There'll probably be at least one species what will want to destroy us, but it won't be anything personal. Just business.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/wz5km.jpg[/img]
Rape their women, steal their technology, and slaughter their chiefs.
That'll teach 'em to be different.
[QUOTE=RBM11;19850493]This is stupid because it doesn't take into account declines in population. War, disease, famine, drought, crimes, etc. all decrease the population. Europe for the most part has a negative growth rate, but according to you, they should be colonizing the moon to escape the dangers of "overpopulation." You have to have two kids per couple to keep the population steady. If everyone had one kid, the population would dramatically decline.[/QUOTE]
Net population on Earth is still rising, and doesn't show any signs of slowing. It's all really just speculation, but the assumption is made that desire to reproduce and expand trumps everything, and that the nature of life is to reproduce at an exponential rate, thus always accelerating that rate of expansion.
Of course, it's equally likely that we'd never see aliens themselves, just their von Neumann probes. What's the easiest way to colonize a star system? Send self-replicating machines ahead of you to process local resources into a usable form, and set up the infrastructure you'll need to be at home in the system. Hell, maybe you don't even physically fly yourselves there, just equip the probes with frozen embryos to be thawed and grown into the first generation of colonists.
We need an organization like X-com
holy shit. is that michael jackson? and 2ndly E.T looks fuckin creepy...
if hostile aliens came over here to fuck us up and take humans for experiments and brutally murder us well I would just commit suicide as simple as that
I doubt if aliens would try to take over the world to experiment on us, seeing as americans, russians, koreas, etc will join forces to take them down, turns out it's a game called Crysis.
[QUOTE=Levithan;19850271]I'm pretty sure Stephen Hawking already mentioned this some time ago.
I'm all for an Isolationist Earth. :patriot:[/QUOTE]
Terra Firma Party!
Earth must stand alone!
[editline]10:43PM[/editline]
[QUOTE=Montroze;19849488]
I would have to say this is untrue, easily put, Entropy. The more energy put in to maintain a state, the less energy needed to destroy that state. They have a ship with shields and little nano-bots-nice, but that means that these features require energy. Energy which can easily be interrupted or overpowered through fast moving highly charged particles AKA EMP. A nuclear device has the power to deploy radiological gamma/beta rays, as well as highly charged particles to severe any sort of technological device.
Unless they have ships which use steam to operate, in that case we are fucked cause no one fucks with aliens with steam ships[/QUOTE]
Fun Fact: EMP has the same strength on an electronic device, regardless of power (power just means the EMP has a longer range, not that it's more devastating)
That being said, the odds of an alien ship lacking simple EMP protection, or whatever they build their crap out of, is silly.
[QUOTE=Leg of Doom;19875808]We need an organization like X-com[/QUOTE]
[url=http://www.facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=818183]Already have a FacePunch X-Com Effort.[/url]
[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;19842537]If they have FTL travel abilities, we're better off than if they're limited to lightspeed, because there's a chance they aren't solely after our resources.
Anyone heard of the concept of a light-speed bubble? The basic idea is that, much like has been demonstrated at various times in history on Earth, expansion into new areas is provoked by population pressures and resources shortages at home. Therefore, a spacefaring race would begin expanding outward from their solar system, in all directions, to alleviate population pressure in their home system. Now, historically, human population growth is about 2% per year, doubling every century. It's exponential. So, as time goes on and population continues doubling every century, the speed at which the front of that colonization wave must move to keep up with population growth keeps accelerating. Eventually, as the population doubles, and doubles, and doubles, that colonization front reaches it's limit: light speed. Once that happens, the population can't be exported to new systems fast enough, and they pack in tighter and tigher, consuming their resources faster and faster. Eventually, though shortage and famine and brutal war over dwindling resources, the bubble collapses and the civilization destroys itself, or suffers so much damage they can't realistically recover.
Theoretically, our galaxy could have dozens of these light-speed bubbles, each a few hundred light-years wide, and we would have no clue as to their existence. One thing is certain, though: if the advancing front of colonization has reached a substantial fraction of light speed, population and resource pressures behind it have reached the point where nothing but utter and complete devistation would await anybody in their path.
Hence, why FTL-equipped aliens have a better chance of simply being explorers, it means they've broken the light-speed bubble and not only explore faster than their colonization bubble moves, but have access to a much wider portion of the galaxy, and therefore resources. They could still be greedy and hostile, but a civilization desperately fleeing the pressures of overpopulation at .95c is almost guaranteed to not give a shit about some puny little pink primates inhabiting a ball of water and oxygen.
Stephen Baxter's book Manifold: Space dives much deeper into this concept, but I've given the basics.[/QUOTE]
That actually makes a lot of sense.
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