how the little green men might defeat us humans 5
Up to this point, we’ve been exploring this general topic by considering human internalities: what are the aspects and traits about us as humans that might provide ways for the little green men to bring us to our collective knees. We will come back to these internalities, as there is much much more to explore, but today, I would like to consider some of the externalities that could be brought to bear.
I have not done much in the way for formal research, on this post or on the others in this particular series. There is a lot of research to be done and it is research that should be done, but I’m taking the opportunity to speculate, pulling from my memories ideas that have stayed with me, variants of some of which I’m trying to work into my own writings.
Perhaps for instance the little green men, who might be none of the above, come to our solar system but remain out in the Oort cloud. If they were able to calculate sufficiently well, which one would hope they would be able to, then they could be patient and drop well-aimed rocks from the Oort cloud into the inner solar system.
Here, we encounter a potential discussion of aesthetics. Might they reshape the rocks into shapes or compositions of relevance or importance to them, or would they use the rocks in their raw shapes? Might they accept the greater challenge of playing billiards with the moons and planets, for no reason other than that is what they feel like doing? How much damage, for instance, might they be able to do with a single well-aimed rock? And yes, I recognize that this this is drifting into supervillain territory, but I think that might be unavoidable given the topic at hand.
There are variants of the dropping a rock theme. One that I have never been able to get out of my head is the narratively simple but physically challenging variant of attaching an engine to a rock and accelerating it to some appreciable fraction of the speed of light.
I think the reason this sticks with me is that all of the disaster movies that I love that involve asteroids and meteors, like Deep Impact and Armageddon and Meteor, and the innumerable others, always give us the time to react, to build and equip a ship to go forth and meet the offending rock. But with a rock moving incredibly fast by our usual standards of movement, there would be no such opportunity.
There is another idea lurking in the bushes here as well, the idea that if something is difficult given our current capabilities, then in some sense it’s legitimately and properly difficult. I come across this from time to time among my students, more the mathematics students than the aikido students, but I am less and less willing to accept that it’s true. We practice, we evolve our understanding and as we do so, our threshold of difficulty changes.
But there’s more than dropping rocks on our heads. One of my favorite movies from my early days is the Andromeda Strain. An alien microbe, for lack of a better term, finds its way to Earth via one of our own space probes sent to collect (as we’re now doing with comets, but that’s another exploration entirely), and it starts misbehaving, at least for a time.
Given the technologies that we’re currently developing, it would be relatively straightforward for an alien species to hire the expertise of human genetic coders to so nefarious things, and it wouldn’t even be necessary to attack humans directly.
Some of these things might not involve an external agent. A book that I dimly remember, and that I need to read again, is Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin, which as I remember it explores the basic issue of civilizations developing tools and technology more quickly than they develop the ethics and sensibilities about using those tools and technologies.
This is an issue that we read about every day, and have since we first developed the ability to sterilize the surface of our planet. Artificial intelligence might one day find its way into this list of tools and technologies, to go along genetic engineering, nuclear power and even perhaps the internet. I would probably put human psychology on this list as well, and I would be interested in knowing what things you would want to add to this list.
multijimbo 