Thinking of invading ETs is not to the liking of the scientists involved in SETI, the program to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Carl Sagan, Francis Drake or Jill Tarter, to name the best known, are of the opinion that an advanced civilization, which has been able to avoid self-destruction, will be essentially peaceful . But that is just a gratuitous assumption. In fact, the counterexample is ourselves: we passed the point of no return of atomic destruction during the cold war, but we continue to be involved in armed conflicts. Moreover, as archaeologists Mark W. Allen and Elizabeth N. Arkush state in their book Archeology of war , “Current archaeological investigations have demonstrated the disturbing fact that the prehistory and history of our world have been linked to the course of warfare.” ”. And they add: “in complex societies it is the leader or a small group of political elite who makes the decision to go to war; it is in small societies where the risks and rewards of a conflict are discussed, agreed upon and shared”. In essence, it only takes two people to declare a war between civilizations .
The “good-natured ETs” argument assumes that all extraterrestrial races, regardless of their biological, psychological, political, or social make-up, throughout their history of space colonization, behave like little sisters in mercy. Is it really believable? And not only that, but we must believe that all possible alien civilizations throughout their space history have always acted the opposite of how we do, who are bullies.
Be that as it may, if an advanced civilization wants to destroy the Earth, it can do so without any hindrance. The reasons can be very varied: see if not the funny novel Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by the Englishman Douglas Adams, where our planet is demolished because a highway is going to pass through here. In that case we won’t have a chance. But if their objective is not the annihilation of the human race… then we can harm them . You just have to think how.
The first step in the alien invasion
For the aliens, putting the Earth in check is very simple: they just have to destroy all our satellites . No casualties, no landings and firing their laser cannons -or whatever they are- from a reasonable cosmic distance. There is no doubt that this would be the first step in a hypothetical invasion. And what about subjecting the planet to a brutal electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that freezes all electronic components? Between 1961 and 1962 the Soviet Union launched its Project K, among whose objectives was the study of the effects of an EMP created by atomic explosions in the upper atmosphere. During the test on October 22, 1962, the PEM melted 570 kilometers of monitored telephone line and set fire to the protections they had placed, in addition to causing a fire that destroyed a power plant and disabled 1,000 km of underground electrical cables. Can you imagine something like this but at a planetary level? If they want to sink our civilization, the aliens just have to see to it that the power grid disappears.
Of course, if their idea is to take over the planet, in the end they will have to face us at some point. Learning to defend ourselves against an enemy technologically superior to us -it is what is called asymmetric warfare- is something for which we must be prepared . At first we may be tempted to think that, as the Borg said in the science fiction series Star Trek , all resistance is futile.
But it does not have to be like that.
How to resist the alien invader
We have proof of this in what was the most expensive war game in history, Millennium Challenge 2002 . With a budget of 250 million dollars, the US military designed it to test a series of new combat theories. The intended scenario was a war against a fictional country in the Persian Gulf, curiously similar to Iraq.
The enemy (Red Team) was put under the command of a retired general named Paul Van Riper, a Vietnam veteran. The Pentagon had foreseen a total and overwhelming victory of the Blue Team, the “good guys”, using their new ideas of technological warfare. The Red Team received an ultimatum demanding their surrender within 24 hours. Van Riper was clear: the enemy war fleet had arrived in the Persian Gulf to launch a preventive attack against his country. So following the old maxim that the best defense is a good offense, he decided to attack first. Knowing he had lost electronic warfare, he decided to go back to before World War II: he shut down all his radios and used motorcycle couriers to deliver the orders. To circumvent electronic countermeasures, it armed fast patrol boats and pleasure boats with first-generation missiles, those that are to point, shoot and wait to hit the target. And as if that were not enough, he prepared a massive wave of suicide attacks with small boats and propeller planes loaded with explosives in the purest kamikaze style. The result? When the (digital) smoke cleared it had sunk 2/3 of the Blue Team fleet. First war myth dismantled: being technologically superior does not guarantee winning a war .
So if we lose the battle for Earth and are overrun by aliens like they do in Independence Day , War of the Worlds , Earth Invasion, Mars Attacks!, Skyline, or so many other alien invasion movies, we can still stand up to them. Because something that is easily forgotten is that every war has two phases: invasion and occupation. If the ETs do not come as destroyers of worlds and want to take over the planet in the style of the lizards of V , we can give them the same bad time that our guerrillas did with Napoleon , the resistance with Hitler or the Iraqi militias with Bush.
Like Van Riper, we will have to be creative . In Iraq, the militias have done a lot of damage to the US army. In the ambushes on the transports, the Iraqis detonated their explosives as the vehicles passed with a simple cell phone. When the Americans started using inhibitors, the Iraqis were clear: take a technological step back and detonate them by pulling a cable. Necessity drives creativity, and that’s true even in war. Remember the movie Black Hawk Down ? In October 1993 the Somali militias in Mogadishu, with the AK-47 assault rifle and machine guns mounted on trucks, managed to give the elite American troops a real hard time with all their technological might. And they shot down two helicopters with an RPG! It would not have occurred to anyone that an anti-tank weapon could be used as a surface-to-air missile.
Human beings are very creative and would surely find ways to harm the alien occupying army using simple weaponry, even those not designed for war. Because it is better for us.
Reference:
Taylor, T.S. Y Boan, B. (2006) An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion, Brown Walker Press
