How would the militaries of the world realistically react to something like the Tripod invasion from the War of the Worlds? The Tripods are around 200 feet tall, they have two cannons that fire rays that vaporize living things, send objects hurtling around like super-tornado and bring down entire buildings like they were made out of cardboard. They have an electromagnetic shield that surrounds their war machines and preemptively triggers any explosives before they get close to the machines. I'd imagine the military would quickly realize that conventional weaponry has little to no effect on their war machines. How would the military actually fight them? What would their first reaction be? I find it ridiculous that in the movie, the US army just went toe to toe with them on some open battlefield with tanks, jets and helicopters. Surely, real life militaries wouldn't use such lemming strategies to fight an advanced enemy?
We send them somebody affected with the flu. The alien immune system would not be prepared for the virus and they all perish from it. Maybe we'll get Will Smith to bring them a virus-infected software, too, as a plan B.
Maybe there's weaponry or even something supernatural that we have access to, but which is just not publicly known (until the time comes).
How about not using explosive based weapons??? Sure, humanity strongest weapons are explosives, but we could (theoretically) just make giant non-explosive bullets... we can also try using medieval siege weapons with modern technology. Ooooor, we could make giant frag grenades (the dangerous part of a frag is the shrapnel) or giant napalm grenades so that they burn... and then we combine these giant grenades with modern medieval siege weapons (preferably trebuchets).
Mhmm. Interesting. So if conventional explosive based weaponry would trigger, what about non-conventional explosive weaponry? Certain nuclear bombs (extreme low-yields) explode from the impact of something upon the critical radioactive mass. Not a physist or anything, so this might be completely off the mark. But maybe they would work. I think you need to define how exactly these 'aliens' prevent or explode weaponry. if it is a EMP-style shield that fried the circuitry then you can just sent any mechanic or fuse-based explosives. they don't have any electric and instead rely on timed chemical reactions or mechanical devices. If the shields are indeed electromagnetic, then really, any non-magnetic or non-conductive material would just ignore them. We've got plenty of those that could be easily made. I think, assuming the aliens are hostile, they would attack the biggest military contenders. This would be Europe (and west russia), china & east russia and the USA. I also think that the navies and large-shell firing 155mm canons or the likes would do some damage - and conventional thinking would be to fire a bit of everything - since this is an unknown entity. find out what works and what doesn't and formulate something on that. As such, I would think that a unified military command would form between these three main military armies and that quite quickly the militaries would adapt. Ceramic rounds could become a thing. I would also assume the militaries would attempt a nuclear solution - as these are currently the most powerful weapon we currently have. The advantage of nuclear is that the main damage is not just the explosion - but the very heat, radiation and wind that goes along with it. And these last three are a lot more difficult to prevent. So if we the aliens somehow prevent them from actually detonating near themselves, then it wouldn't matter too much. They would also be non-conventional tactics used I suppose. large scale EMPs or chaff - the chaff might completely interrupt or otherwise dimish the effectiveness of an electromagnetic field. Note: The vaste majority of militaries today are NOT trained for symmetrical warfare. compaigns like Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan meant the militaries learned that symmetrical warfare like World War 2 was over. nowadays, there is an emphasis on smaller unit scaled operations working in tangent with each other instead of a single large brute-force attack. As such, I would think that militaries would adapt fairly quickly, but still during those month or so, the militaries would be fairly pointless and ineffective. Also, modern military thinking plays a large emphasis on the domination of the sky. Naval and Tanks have largely been phased out or ignored (comparatively speaking) as now, single-manned equipment can easily take out tanks and even ships. Similarly, with our age of radar and all that, large ships are just sitting ducks. they are too easy to find and hit. Whilst smaller ships can much easier be camouflaged or be equipped with radar-jamming tech. The idea of the 'lemming' attack would only be true, I think, on pre-1970s armies or modern primitive armies (like most African militaries) I know someone at work that was actually in a commanding position within the military. I could ask him if you want to wait a few days.
Well air superiority for one. Nukes and cruise missiles for another. Possible use of anti-tank weaponry in a guerilla war. And seconding the EMP by detonating a nuke in the upper atmosphere. Or if you really want to get obscure and have a bit of fun. Attach tow cables to jet fighters and take them out like AT-ATs.
While the full-frontal assault is occurring, I'd want to find out what method of computer network system they have and look for ways to infiltrate and disrupt it.
An alien race that has the advanced technology to travel lightyears in space will definitely have a very good plan to defeat us if that is their goal. Making us their slaves or use our buildings/factories would not be an option for them and the only two things they can be interested in are 1) eliminate the danger we pose to them and 2) use the natural resources of our solar system and surrounding ones (mining). They certainly would start the war with a large amount of thermonuclear bombs (or antimatter bombs) to wipe out all life on Earth. After the radiation is gone they would start mining and if the temperature is OK for them, they may terraform Earth so they can live here without a spacesuit. What are the factors that could help us to protect ourselves against an enemy that is so much more advanced than we are: - we and our weapons are here, but they need to bring all stuff from their lightyears away home (OK, they might build secret factories on Pluto or whatever but that is still not the same as their home planet). - because of the above they have limited human alien and technical resources, while we have billions of people and the full resources of a whole planet. - although we rely deeply on satellite communication, we also have a large network of wired connections as a fallback (and it is built to be redundant). If they don't have a very advanced communication technology (like gravitational waves or very precisely oriented laser beams) they need to rely on radio and that can be disturbed with a strong signal. - as humanity is always in war with itself we are somewhat prepared for a nuclear war. Military command centers are hidden away, at least part of the globe is protected by anti-missile systems and there are shelters that could protect many people from non-direct nuclear strikes. Many would die on the first day but not all. - we have thermonuclear weapons and that is the 2nd strongest weapon possible (only an anti-matter bomb would be more effective). They would probably have a more advanced way to bring the weapon to its target, than we have, but they won't have much stronger weapons. - we are a large target, that is easy to hit but hard to destroy. They are small and therefore hard to hit but easy to destroy (remember we have nukes). That's for now, hope it helps someone.
We’d die. People like to think of alien vs humanity battles as David Vs Goliath but it’d be more like David vs Godzilla. Explosives won’t do shit. Our most powerful explosives are nukes. If you can do interstellar travel, the energy of a nuke would be like a firecracker. Even if we could create an antimatter bomb, its still nothing compared to the enemies a ship would have to compensate for in interstellar travel. Our most powerful projectiles are railguns. Again, interstellar travel is far more violent than anything we could throw at them. They’re clearly got the technology to deflect or destroy entire asteroids that are in their path near the speed of light. Laser and energy weapons would also be useless. Space produces orders of magnitude more radiation than anything we can produce and the Hawking radiation produced by moving close to the speed of light would be thousands of times hotter than any laser we could produce. We can also assume that their ability to produce ai and drones would be far superior to ours. So a guerilla war wouldn’t work either, they could send a trillion warriors onto our planet from space, each armored like a tank, hyperintelligent, and can climb and crawl like a spider. Also nuclear weapons are not even close to the most powerful explosions we could theorize. Not by many orders of magnitudes. Even antimatter/matter annihalation is nothing when it comes to high energy physics. We’d be fighting a war or survival and would likely just hide and try to wait it out. Here is a good way to think about it. How would the Roman army of 100AD fair against the United States of 2018 if the USA was hellbent in their extermination? Now multiply the technology difference by a thousand or even a million.
Very good analysis, similar to what I thought might happen. But it still doesn't explain how we would realistically try to fight them, what would militaries actually do instead of the Hollywood version where they go full mongoloid toe to toe war on the battlefield with them?
I’d assume militaries would put everything that had into it knowing that they’d lose. I’m a battle for survival you put everything you got towards defending your central base even if it’s futile. They’d likely have the state of mind that the only thing they can do is stall for as long as possible and give everyone a fighting chance to survive. Though realistically, I’d imagine 99.9999% of US military forces to be obliterated in the first ten seconds of the fight. They’d likely do a Blitzkreit attack and level everything. That’s what aid do. The power of a single interstellar engine likely has the energy requirements to turn an entire planets surface to glass within minutes. People seriously underestimate the power requirements of interstellar travel.
Unless (and this is stretching) they had some reason they wanted to preserve the biosphere more or less intact. Moral, religious, scientific curiosity, dunno. That might make things a little more interesting. But how about this: The alien starship arrives in the asteroid belt. Scooping up a couple of likely candidates, it extracts whatever useful minerals they have and pulverizes the rest to pea gravel. The gravel is injected into a variety of orbits around the Earth, causing a Kessler cascade that wrecks every satellite launched by every nation since Sputnik, and denies the nations of Earth the ability to launch anything. Whatever threat the humans might have posed has been bottled up for a century or so, and the aliens get to work feeding Jupiter into their great interstellar rendering plant....
If any advanced alien civilisation would invade, it would not be 70 meters tall tripods. Space travelling is expensive. Ships & cargo would be as small as possible to fulfil the mission. First phase could be recon. Getting info about what to do. And what would happen after that would depend on they interpretation of us. Invasion can be military, biological, economical/commercial, socio-emotional, peaceful occupation, intellectual... Anything but 70 meter tripods. Why? Because they would be intelligent and not stupid. How would our militaries react? Just read your Sun Tzu and he answers to you.
If an alien race with the technology required for interstellar travel turns up here tomorrow, we'll do whatever they tell us, because otherwise we'll be about as effective as a tribe of cavemen trying to beat the US Marine Corps. Yeah, we could use nukes, but they could wipe out all life on Earth with a few redirected asteroids. There would simply be no contest. Any alien race who's learned to live in space will have learned to create anything they want from raw materials. Just tear up a few asteroids and churn out hunter-killer drone AIs. With sufficiently-advanced AI, they'd just need to send one drone here and it would take over the entire solar system for them within a few years.
The reason Wells' War of the Worlds works, is because the relative technology to get the aliens from Mars to Earth isn't so far advanced from our own. It's not unthinkable that these aliens had failed to recognize the threat of viruses and other contagions. The problem you have with aliens getting here from even the closest star, is that their technology would be so far in advance of our own that we would be completely at their mercy. Remember, Star Wars isn't serious SF. It's a stupid pirate movie in space. There was never any need for a Death Star. If you've mastered interstellar travel, that is faster than light, you have the universe at your mercy. The idea of traveling light years to a star system and jumping out of your spaceship, spouting some hokey religion with light saber in hand, and having what amounts to a sword fight with your enemy is so utterly ridiculous it isn't even worthy of comment. It is the stuff of a teenage boy's wet dreams. For the rest of us, we need something more. As already mentioned, if the aliens ever do come... we'll be their bitch for evermore.
What if they didn't invent interstellar-faring ships and traveled via wormholes/black holes instead? You assume that alien civilizations would be completely advanced in every department but look at us, we've got billions of people in different departments and we're still not that advanced in some areas. Why would we assume that an alien civilization would have everything? Perhaps there's a civilization that never invented the wheel, perhaps there's a civilization that's never encountered diseases before so they have no clue about antibiotics or vaccines. Realistically, an alien civilization that is interstellar faring is probably going to be either a type 1 or type 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale. The human civilization isn't even close to being on the scale yet, we won't even register for them, our total energy output of everything that we have wouldn't even show up as a blip on their radar. But that doesn't mean that all alien civilizations are on the scale, perhaps some have figured out a way to travel through unorthodox means and can reach us with technology that's a few notches advanced than ours.
It's certainly possible to build a story world that works and still allows humans a chance to survive. It's just not very realistic.
Well that's what I created this thread with in mind, a civilization is more or less a few notches advanced than us. I didn't really have type 1 or type 2 civilizations that create Dyson swarms and have entire star systems covered with Dyson spheres or rings to harvest the energy output of the stars in mind. And what if you wanted to preserve the atmosphere of the world? What if you wanted to enslave the civilization? What if what you needed was only obtainable without utterly destroying their planet or ecosystem? The tripods from the War of the Worlds needed human blood to terraform Earth in order for them to be able to habit it properly and it served as a food source. To completely wreck planets and stars isn't exactly a logical train of thought. Why would an extremely advanced civilization that is possibly a type 1 or 2 civilization on the Kardashev scale even bother with us? We can't even touch them, if anything, they would just build some mysteriously powerful shield around us that prevents us from leaving without us ever realizing it. But a civilization that requires something from our planet is going to need to be a bit more careful. You wouldn't just stuff a 60 megaton nuke into a mine shaft if you really needed to mine the resources down there, would you? How would you access it after the whole thing is blown to shit? Likewise when we need to harvest honey from honeybees, we don't just go apeshit and systematically slaughter all the bees with nukes, do we? How would we collect the honey if the bees are dead and are no longer producing any? We seem to be thinking in extremities concerning the aliens' approach to war if they required something from our planet and needed to initiate war on us. Consider why an alien civilization would even care about our planet in the first place and why would they waste time redirecting an asteroid just to wipe us out if we can't even touch them in the first place.
Exactly what I was thinking, why would an alien civilization waste so much time coming over here just to blow up our planet? With interstellar travel, time still flows and their civilization will age as they travel. Why would they waste potentially thousands of years just to blow up some savage civilization like ours that hasn't even made it on the Kardashev Civilization Scale yet? I'd imagine there would be something in it for them, something precious like colonizing a world or perhaps extracting a specific mineral they require, maybe even research. Perhaps they don't even see us as living things and accidentally kill us off like we would accidentally kill off trillions of bacteria as we walk on floors or touch walls. We don't even see anything on the floor, we don't see an ecosystem of literally trillions of living things and we accidentally commit genocide with every footstep we take. It's a ridiculous concept but honestly, an alien civilization that's as advanced as a type 2 or 3 might actually behave just like that.
Never mentioned anything about humans surviving, I just wanted to know how our militaries would realistically react in real life to an alien invasion threat. I can't imagine they'd do it like how Hollywood presents the American army.
But how would they try to do it? What would be the process? The mindset? Would we just go all out and launch every single nuclear weapon we had at whatever hostile we encounter? Would we play it smart and use satellites as a means to conduct guerrilla warfare against the aliens from spaces? I don't know, I'm asking you.
Very interesting answer, I'd love to hear an answer from a former commander in the military, it'd give me great insight.
How would they open dialogue, how would they even connect to them? What would be the process undertaken to ensure communications open up between the two? It's not exactly as simple as waving a white flag because the aliens likely have no clue what the hell it means or what it is. And again, we're assuming that we're going to go up against some homicidal alien race that traveled thousands of years just to blow up our planet. I'd imagine they'd have a goal that extends beyond destroying our planet because they could just align an asteroid from their homeworld and send it to our planet which would collide in the same amount of time it would've taken for their fleets to arrive. So, assuming there's some kind of reason such as harvesting resources, enslavement or whatever, how would a ground invasion look like to weed out the humans akin to the tripods from War of the Worlds?
Human slaves are unlikely to have any value to aliens who can just set up some replicators and churn out robots. And, if they're after resources, they're probably planning to churn up the entire solar system. There's little sense in invading another solar system just to steal our gold. But it is an interesting question. What would a realistic invading alien race actually want?
