The alien invasion reasoning thread

[Imperial528]

Fear: One of their system probes detects this thread, and the guy at the control center mutters something along the lines of "Shit! They're on to us!" and launches the invasion preemptively. Subordinates shrug and go along with it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Hunger: They are space vampires or somesuch that feed on sentient creatures life essence. Like the Wraith

[Zixinus]

Compatible biosphere: Sending excess population to Earth is cheaper,simpler and faser than building a new Space Colony. Earth is large and can house a large deal of excess population, with enough additional space to make jobs and make food supply. That is, it would if the humans wouldn't be hogging it and ruining it.
Objective: exterminate large segments of humanity to allow comfortable location for settlers.
Cause: out-of-control population growth

Interest in flora and fauna: They view the planet's flora and fauna as highly interesting, as it is compatible with theirs and it may hold some very valuable things for them. So valuable in fact, that they are pissed that we are destroying our forests/coral reefs/etc. They do not want to exterminate us, but replace and control our industrial civilization so we would stop making polluting by-products. They may offer to make replacement farms and factories in orbit (and show us how to) but many nations would still rather hold on to their industrial infrastructure.
Objective: destroy human ecosystem-destroying infrastructure.
Cause: strong belief that Earth fauna/flora may have materials for miracle-drugs (or even cure for a crippling alien disease)

Strategic: In a few near-by solar systems, there is an interstellar war and Sol looks like a neat spot to settle in and build war resources. We are not the primary target, merely a potential problem they wish to preemptively take care of. extinction is not the primary objective, just to pacify us and prevent us from calling the Enemy for help.
Objective: secure Earth and population.
Cause: fear of our interference in their war.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Rescue: Some massive disaster, natural or artificial is about to destroy all life on Earth, and they don't have the time to figure out our language so they can explain why they are scooping up people by the millions. So they naturally have to defend themselves from us even as they rescue as many of us as they can. James White, author of the Sector General stories came up with that one.

Crazed Loner: The invasion is actually just one guy and his army of replicating machines. It isn't a clash of civilizations, it's one lunatic or sadist from a species powerful enough that a single individual has more power than all of Earth.

[TOSDOC]

Their binary system has created conditions where their species has hibernation cycles of 400,000 years. Their next cycle is approaching and they have decided to exterminate at least all vertebrate life in a feasible radius of their system so they can sleep peacefully.

[Double post reduced to single at user request. ~ NL]

[Lord of the Abyss]

Their binary system has created conditions where their species has hibernation cycles of 400,000 years. Their next cycle is approaching and they have decided to exterminate (EDIT at least) all vertebrate life in a feasible radius of their system so they can sleep peacefully.

As seen in Spoiler

Illegal Alien by Robert Sawyer. Although that was more "fry from orbit" than "invasion".

*


* Spoilered to avoid giving away a major plot twist.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Penal Colony: The alien leadership has decided to use a separate planet in another star system as a penal colony for their interstellar empire. The ships drop what appear to be troops to us but are in fact prisoners marooned with a small amount of survival gear: some weapons etc.

[Simon_Jester]

Good one, EF. That also suggests:

Penal Colony, Extra-Difficult Version

The penal colony is in some way a relevant economic activity to the Empire: the prisoners do something that the Empire would not want to have to pay for, such as mining highly dangerous unobtainium, manufacturing some kind of good the Empire values, or whatever.

This is extra-difficult because it gives the Empire a reason to fight the locals if said locals try to exterminate the prison population.

[lance]

In the Returner it was due to a government doing experiments/dissection on a kid that crashed the in a Roswell type incident.

[Guardsman Bass]

I like Alien Psychology. If this is a universe where there's a low-energy "trick" to FTL, their attack might be an attempt on their part to assert the dominant position before humanity develops it and can hit them. Only problem is that we don't understand why they're doing it - just that they're attacking various cities.

It might work especially well if the alien race has a different view of the death of individuals. Perhaps large parts of their race consist of sterile drones that tend to die in large numbers in dominance-subjugation fights between their various factions, but also breed back quickly. This leads them to believe that humanity won't really care if large numbers of humans are killed, provided that the overall civilization isn't completely disrupted and destroyed.

I'll second Religion. Perhaps they attach immense religious significance to certain orbits around habitable planets, as well as areas directly beneath their orbital ships/habitats/etc. Unfortunately, these areas tend to be large, and they're not above clearing out any unfortunate locals who happen to live in the sacred places.

[Simon_Jester]

Low-energy tricks to FTL make a lot of motivations for alien invasion work better, because they lower the amount of effort entailed in getting here and make it easier to come up with rational calculations in which invading another star system pays better than turning your home system into a Singularitarian dream of Dyson spheres and space habitats.

[wautd]

Tourism. Earth safari's a wonderful but don't drink the water coming from tap.

[Guardsman Bass]

Thinking more about it, I think it would be amusing to see an alien invasion movie that did have the alien psychology. The aliens show up, there's a huge gigantic fight with lots of deaths, the aliens win after shattering the bulk of Earth's military power . . . and then they started pulling out, and leave just after sending a single radio broadcast across the whole world in multiple languages that basically consists of "You are defeated." The whole world then is left to go "WTF?", and the movie ends.

Of course, your audience would be confused too, so maybe it's not such a good idea.

[Gil Hamilton]

I think For Our Own Good/The Greater Good is an interesting premise that I haven't seen suggested too much. I like the notion of a story where normally peaceful aliens have been in contact with humanity for a while and humanity proves intractible to what the aliens consider moral behavior.

For example, the aliens haven't had a sense of nationalism for a LONG time and legitimately don't understand why countries won't work together for the common good and why ambassadors keep STRONGLY hinting that they'd really like exclusive use of alien weapons technology. Or perhaps the notion of capitalism is completely foreign to them and they can't understand why the United States won't just let them just mass produce all the medicine and automatic health care machines necessary to provide complete free health care for all citizens (rather than give the technologies to corporations and let the corporations SELL it to the population). If they are post-scarcity aliens, the notion that an industry should sell vital services to people that need them but not only be mysterious a thing to do but ACTIVELY offensive to their morals. That all the doctors, chemists, et cetera would be completely out of a job by superior alien technology wouldn't be a problem. After all, they can make all the food and electricity Earth needs too.

The aliens might eventually come to the conclusion that humanity is being run by spoiled, naughty children and the only moral option for them is to give us a good sound spanking to set us on the right path.

[lordofchange13]

They want to harvest us,Souls to feed to there living metal gods. Or we taste good.

[open_sketchbook]

"Humanism" Gone Wrong An alien AI was long ago programmed to reduce the suffering of sentient creatures. It picked up on the existance of our civilization, and has come to fullfill that goal and keep us on on a drip of happy drugs.

Construction Materials In a similar fashion, an AI long ago programmed to manufacture things has converted all the matter in it's home system into paperclips and has now come here to do the same.

Gross Out Something about us (eat with our mouths? Sexual reproduction? We are made of meat?) disguists the aliens on a base level.

Fossil Fuels Fossil Fuels are actually really good at what they do. As a planet has to have life on it in order for fossil fuels to form, we may be invaded for our oil.

Adventure Our invader is actually a small group or an individual from a highly advanced civilization where massive amounts of technology can be wielded by private citzens. They send an army of flying saucers and other improbably machines to give us a sporting chance, but it's really for the entertainment value.

Justify our Budget The alien astromilitary needs to invade someplace and get a war going to avoid budget cuts next cycle.

Shut Up! Our primative communications are disrupting vital interstellar communications, so the alien empire sends it's army to knock our civilization back to the stone age and destroy our beeping satellites.

Criminal Hideout Earth, being subject to the prime directive, is the perfect place for alien criminals to lay low, or use as a tax haven. Unfortunately, a new government was elected on a policy of being hard on crime, and are coming to shut us down.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Future Threat: A time traveler from their distant future told them we'd exterminate their species in a few centuries. They are trying to conquer us instead of destroying the planet from space because they can't quite bring themselves to commit genocide for something our descendants in a possible future did.

Stop the Fools: We are doing something experimentally that could lead to a massive, perhaps universal disaster (say, collapsing the false vacuum), and we refuse to listen to them and stop doing it.

Hiding Place: The universe is a hostile place for intelligent organic life; sooner or later fleets of Berserker-style machines kill anything that reveals itself. Stealth is impossible in space we are told; so instead, the aliens intend to destroy us and hide underground on Earth where the machines won't find them. The machines will just find the remnants of a crude civilization that apparently bombed itself into collapse, kill off any human survivors then leave.

[Swindle1984]

I think For Our Own Good/The Greater Good is an interesting premise that I haven't seen suggested too much. I like the notion of a story where normally peaceful aliens have been in contact with humanity for a while and humanity proves intractible to what the aliens consider moral behavior.

For example, the aliens haven't had a sense of nationalism for a LONG time and legitimately don't understand why countries won't work together for the common good and why ambassadors keep STRONGLY hinting that they'd really like exclusive use of alien weapons technology. Or perhaps the notion of capitalism is completely foreign to them and they can't understand why the United States won't just let them just mass produce all the medicine and automatic health care machines necessary to provide complete free health care for all citizens (rather than give the technologies to corporations and let the corporations SELL it to the population). If they are post-scarcity aliens, the notion that an industry should sell vital services to people that need them but not only be mysterious a thing to do but ACTIVELY offensive to their morals. That all the doctors, chemists, et cetera would be completely out of a job by superior alien technology wouldn't be a problem. After all, they can make all the food and electricity Earth needs too.

The aliens might eventually come to the conclusion that humanity is being run by spoiled, naughty children and the only moral option for them is to give us a good sound spanking to set us on the right path.

Super Happy Fun aliens/Baby-eaters?

[hongi]

Thinking more about it, I think it would be amusing to see an alien invasion movie that did have the alien psychology. The aliens show up, there's a huge gigantic fight with lots of deaths, the aliens win after shattering the bulk of Earth's military power . . . and then they started pulling out, and leave just after sending a single radio broadcast across the whole world in multiple languages that basically consists of "You are defeated." The whole world then is left to go "WTF?", and the movie ends.

Of course, your audience would be confused too, so maybe it's not such a good idea.

Epilogue: alien controller returns home and meets his friends: "Guess what I did during my holiday? My army of robot soldiers totally pwned this noob planet. Last thing I did was write a giant gg on their moon."

[Rossum]

1. Xenobiological Gourmet - These aliens like to eat thing, I mean they relly like food. They've already sampled all the food combinations on their home planet and several others and now discovered Earth. Here we have chocolate (in many different types and dishes), cakes, sandwiches, chicken eggs, fish eggs, lasagna, turpentine, Styrofoam, etc. They've genetically modified themselves to the point that they can eat darn near anything and they want to harvest the Earth for ingredients to see what the next best dish would be.

Things might not be all that bad at first (the aliens steal some cattle, humans contact them, then work out a trade agreement) but then something stupid happens and some alien wants to try out "tortured human baby with melted asphalt and onion vinegar", they start trading advanced gene-modifying technology to some dictator-run country in exchange for human cattle and rare endangered species, or one alien brings some Talxian cheese to earth and the microbes get loose and starts fermenting all the polyester on the planet. This freaks the hell out of alot of people and causes outright war with several nations and mass riots develop when people learn that they are at the mercy of alien chefs.

The net result is less of an organized invasion and more a clusterfuck of several different clans of the same alien race making deals with different human nations, all of which result in more humans/animals getting turned into entrees and more alien tech/microbes getting introduced to the Earth. Cue massive environmental damage social problems that screws up Earth but the aliens don't care about (or some do but other aliens go behind their back and keep screwing stuff up).


2. The Necessary Villains - A group of aliens discover Earth and run a scan of its political/historical/psychological profile and come to the conclusion that humans will constantly fight eachother unless provided with a mutual enemy to unify against. They then go about bombarding the planet, making crazy threats, engaging in cyberterrorism and generally making trouble. However, its all calculated to cause the minimal damage (sure, alot of humans die horribly and such but its still less than the projected result of a human world war).

This results in nations unifying against the alien menace and intelligece agencies all working together as one. The aliens themselves are super-intelligent and always five steps ahead of the humans (or so they think) and make their next attack different to stimulate more unity among humans (they use holograms to trick religious people into thinking their diety is here... then let a 'malfuction' reveal its a fake if the church hasn't already renounced it. Or they use robot duplicates to infiltrate organizations and cause trouble so lax security is improved, or they expose the hypocracy of powerful organizations and declare they humanity must surrender to the more powerful aliens).

This whole thing either results in an Earth that truly unites against a common foe for its own good (At which point the aliens point this out and say how great everything turned out while the mourning survivors of the last asteroid bombardment curse the green bastards), or their attempts at uniting humanity against a common foe just makes things exponentially worse, freaks everyone out, and destroys civilization.


3. One alien race at the other side of the galaxy discovered how to launch relativistic missiles before they developed inter-steller life support. So they just built a huge manufacturing facility, made a few million inter-steller missiles, and launched them into space to blow up every habitable planet to clear the way for when the aliens finally can take to the stars.

The result is that millions of powerful warheads are flying through space and are all programmed to blow up any habitable planet they come across. The aliens never set foot on Earth or even reach its solar system, the aliens are all back in their home system trying to design life support systems that will work for the decades needed for interstellar flight. The closest Earth gets to contact with alien life is to see a hyperatomic missile heading into the solar system at 86% light speed, see it maneuver in response to detecting surface water on our planet, and then having it slamming into us at ludicrous speed before the anti-matter warhead goes off and ruins our day.

If the aliens ever start traveling the galaxy themselves and if they ever make it to our solar system, all they will find is an asteroid belt where the missile their great-great-great-grandparents built blew us up.


4. A group of atheist happyness maximizing aliens show up in the solar system and initiate contact. They are totally benevolent and help develop all sorts of medicienes to prolong human life and minimize suffering.

Then some of them start talking about philosphy and a human christian talks about religion. The aliens never heard about religion before (okay, their great-great-ancestors had religion before the Great Purge eliminated it but they personally never did) and discuss it. They are then told about Heaven and Hell and the aliens turn deathly pale. The idea of life after death simply never occurred to them and they can think of no way to disprove it (after all, human physiology could be different enough to allow those things). So the aliens try to learn everything they can about human afterlife belief systems and come to the conclusion that they can't disprove of the existance of eternal damnation and thus must assume its the case.

Cue three weeks later when a massive army of self-replicating combat robots sweeps across the Earth capturing every human alive and torturing them while asking them to deny The One True God. Anyone who chooses to deny God is tortured horribly, healed back to perfect health, then tortured again (this goes on forever since alien medicine can effectively make someone immortal). Those who accept the omni-benevolent God are then killed painlessly so they can go onto their eternal reward.

The aliens effectively choose to murder everyone in the world and/or torture them eternally in order to save them from being tortured eternally in a hypothetical afterlife. Then once the aliens back home hear about this they have the aliens responsible for this executed and all traces of human literature destroyed to keep that idea from spreading again.


5. Economic Conquest - These aliens don't really want to conquer the Earth in a bloody battle but they feel that humans aren't responsible enough to handle themselves. Thus, they start a Mega Corporation to conquer Earths economy.

They start off by building a dyson array to harness a fraction of the Suns power, then sell that energy to the Earth for low prices. Earth then gets less of its power from fossil fuel and more from the aliens. The aliens then use this money to buy up businesses and bribe politicians until they control huge chunks of the market in everything. Eventually everyone with any say in the matter gets a paycheck from the aliens and they basically rule the world now. Those who aren't employees of AlienCo don't have any power to really cause any trouble.


6. Culling the Herd - The aliens belong to a culture where the strong eat the weak... literally. They see that there are homeless, starving, uneducated people and are frankly baffled and disgusted that the strong and rich people aren't killing and eating them! Seriously, all organic life-forms want to survive (you can't blame them) but the laws of scarcity indicate that not all of them will leave rich and full lives. Letting homeless poor people live squalid lives with no hope of ever truly bettering themselves is nothing less than animal cruelty! Unless you plan on gathering up and helping all those people (Haha, that was a joke. Even advanced aliens like these find benevolence like that to be unfeasible) then the least you can do is put them out of their misery.

Thus, the aliens demand that the rich people of Earth do their job and start killing and eating the poor people. At first there is awkwardness with some thinking this is a secret test of character or something until they learn that these aliens are dead serious. A few people give into their demands (and are seen as sick freaks by the rest of humanity) but resistance grows until the aliens decide to get this stuff done.

They invade the Earth, decimate the defences, conquer the nations and start setting up concentration camps to round up all the sick, stupid, and homeless. Then they force all the well-off people to sit down at tables and watch as the poor and homeless are killed, cooked up, and served for food. The aliens happily partake and anyone who refuses to eat the poor is themselves killed. This continues until they run out of homeless poor people.

[wautd]

Iraqi oil

[Swindle1984]

Stolen from a thread on 4chan, of all places, where people got tired of "aliens are technologically/physically/socially superior to humans" and want a thread where humans are better than aliens, or at least more dangerous.

-------------

!MESSAGE BEGINS

We made a mistake. That is the simple, undeniable truth of the matter, however painful it might be. The flaw was not in our Observatories, for those machines were as perfect as we could make, and they showed us only the unfiltered light of truth. The flaw was not in the Predictor, for it is a device of pure, infallible logic, turning raw data into meaningful information without the taint of emotion or bias. No, the flaw was within us, the Orchestrators of this disaster, the sentients who thought themselves beyond such failings. We are responsible.

It began a short while ago, as these things are measured, less than 6^6 Deeli ago, though I suspect our systems of measure will mean very little by the time anyone receives this transmission. We detected faint radio signals from a blossoming intelligence 2^14 Deelis outward from the Galactic Core, as photons travel. At first crude and unstructured, these leaking broadcasts quickly grew in complexity and strength, as did the messages they carried. Through our Observatories we watched a world of strife and violence, populated by a barbaric race of short-lived, fast breeding vermin. They were brutal and uncultured things which stabbed and shot and burned each other with no regard for life or purpose. Even their concepts of Art spoke of conflict and pain. They divided themselves according to some bizarre cultural patterns and set their every industry to cause of death.

They terrified us, but we were older and wiser and so very far away, so we did not fret. Then we watched them split the atom and breach the heavens within the breadth of one of their single, short generations, and we began to worry. When they began actively transmitting messages and greetings into space, we felt fear and horror. Their transmissions promised peace and camaraderie to any who were listening, but we had watched them for too long to buy into such transparent deceptions. They knew we were out here, and they were coming for us.

The Orchestrators consulted the Predictor, and the output was dire. They would multiply and grow and flood out of their home system like some uncountable tide of Devourer worms, consuming all that lay in their path. It might take 6^8 Deelis, but they would destroy us if left unchecked. With aching carapaces we decided to act, and sealed our fate.

The Gift of Mercy was 8^4 strides long with a mouth 2/4 that in diameter, filled with many 4^4 weights of machinery, fuel, and ballast. It would push itself up to 2/8th of light speed with its onboard fuel, and then begin to consume interstellar Primary Element 2/2 to feed its unlimited acceleration. It would be traveling at nearly light speed when it hit. They would never see it coming. Its launch was a day of mourning, celebration, and reflection. The horror of the act we had committed weighted heavily upon us all; the necessity of our crime did little to comfort us.

The Gift had barely cleared the outer cometary halo when the mistake was realized, but it was too late. The Gift could not be caught, could not be recalled or diverted from its path. The architects and work crews, horrified at the awful power of the thing upon which they labored, had quietly self-terminated in droves, walking unshielded into radiation zones, neglecting proper null pressure safety or simple ceasing their nutrient consumption until their metabolic functions stopped. The appalling cost in lives had forced the Ochestrators to streamline the Gift’s design and construction. There had been no time for the design or implementation of anything beyond the simple, massive engines and the stabilizing systems. We could only watch in shame and horror as the light of genocide faded into infrared against the distant void.

They grew, and they changed, in a handful of lifetimes they abolished war, abandoned their violent tendencies and turned themselves to the grand purposes of life and Art. We watched them remake first themselves, and then their world. Their frail, soft bodies gave way to gleaming metals and plastics, they unified their people through an omnipresent communications grid and produced Art of such power and emotion, the likes of which the Galaxy has never seen before. Or again, because of us.

They converted their home world into a paradise (by their standards) and many 10^6s of them poured out into the surrounding system with a rapidity and vigor that we could only envy. With bodies built to survive every environment from the day lit surface of their innermost world, to the atmosphere of their largest gas giant and the cold void in-between, they set out to sculpt their system into something beautiful. At first we thought them simple miners, stripping the rocky planets and moons for vital resources, but then we began to see the purpose to their constructions, the artworks carved into every surface, and traced across the system in glittering lights and dancing fusion trails. And still, our terrible Gift approached.

They had less than 2^2 Deeli to see it, following so closely on the tail of its own light. In that time, oh so brief even by their fleeting lives, more than 10^10 sentients prepared for death. Lovers exchanged last words, separated by worlds and the tyranny of light speed. Their planet side engineers worked frantically to build sufficient transmission infrastructure to upload the countless masses with the necessary neural modifications, while those above dumped lifetimes of music and literature from their databanks to make room for passengers. Those lacking the required hardware or the time to acquire it consigned themselves to death, lashed out in fear and pain, or simply went about their lives as best they could under the circumstances.

The Gift arrived suddenly, the light of its impact visible in our skies, shining bright and cruel even to the unaugmented ocular receptor. We watched and we wept for our victims, dead so many Deelis before the light of their doom had even reached us. Many 6^4s of those who had been directly or even tangentially involved in the creation of the Gift sealed their spiracles with paste as a final penance for the small roles they had played in this atrocity. The light dimmed, the dust cleared, and our Observatories refocused upon the place where their shining blue world had once hung in the void, and found only dust and the pale gleam of an orphaned moon, wrapped in a thin, burning wisp of atmosphere that had once belonged to its parent.

Radiation and relativistic shrapnel had wiped out much of the inner system, and continent sized chunks of molten rock carried screaming ghosts outward at interstellar escape velocities, damned to wander the great void for an eternity. The damage was apocalyptic, but not complete, from the shadows of the outer worlds, tiny points of light emerged, thousands of fusion trails of single ships and world ships and everything in between, many 10^6s of survivors in flesh and steel and memory banks, ready to rebuild. For a few moments we felt relief, even joy, and we were filled with the hope that their culture and Art would survive the terrible blow we had dealt them. Then came the message, tightly focused at our star, transmitted simultaneously by hundreds of their ships.

"We know you are out there, and we are coming for you."

!MESSAGE ENDS

[Eternal_Freedom]

^That sounds like the basis for a pretty awesome story there.

[White Haven]

That...is pretty hardcore, actually. Every now and then, 4chan surprises me in a way that doesn't make me roll my eyes.

[Sarevok]

Eh it's a typical human pride story. A poorly written one at that.