Aliens with biology comparable to humans want to colonize the Earth, first wiping out human life. How would they do it, assuming advanced but realistic technology?
Off the table (at first) is orbital nuclear bombardment. While it would be effective, the radioactive fallout would leave the planet inhospitable for alien life -- the assumption of similar biology means that what hurts the humans would also hurt the aliens.
The biggest problem then might be similar: humans facing defeat leaving a scorched earth, unleashing our own nuclear arsenal against ourselves to allow the aliens at most a Pyrrhic victory. Salt the earth with salted bombs. To prevent this, the aliens would first somehow have to disarm the nuclear powers, which seems very difficult in our political world bent on hair-trigger mutually assured destruction.
Assuming the aliens do not have FTL, interstellar travel would have taken a very long time, so they have the technology to survive for long periods in space. Perhaps the aliens' best strategy is to drop nuclear bombs on us from space, then wait hundreds or thousands of years for the radioactive fallout to decay to tolerable levels, a wait still a small fraction of their total travel time. How will the ecosystem have fared? What, if anything, would have survived?
Instead of going for complete extinction, would it be better to enslave surviving humans?
No comments :
Post a Comment