and are aware that within the genre of media entertainment known as “Sci-Fi” (not to be confused with the TV channel Syfy, which, near as I can tell, is not entertainment and is barely media) there have been a lot of plot lines that center around alien civilizations coming down and invading our asses (meaning Earth, not anyone’s actual sphincter). There is the usual interplay of skeptical scientists/absentee dads/cable network technicians who detect, and or try to warn people, who of course do not listen (that would be bad for plot padding) about the impending invasion. Then when the invasion happens, and anything vaguely weapon like is tried to repel them, the aliens have machines that are essentially invincible (sort of like Charlie Sheen’s career only with fewer STD’s) via technology that borders on “magic”. Whether this is the same “magic” that keeps the Kardashian sisters relevant in the face of all logic is open to debate.
Now the possibility of the threat of extraterrestrial invasion is not something just relegated to bad B-movies and crappy late night filler you turn your TV to when the softcore on Cinemax gets boring and you simply do not want to see yet another penis enlargement infomercial. You see, none other than Stephen Hawking has brought this issue up and I’m pretty sure he has way more credibility on this matter than all of Hollywood put together (and fewer of those two week marriages and pesky coke habits).
However, would aliens even want to do this? I propose they would not for the following four reasons.
#4 Our Resources Are not Worth It
One of the most common reasons trotted out for why ET has decided to do a blitzkrieg of Earth is that they need our precious resources. Sometimes its minerals, sometimes it is us (which I’ll get to in the next bit), sometimes it’s water and sometimes it’s gold. Because aliens from planets that can explode at any moment should some idiot bring a Zippo lighter back from Earth as a souvenir really like gold.
Here’s the thing, that stuff is like everywhere!
Want Iron? Mars is literally covered in it! Need Magnesium? There is probably loads of it on the dwarf planet Eris. Water? Comets dude. But, here’s the kicker, aliens wouldn’t even need to come to our solar system for that stuff. Iron is like the sixth most common element in the whole freaking universe. Magnesium is ninth and there are many places these aliens could mine this stuff.
Ever hear of something called Gliese 581 d? It’s an exoplanet that’s twenty light years away. Know what Gliese 581 d has? Loads of stuff aliens might want. Know what Gliese 581 d doesn’t have? Humans! Nasty trigger-happy humans with guns and tanks that would put up all this annoying resistance to any alien incursions and just make mining things take forever. Now, sure you might be saying the aliens would surely defeat us with their superior weaponry and lack of French allies, but why would they want to go through that trouble? Building war machines takes resources themselves. Training armies is not going to be cheap or easy. So why expend that effort to take down humans on Earth when you could just get the stuff on Gliese 581 d without the need for war? Unless the same geniuses that ran Lehman Brothers into the ground also run the aliens (Take on $600 billion in dubious bad mortgage debt? Sure!) this is just a no brainer.
#3 We’d Suck As Slaves
Ahh, you say, they want to enslave us. Okay, why? Once again, you have to make a cost/benefit analysis for this. In what way would humans be valuable enough to justify building a huge military that then needs transportation light years across the galaxy?
Are you going to use humans as beasts of burden? I would think that would be unwise. There are so many other beasts with more strength and stamina than us plus there would be a marked decrease in the chance of the beasts using their sentient intelligence to plot an uprising.
Use humans for manual labor? Why? You have freaking robots!
Are you going to farm them as food? This would just be inefficient. Humans require an enormous amount of food energy from numerous nutritional sources just to stay alive. Aliens would surely have better staple food sources that would give you much more bang for your buck. In addition, there would be a marked decrease in the chance of the other food using its sentient intelligence to plot an uprising.
Are the aliens performing medical experiments on humans? Well this is supposedly already happening but, again, you would have to ask: what medical experiments are worth the cost? Unless the aliens have some sort of weird virus that can only be properly studied in the bowels of drunken rednecks in Alabama this just seems like a waste of resources that would probably yield little useful scientific data for the aliens.
#2 H.G. Wells Was On To Something
The ending of the classic novel The War of the Worlds is often wrongly cited as a deus ex machina. In reality, H.G. Wells was onto something. When you think about it viruses could be a huge threat to aliens provided they have a similar basic inheritability structure like our own DNA. However, even if they do not there would be all sorts of problems. Now Earth, for us, is great. That is because we evolved on the planet and Natural Selection took biological life down a path that was suited to the basic conditions. There was plenty of sunlight, hydrogen and sulfide so early photosynthesis was very suitable to arise. Later when water and carbon dioxide became plentiful photosynthesis changed and started producing oxygen. That in turn led to the emergence of aerobic life.
That sequence of evolution all happened on Earth because of the conditions present. Who knows what will happen on alien worlds? We, so far, know of only one abiogenesis event. How others might happen can be speculated as ranging from “who knows” to “probably really *@#%^&! weird!” As such what alien life will be like can only be speculated about at best and at worst it will be so strange that we may not even recognize it as life at all if we came across it. As such the odds that Earth would be habitable for aliens is about the same as me going home tonight and finding Megan Fox cooking pancakes in an Easter Bunny Suit for some reason. Therefore, in order to colonize Earth it would have to transform in radical ways to suit the needs of the alien race….and of course that all comes after they defeat us with their “magic” weapons.
Really, if they can travel light years, it would probably just be easier for them to put more effort into scouting in order to find planets that are more suitable to colonize.
#1 It’d Be Easier To Just Nuke Us From Orbit
(it’s the only way to be sure)
However, remember how I touched on the possibility that we might not even recognize alien life if we came across it? Well that works both ways. Alien life might come down and not even see us as like life. They may just see us as some weird mobile carbon blobs that are in the way. If that is the case then they might want to get rid of us.
It is also possible that they have been worshiping The Little Rascal’s broadcasts as Gods and have come to unleash unimaginable wrath for our unceremonious and blasphemous discontinuation of that program. Again, if that is the case, they might just want to get rid of us.
Either way an invasion would just be stupid. They already have interstellar capabilities so why land on the planet and do it the hard way? Are they hardcore Heinlein fans that just have boners for infantry? Probably not as I imagine aliens being more into Niven. Besides, as I alluded to earlier, they may not even have biology suitable to infantry style battle. If they are just brain blobs or containerized thought electrons they would be just so much more suited to unleash a huge barrage of some ungodly weapon that not even Michael Bay can conceive of….yet.
Now, granted that would be bad (well, it would also be the end of Here Comes Honey BooBoo….which is good). And it would be the end of us, but it would not be an invasion. It would just be us going about our normal things; going to work, streaming music, complaining about all the dubstep in the streamed music, playing video games when all of sudden…..Zap! We are gone, the Zlyklans take over, and we never even perceived it let alone had time to worry about it.
Heck, maybe that all happened in 1994 and today we are all just brains in jars being screwed with by Zlyklan teenagers for giggles. If so I would beg them to have some mercy and let me live in a mansion somewhere with my girlfriend and someone famous as my neighbor.
Okay so we’ll assume that you are not Amish or living in a cabin in Montana composing anti-technology manifestos and are aware that within the genre of media entertainment known as “Sci-Fi” (not to be confused with the TV channel Syfy, which, near as I can tell, is not entertainment and is barely media) there have been a lot of plot lines that center around alien civilizations coming down and invading our asses (meaning Earth, not anyone’s actual sphincter). There is the usual interplay of skeptical scientists/absentee dads/cable network technicians who detect, and or try to warn people, who of course do not listen (that would be bad for plot padding) about the impending invasion. Then when the invasion happens, and anything vaguely weapon like is tried to repel them, the aliens have machines that are essentially invincible (sort of like Charlie Sheen’s career only with fewer STD’s) via technology that borders on “magic”. Whether this is the same “magic” that keeps the Kardashian sisters relevant in the face of all logic is open to debate.
Now the possibility of the threat of extraterrestrial invasion is not something just relegated to bad B-movies and crappy late night filler you turn your TV to when the softcore on Cinemax gets boring and you simply do not want to see yet another penis enlargement infomercial. You see, none other than Stephen Hawking has brought this issue up and I’m pretty sure he has way more credibility on this matter than all of Hollywood put together (and fewer of those two week marriages and pesky coke habits).
However, would aliens even want to do this? I propose they would not for the following four reasons.
#4 Our Resources Are not Worth It
One of the most common reasons trotted out for why ET has decided to do a blitzkrieg of Earth is that they need our precious resources. Sometimes its minerals, sometimes it is us (which I’ll get to in the next bit), sometimes it’s water and sometimes it’s gold. Because aliens from planets that can explode at any moment should some idiot bring a Zippo lighter back from Earth as a souvenir really like gold.
Here’s the thing, that stuff is like everywhere!
Want Iron? Mars is literally covered in it! Need Magnesium? There is probably loads of it on the dwarf planet Eris. Water? Comets dude. But, here’s the kicker, aliens wouldn’t even need to come to our solar system for that stuff. Iron is like the sixth most common element in the whole freaking universe. Magnesium is ninth and there are many places these aliens could mine this stuff.
Ever hear of something called Gliese 581 d? It’s an exoplanet that’s twenty light years away. Know what Gliese 581 d has? Loads of stuff aliens might want. Know what Gliese 581 d doesn’t have? Humans! Nasty trigger-happy humans with guns and tanks that would put up all this annoying resistance to any alien incursions and just make mining things take forever. Now, sure you might be saying the aliens would surely defeat us with their superior weaponry and lack of French allies, but why would they want to go through that trouble? Building war machines takes resources themselves. Training armies is not going to be cheap or easy. So why expend that effort to take down humans on Earth when you could just get the stuff on Gliese 581 d without the need for war? Unless the same geniuses that ran Lehman Brothers into the ground also run the aliens (Take on $600 billion in dubious bad mortgage debt? Sure!) this is just a no brainer.
#3 We’d Suck As Slaves
Ahh, you say, they want to enslave us. Okay, why? Once again, you have to make a cost/benefit analysis for this. In what way would humans be valuable enough to justify building a huge military that then needs transportation light years across the galaxy?
Are you going to use humans as beasts of burden? I would think that would be unwise. There are so many other beasts with more strength and stamina than us plus there would be a marked decrease in the chance of the beasts using their sentient intelligence to plot an uprising.
Use humans for manual labor? Why? You have freaking robots!
Are you going to farm them as food? This would just be inefficient. Humans require an enormous amount of food energy from numerous nutritional sources just to stay alive. Aliens would surely have better staple food sources that would give you much more bang for your buck. In addition, there would be a marked decrease in the chance of the other food using its sentient intelligence to plot an uprising.
Are the aliens performing medical experiments on humans? Well this is supposedly already happening but, again, you would have to ask: what medical experiments are worth the cost? Unless the aliens have some sort of weird virus that can only be properly studied in the bowels of drunken rednecks in Alabama this just seems like a waste of resources that would probably yield little useful scientific data for the aliens.
Actually, we just stopped to use your facilities. I've held it in since Proxima Centauri
and this totally not earth-male conceived space suit is riding up my ass.
#2 H.G. Wells Was On To Something
The ending of the classic novel The War of the Worlds is often wrongly cited as a deus ex machina. In reality, H.G. Wells was onto something. When you think about it viruses could be a huge threat to aliens provided they have a similar basic inheritability structure like our own DNA. However, even if they do not there would be all sorts of problems. Now Earth, for us, is great. That is because we evolved on the planet and Natural Selection took biological life down a path that was suited to the basic conditions. There was plenty of sunlight, hydrogen and sulfide so early photosynthesis was very suitable to arise. Later when water and carbon dioxide became plentiful photosynthesis changed and started producing oxygen. That in turn led to the emergence of aerobic life.
That sequence of evolution all happened on Earth because of the conditions present. Who knows what will happen on alien worlds? We, so far, know of only one abiogenesis event. How others might happen can be speculated as ranging from “who knows” to “probably really *@#%^&! weird!” As such what alien life will be like can only be speculated about at best and at worst it will be so strange that we may not even recognize it as life at all if we came across it. As such the odds that Earth would be habitable for aliens is about the same as me going home tonight and finding Megan Fox cooking pancakes in an Easter Bunny Suit for some reason. Therefore, in order to colonize Earth it would have to transform in radical ways to suit the needs of the alien race….and of course that all comes after they defeat us with their “magic” weapons.
Really, if they can travel light years, it would probably just be easier for them to put more effort into scouting in order to find planets that are more suitable to colonize.
#1 It’d Be Easier To Just Nuke Us From Orbit
(it’s the only way to be sure)
However, remember how I touched on the possibility that we might not even recognize alien life if we came across it? Well that works both ways. Alien life might come down and not even see us as like life. They may just see us as some weird mobile carbon blobs that are in the way. If that is the case then they might want to get rid of us.
It is also possible that they have been worshiping The Little Rascal’s broadcasts as Gods and have come to unleash unimaginable wrath for our unceremonious and blasphemous discontinuation of that program. Again, if that is the case, they might just want to get rid of us.
Either way an invasion would just be stupid. They already have interstellar capabilities so why land on the planet and do it the hard way? Are they hardcore Heinlein fans that just have boners for infantry? Probably not as I imagine aliens being more into Niven. Besides, as I alluded to earlier, they may not even have biology suitable to infantry style battle. If they are just brain blobs or containerized thought electrons they would be just so much more suited to unleash a huge barrage of some ungodly weapon that not even Michael Bay can conceive of….yet.
Now, granted that would be bad (well, it would also be the end of Here Comes Honey BooBoo….which is good). And it would be the end of us, but it would not be an invasion. It would just be us going about our normal things; going to work, streaming music, complaining about all the dubstep in the streamed music, playing video games when all of sudden…..Zap! We are gone, the Zlyklans take over, and we never even perceived it let alone had time to worry about it.
Heck, maybe that all happened in 1994 and today we are all just brains in jars being screwed with by Zlyklan teenagers for giggles. If so I would beg them to have some mercy and let me live in a mansion somewhere with my girlfriend and someone famous as my neighbor.
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