Interesting Links for 26-09-2016

[andrewducker]

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? (tags: programming psychopath quiz ) Experimental stem cell therapy helps paralyzed man regain use of arms and hands (tags: healthcare health stem_cells ) Forget VR. The Future of Roller Coasters Is About Maglev (tags: fun Technology magnets ) Japanese Can Soon Pay Utility Bills with Bitcoin (tags

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Finally, I've never understood this desire to let other planets know we are out there.

"Hey, we are a planet with a ton of oil, coal, uranium, other types of fuel and energy sources and water! Why not come here and steal our shit!"

[andrewducker]

I think that if you've got the tech to travel those distances then you can also spot that kind of thing from a looong way away, and don't need it.

A bit like Pacific islanders not building bonfires in case they attract the British Navy who might want to run off with it. Sure, if they turned up wanting it, you'd be completely fucked, but they aren't coming for any of the stuff you care about.

[danieldwilliam]

I've always thought that any alien that can get Here from There has pretty much won already.

they are unlikely to need any thing we have here. If they can get here easily and cheaply they don't need our coal or our planet to live on. If they can't get here easily and cheaply then all the stuff we have is unlikely to pass a simple Net Present Value calculation.

So I'm left thinking that their only reasons for coming are to deliver a Message of Universal Comradeship and Peace or to do unpleasant things to us for a variety either to stop us before we stop them or for "religious" reasons. But again, if they can get here we probably can't do much to stop them. Our first and last act in an inter-stellar war right now might be to wonder why there was a suspiciously high number of large asteroids on collision course with Earth.

[theweaselking]

The generation ship from proxima centauri, full of religious zealots who embarked centuries-and-generations ago, looking to produce the first extra-centaurian colony on faith that of the two habitable-zone planets they spotted around Sol, one would probably be life-supporting?

Those guys could be a problem.

(This is the Nauvoo from The Expanse, in reverse)

[cartesiandaemon]

I've often thought, it's strange we don't see more "one way ship arrives at earth" stories. It simultaneously answers several questions which are difficulties in many alien contact stories. They have higher tech but not ftl, or ftl only with difficulty. They have an existing culture. They are massively outnumbered, so "which side has the upper hand, or is a mostly-equal war in the offing" can be adjusted to fit the story.

But usually "alien invasion" stories seem to assume we'll be conquered by an alien fleet in close communication with home, which doesn't seem to make sense for lots of reasons.

[andrewducker]

The two that occur to me are District 9, and The Saga Of The Exiles, where the aliens are only running the show because they crashed in the Pliocene, and if they'd landed in modern day earth they'd have been completely fucked.

[theweaselking]

I can think of a few.

The Lizards from V were small in number and had no way home. It's implied that the masters from They Live are similar. Comedy-wise, Alf and Howard The Duck would count (as would Superman, I suppose)

The aliens from Independence Day and The Stark from Guardians Of The Galaxy (the comic, not the movie) are barely-ftl travellers who hit suitable worlds, consume all the resources stocking up for their trip to the next world, then move on leaving a husk behind. So are the Tyranids from Warhammer 40K.

David Weber's execrable Out Of The Dark[1] involves stl world-conquerers who are, among other things, simply *shocked* that humans went from knives and bows to space travel and nukes in only the 900 years it took for their scouts to return to The Great Galactic Government and a pacification/uplift fleet to arrive

[andrewducker]

I just read the Wikipedia article on Out Of The Dark. And had to resist the urge to bash my head off of the desk.

(I don't object to vampires in my SF. But three pages from the end???)

[theweaselking]

The entire book is a shaggy-dog setup. But it meets the needs of the discussion here because one of the major problems the conquerers have is that they can't call home and ask for updated orders when their existing ones clearly no longer apply (and, being Evil Foreigners, they immediately start working around their orders to harvest the Precious Bodily Fluids of Those Loyal Americans for Profit).

[ckd]

Niven and Pournelle's Footfall also has a single ship invasion.

[theweaselking]

I haven't read that in decades. Was that also either "they can't go home" or "they can go home but they can't communicate easily with home"?

[ckd]

IIRC, "they can't go home".

[theweaselking]

Another one: The elves in Charlie Stross' "The Nightmare Stacks", who are the last survivors of a world where Lovecraftian horrors used as WMDs by nation-states ate the planet.

The Saurr in Feist's sequels to the Riftwar are a more directly fantasy example of invaders on a one-way trip.

[torrain]

...and until you said that I had not previously realized how much the elves remind me of Jadis of Charn, and the Deplorable Word.

[theweaselking]

Thinking about it: The reverse, where a human ship makes a one-way trip to an alien planet, is *way* more common. Its probably got its own page on TVTropes.

[danieldwilliam]

Oh, that's a good point. A sort of stuck in the middle strategy. We can only just get there but we couldn't tell when we started that the place was already occupied because there was nothing to show any sign of intelligent life many thousands of years ago and now we're committed.