The world the day after an Alien invasion?

I realize, I been thinking about this quite a bit. And I think I have the right idea for the most part but I don't know why the idea is right(which obviously gives previous confidence some doubt.) And I know some people on here would be good at commenting on this.

So essentially the set up is this. Earth, in a time of mostly peace finds the aliens invade. Thing is, no warning, no knowledge of why or how. The aliens teleport in and rain down, but the leader is defeated and they retreat.

Yet no one realizes this is why the retreat happened. So to Earth's knowledge, its like hell rained down for a brief moment, real brief actually like a day or two. Then they vanished without a trace. Well, mostly, I suppose dead enemies would still be left behind. lol.

A lot of pain and suffering happened during those days though, millions of soldiers teleporting in all over the world. A powerful blitz!

So, the story, which I refer to as ORA(The Order, Return of Alptraumkatze) takes place ten years later. And I say that that day still is effecting everyone. But most people don't even realize it. Like the public policy is much less nice and more corrupt people occupy the government.

So the questions are these.

1. Do you think my situation would cause the effect I have?

2. If not, what long term affects do you think would happen instead?

3. If yes you agree with my conclusions. How do you think it started? How did the government begin to slide down to becoming worse for the people?

 

1. Corruption could go either way. Likely, you'd start off with a bit of a "cleansing," the nations would rally and self-interest would be at an all-time low. It can either stay that way, or, as time goes on after invasion, start to become corrupt. Policy will likely still be towards a global-war-state. Technological advance would be a goal, particularly in figured out old alien-tech.

2. Travel to the stars would become a priority, as would development of a space-Navy. By the time of your story we'd likely have more space-stations, and have colonized Mars. Possibly the asteroid belt. We'd be focusing on preservation of humanity at all costs. We'd develop massive ship-killing orbital missiles. (If you know how to use the laws of physics, it doesn't matter what tech the enemy has. A lot of mass moving really fast will kill a lot of things quite well.)

3. If the government gets worse, it's going to be after a few years. Naysayers will start saying "why are we still funding this, they're never coming back! We need luxuries again!" On the other side, you'd have people who take advantage of the people's motivation and starting to war-profiteer, essentially, without a war. Cut quality on some goods, or up the price a bit unnecessarily... All they have to do is warn that the aliens could come back, and [New Technology That No One Knows The Real Price Of] that came from alien-tech could save us! Meanwhile, you have the legit, non-corrupt people accidentally helping corrupt people - they also worry that the aliens could come back, and if that tech does it's job, how do they know how much it actually costs?

Your people will also be more used to a life without luxury. They'd have lost or had to give up much for the war-effort. It might be good to look at the situations of countries that were wracked by WWII.

 

Technically they didn't.

The leader lost. The fight was really more of a one on one between god like figures.

The invading aliens side led by someone who was like. "You had the unfortunite to get on my bad side. Now I will kill you as your world burns around you!"

And Earth didn't realize they had a god like figure on their side, hence them being completely in the dark.

Once the leader lost though, the aliens had no reason to continue fighting and retreated. I mean, if you followed a god-like figure into battle and he lost and the won that took his head looked at you and said run. What would you do?

 

I know it's not to your original question, but could you do it something like Ender's Game, where the aliens were basically a hive mind ruled by a Queen? When the Queen was killed, the rest of the alien soldiers lost all ability to fight without instructions (the computer game F.E.A.R. had a similar premise). The aliens were guilty of atrocities against the human forces in the first part of the war because they didn't realize that they were fighting against sentient beings; to them, soldiers were no more important than individual cells.

 

When the Mongols invaded Europe, they literally crushed all opposition. The Mongols were organized along the lines of modern armies; advances lines of communications, a think-tank of military minds, very mobile with artillery support. But, the Khan died. And, a new Khan is elected by, you guessed it, the generals. So, the Mongols suspended all operations so the head generals could return home and select a new Khan. By the time a new Khan was selected, other issues in the Empire prevented the Mongols from returning to Europe.
Godspeed!

 

Further Fun Fact: American schools dramatize the War of 1812 as The Second War for American Independence, but British historians downplay the war as just a tiny footnote of the Napoleonic ****storm.

Now I want somebody (maybe me) to write about a second alien civilization attacking the first one when they thought that the first would be distracted by attacking us, but then the first one regrouped and decided "Meh, never mind, we can get back to our original invasion later"

... Only we here on Earth don't know anything about this.

 

I find it hard to believe that an alien warlord would make such a horrible miscalculation. With the technology at their disposal, why would any individual of the species need to get close enough to Earth to get in harms way. Intelligent beings try to find ways to give themselves a distance advantage: it's why we invented spears, then bows, then catapults, then guns, the missiles, then drones...

 

Intelligence is not always the major factor in military decisions. Battles are not so much won by geniuses as they are lost by idiots. There are countless of historical examples of defeat being pulled from the jaws of victory. But, the task will be making it believable.
A Hollywood trope that I despise is the vastly superior robot alien army created by super-intelligence that hasn't discovered CLOUD yet.
Godspeed!

 

Can you think of any way that this could be emphasized as a difference between human and alien psychology?

 

It would have to be. They'd have to have some psychological reason to want to be on the ground fighting, not using their technology. A Klingon mentality maybe.

 

Could be interesting.

I used to be semi-active on the World-building Stack Exchange, and one person asked for help in making a warrior culture for a species that didn't feel fear. Thinking about this made me realize that their tactics would be far subtler than ours: human militaries tend to go for "Shock and Awe" to scare an enemy into not fighting in the first place, but if an alien species doesn't feel fear, then it wouldn't occur to them to scare their enemies either, and you would see much more of a numerical efficiency game.

Along the same lines, humans developed long-range weapons like spears and slings because we're basically water balloons with legs compared to the prey that we depended on for food.

Maybe this other species are such effective natural predators, with tougher skin and deadlier natural weapons, that hunting wasn't the thing that they first developed tools for? Maybe they started out on an archipelago region of their planet, and the first technology that they developed was rafts that let them get to new sources of food more effectively (which they then hunted with their bare hands)?

As opposed to humans, who got started on massive continents, whose natural advantage was in running our prey to exhaustion, and who didn't initially need to focus on building more effective vehicles?

 

Well, I fail to see even the miscalculation. I mean, sure he died, but there are a few issues here that aren't just psychological reasoning.

1. His army didn't lose, or rather, they didn't retreat because they lost. They retreated because their leader lost.

2. Well, while a fair assumption your assuming he had access to a better strategy that he didn't utilize. Teleporting is a magical based ability that has a finite size limitation. Teleporting a person or hundreds of people, easy. Teleporting a star ship? Not easy or even possible really. So waiting for backup was not exactly a better option.

3. Yes he could have been more patient and dead a swifter blow in a more delicate and stronger way to Earth, but Earth wasn't his goal. The one person was his goal. And burning the world around her was a psych out campaign meant to demoralize/distract her.

4. He lost to her, so yeah, miscalculated, but she was a threat and she wasn't getting weaker. A blitz wasn't exactly a bad strategy even if it failed.

 

@GuardianWynn ... Well then

Can't imagine that one person will be very popular once everybody else finds out that she was the beacon that attracted the invaders in the first place.

 

True but she also won! lol

But no one ever finds out she was the becon lol.

Though I am surprised you didn't comment on the original question lol. I bet it was a topic you would love diving into.

 

So did Superman in Man Of Steel. Or the Avengers at the opening in New York. Or the entire run of the X-men franchise.

Sure, they need her now, but when they don't, they'll cast her out. Like a leper...

Probably for the best.

Everybody else came up with so much already that I've been having trouble coming up with anything else

 

Wait what? The original question was about how Earth would react in the wake of this event and how this might lead to a more unstable society with more corruption. Most of the replies had been on the details of the event itself?

 

So I just read through the thread again, it it turns out that by "everyone" I was trying to say @Pharthan . Huh.

It felt like more people were involved in that part.

 

Yep but I felt bad cuz I didn't have much of a response to his post.

So, where is your two cents!

 

Did you ever see the Childhood's End miniseries? I only saw the first episode, and Dad - who loved the book in high school - I believe said he was disappointed, but there was one important point about many religious people, now forced to accept the fact life exists beyond the Earth, chose to kill themselves rather than live in a world "without God."

This logic seems like garbage to me - I'm a Christian: not only do I not have a problem with the fact that I don't live on a flat Earth at the center of a 6000 year old universe where genes are magically prevented from mutating, but I in fact hope that there are other people in God's universe who are on average better than we are - but I can see it catching on

 

That's an interesting concept but one I think is not quite notable here, I mean, sure life out of earth might cause those problems but that seems like a small niche not like shaping the entirety of human culture!

Plus Earth has magic and that plot line pretty much emerges there.

"Magic is devils work!"

"Magic is god's divine gift!"

And well you can probably imagine all the similar lines lol

 

You'd be surprised

Yup: my favorite would have to be "magic is a science"