Are Sci Fi monsters and aliens too hard to kill?

[shin_getter]

The point: a few decades ago the sci-fi section would have been HUGE compared to what it is today. Regardless of what the ratio of sex to sci-fi should be, interest in sci-fi literature *seems* to be way down. At the same time, interest among young men to date, and interest among women to reproduce, are way down. Insert your favorite sci-fi plot points to explain that HERE.

What kind of boomer gets their scifi fix from books? Anyone that knows tech can libgen books for free, and most books don't have enough idea density to be worth spending reading completely as opposed to getting abstracts.

If you are interested in learning about empire building to beat the alien menace you are far better off playing a 4x game and figure out whether you should build your dyson swarm for increased energy income or rush tech for singularity control for ship combat power. If you are interested in the technology you can start with kerbal space program all the way up to children of a death earth where you can figure out designing laser assemblies for improving beam quality, optimizing ion drive efficiency and radiator geometry for damage resistance. All those activities take far more time than a mere book.

Even if you are lazy and just interested in a general future narrative, you can enter dozens of sci-fi shooters and wargames that give you a more complete comprehension of warfare with force shields and exoskeletons.

Narrative via author is just bullshit from a person's imagination. Simulation (games) with tractable rules enables the creativity of everyone engaged in the to generate new possibilities. It is a far superior means of learning and exploring the system of operations of a currently unexperienced scenario.

Of course, that is with techno-optimists. With techno disasters like the pill, home appliances (with fatal results in fertility), television and social media (sanity), and terminator being one government contract plus smart engineering team away, the future minded people are often not thinking about shiny rockets to conquer the stars but how to enact the butlerian jihad. There is not much time, some are already thinking about how to bomb TSMC.

Warhammer 40k is such a popular narrative in the modern era is due to the recognition that improved technology is not a path to utopia, but just another step in struggle between agents and may even be a trap in itself.

 

[zen]

Well I'd question why aliens who have crossed interstellar space would comcern themselves with a species stuck on a single planet.
The resources they might want be mostly available without having to waste fuel landing and taking off from a deep gravity well like on earth.

We'd likely sit here powerless as they extract what they want from the asteroid belts, and the moons of this star system.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Well I'd question why aliens who have crossed interstellar space would comcern themselves with a species stuck on a single planet.

For *practical* purposes, if the aliens are able to cross interstellar distances with ease, then humans will be of little concern to them If it is a chore for them, as it would be for us, then we become a potential problem... if not right now, then in the relatively near future. If humanity, say, was doomed and we were able to send a single slowboat to an Earth-like world 30 lightyears away, filled with three hundred frozen colonists and the hopes of our entire ecosystem, then they'd have to make some hard choices when, tens of thousands of years after launch, they arrived at their destination and found, say, 1930's-level civilization on the only planet humans and maple trees and bunnies could live on.

But if the aliens had dirt-cheap hyperdrive and a Type-3 civilization, they might still take an interest in us. Why? Ask the Qu: their religion holds that *they* are the sole permitted sentient species, all others being abominations.

And then there's the generic Dark Forest.

 

[Justo Miranda]

Depends on the aliens. Also depends on just how stupid the writers make the humans and/or aliens. Take War of the Worlds (1950's version on) with "deflector shields." OK, the shields can protect them from a nuke. Let's just assume that. But a *smart* human would, upon realizing that, bury the damn nuke *under* them. If the war machines are walkers and not floaters, set off multiple nukes around them, convert the field they're walking on into lava or vapor. Drop a bunker buster nuke a few dozen meters away, set off few dozen meter underground, and bury the walkers under a mountain of debris.

If you want "evenly matched," then you need to go up against The Race or The Fithp. But more likely humanity will go up against the Vorlons or the Shadows or the Q or the Qu or Cthulhu, entities/races that have such a head start on us that our best science can't hope to even understand what we're looking at.

The Silver Queen series of short stories I'm writing tells the routine work of an exterminator of pests deemed harmful to interstellar human colonies. In these stories, humans do not risk being devoured by monsters, they simply locate them by robots, neutralize them with liquid nitrogen, put them in containers and launch them into spiral orbit towards the nearest star. Species resistant to extreme cold do not share human habitats, but if any are particularly dangerous... just heat them.

 

[Dilandu]

Imagine advanced aliens with hyperdrive and a thirst for conquest. Will they send their invasion fleets out to unexplored worlds... or scouts? Scouts make sense. They'd examine the place form orbit, then set down somewhere out of the way and start studying the biology. They would not need to be much more advanced than we are to be able to point a tricorder at a pile of lawn trimmings and know just about everything there is to know about terrestrial biology.

You mean, to know nothing about it? Your magical tricoder would be able to, at best, provide some physical and chemical data. It would provide nothing about life cycle, about reproduction, about feeding and behavior. Such information could be gathered only from prolonged observation, both in natural and artificial habitats.

 

[Dilandu]

Problem is, in the event of a Thing outbreak, "massive over-reaction" will likely be too little. And shooting individuals won;t do diddly to stop a Thing outbreak; you'll need to cleanse whole regions in nuclear fire, likely repeatedly and very, very thoroughly.

Of course, you did not think that the organism with so little biochemical barriers would be ridiculously vulnerable to all Earth microflora and microfauna? "Being able to assimilate everything" means basically "being a great food for everything". Bacteria and fugni would eat the Thing till the last infected cell in literally no time.

Not to mention that outside Antartic condition the Thing would probably not be able to survive due to overheating. Such ultra-rapid metabolism would require enormous amount of heat being vented outside. Unless the Thing is provided a constant supply of coolant below zero, it would just burn itself.

 

[publiusr]

The pods from invasion of the body snatchers work at a slower-perhaps more realistic pace…perhaps modifying buried human corpses.

A slow incubation process in a higher oxygen world might allow this:

Judas Breed

At first we saw a man, dressed in a somber, featureless black suit. he had a coat and skin-tight pants. His hair was short and curly brown. it stood straight up in its inch-long length. His eyes were open and staring. I noticed first that he had no eyebrows, only a curious dark line in the flesh...

villains.fandom.com

Slow assimilation with a colonist thinking to see a long dead crewmate is all that seems reasonable—and that’s pushing it.

 

[Rhinocrates]

Speaking of John W. Campbell, I do remember reading somewhere that as an editor, he gave directives to his writers that all aliens be both evil and ultimately defeated by human ingenuity and/or grit. Even 'Who Goes There?" ends with a clear human victory and it's John Carpenter's film that has the ambiguous ending. There'll be plenty of stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's watch to provide examples.

 

[PMN1]

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart : You know, just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.

 

[1635yankee]

Speaking of John W. Campbell, I do remember reading somewhere that as an editor, he gave directives to his writers that all aliens be both evil and ultimately defeated by human ingenuity and/or grit. Even 'Who Goes There?" ends with a clear human victory and it's John Carpenter's film that has the ambiguous ending. There'll be plenty of stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's watch to provide examples.

I've read very much the same thing. Indeed, according to something I've read about Asimov, he never wrote stories with aliens because of Campbell's human supremacy position.

 

[1635yankee]

Well I'd question why aliens who have crossed interstellar space would comcern themselves with a species stuck on a single planet.
The resources they might want be mostly available without having to waste fuel landing and taking off from a deep gravity well like on earth.

We'd likely sit here powerless as they extract what they want from the asteroid belts, and the moons of this star system.

I tend to agree this is more likely than an invasion of Earth, unless they desperately want complex organics. Of course, they could get those if we're all dead.

 

[Dilandu]

The pods from invasion of the body snatchers work at a slower-perhaps more realistic pace…perhaps modifying buried human corpses.

A slow incubation process in a higher oxygen world might allow this:

That's more possible, yes. Still, there would be enormous headache with going through all biochemical barriers...

 

[Nik]

Tangential, Turtledove's recent '3 Miles Down' uses that infamous 'Hughes Mining Barge', designed to secretly grab Soviet sub wreckage, as 'cover' for going after WTF put that sub on the bottom...

Tale captures the Nixon-era paranoia, name-drops relentlessly: You could fill a bingo-card with the period's well-drawn characters...

Then it veers off into seriously Alt-History...

Upside, the tale has flashes of T's efficient style before his wits-numbing mega-series.
Down-side, if a meal, I'd need ample pickles, ketchup and 'Tropical' fruit juice to help me clear my plate...

 

[zen]

I tend to agree this is more likely than an invasion of Earth, unless they desperately want complex organics. Of course, they could get those if we're all dead.

Depends on what organics they want.
We can easily imagine hardened low g 'native' organics they need grown in orbit.
What would they want with alien (earth based) organics?
Better justify the fuel needed to get out of the gravity well.

 

[Orionblamblam]

You mean, to know nothing about it? Your magical tricoder would be able to, at best, provide some physical and chemical data. It would provide nothing about life cycle, about reproduction, about feeding and behavior. Such information could be gathered only from prolonged observation, both in natural and artificial habitats.

Sure, observation over time is helpful. But a complete understanding of genetics and epigenetics, more complete by far than what *we* have, can tell you a *lot.* Such as "this species is vulnerable to our biological weapons." Or "the local biochemistry is based on mirrored proteins, so we'll need to burn off the entire ecosystem, rather than simply introducing our own stuff."

 

[Orionblamblam]

Of course, you did not think that the organism with so little biochemical barriers would be ridiculously vulnerable to all Earth microflora and microfauna?

It displayed no such vulnerability. And given how it operates, it would likely happily convert *that* too.

Not to mention that outside Antartic condition the Thing would probably not be able to survive due to overheating.

Except that it survived just fine indoors, and in whatever above-freezing ecosystem it was last on.

 

[Orionblamblam]

What would they want with alien (earth based) organics?

1: Tyrannid reasoning: it's all biomatter to be converted.
2: Dark Forest reasoning: any life form that *could* eventually develop into a threat needs to be exterminated.

 

[martinbayer]

"Unobtanium" is silly, but kinda comprehensible as a reason for interstellar commerce (though unless it's a new element, rather than an compound/alloy, the humans should be able to process it anywhere).

Spice by any other name. I think the relevant termini technici of the entertainment industry are, depending on the circumstances, "MacGuffin" or "Red Herring".

 

[martinbayer]

A real story,

that was published in Egyptian magazine from 1990s,a man lived in desert,
and he saw at night as he claimed,a flying saucer (UFO),in front of his house,
and when the alien was waking on earth,after Alien got off his craft, he secretly stalked him, and killed him with a huge stone from behind. He buried his body behind his house and also hid the flying saucer under the sand. It is clear that he was living in a desert oasis - of course he asked for money in exchange for people knowing his whereabouts, but no anybody turned to him or responded to him - there is no confirmation of this, of course

Right. One single lonely alien in a single lonely flying saucer lands next to a single lonely house in the Egyptian desert with a single lonely human inhabitant that secretly stalks the alien and promptly kills him without provocation or as much as a "hi there" or "how do you do". No wonder aliens probably declared Earth off limits after that - thanks a lot, Egypt...

 

[martinbayer]

All those activities take far more time than a mere book.

There's your problem right there. Humans are time limited, you know? Taking a lot of time is a bug, not a feature.

 

[Michel Van]

The Perry Rhodan series is full of Sci-Fi Monsters
From local invaders to elderly Gods that obliterate entire galaxy if needed.
(and to keep the reader entertained)

One tragic story here is the Beast-Lemurian War
It began with good intention of creating better soldier caste with genetics
what they created were aggressive super soldiers almost invulnerable and completely immoral.
yes they turn against there creators.
After century of Wars the Creators manage drive out those beast from there Galaxy,
While survive beast settle in Milky Way Galaxy, were Lemurians had large empire.

The paranoid beast consider those humanoids as a threat and start extermination war.
For next five hundert years they Lemurians fight against Beast's but loosing the war and face extinction.
a group of Lemurians scientist manage to analyse the Beast's and found a solution.
In a suicide mission they installed on Beast planets a apparatus, that on long term alter the Beast's.
it brought no victory for collapsing Lemurian Empire, but guarantee the it survival of Lemurian species.

Over millennium the Beast transform into Halut's, a peaceful Species,
Who notice on one of Lemurian planets, a new species called Humans.
The Halut's study for almost 500 years Mankind, before asking polite for first contact.
In series they are oldest Species in Milky Way, respected and fear by the others.
because none in right mind, declare war on Halut, they still mighty warriors.


oh by the way
How a Halut look:

 

[Dilandu]

It displayed no such vulnerability. And given how it operates, it would likely happily convert *that* too.

Yeah, because sci-fi authors generally clueless about biology Antarctica. One of the most sterile places on Earth. In any other place, it would be eaten by fungi and bacterias long before it could do any problems.

Except that it survived just fine indoors, and in whatever above-freezing ecosystem it was last on.

Well, it was sapient, after all, so capable of controlling its thermal regime. But outside of cold areas it would be able to exist only in refrigerator.

Sure, observation over time is helpful. But a complete understanding of genetics and epigenetics, more complete by far than what *we* have, can tell you a *lot.* Such as "this species is vulnerable to our biological weapons." Or "the local biochemistry is based on mirrored proteins, so we'll need to burn off the entire ecosystem, rather than simply introducing our own stuff."

That's fantasy. The reality? "After fifty cycles of observation, we could now safely conclude that the initial theory of High Thinker Mu-Tu-Bu, described in his "Some theories about life forms of alien planet called Ea-Ur-Th by local inhabitants, is completely wrong and therefore a new theory must be formulated, which is the purpose of this thesis".

 

[Dilandu]

The Perry Rhodan series is full of Sci-Fi Monsters
From local invaders to elderly Gods that obliterate entire galaxy if needed.
(and to keep the reader entertained)

Aw! I love "Perry Rhodan"! Alas, I can't read it in original - I don't knew German - but google translate improved enormously over years, so I read it in translation.

 

[Arjen]

a complete understanding of genetics and epigenetics, more complete by far than what *we* have, can tell you a *lot.*

This assumes knowledge of the Earth DNA/RNA-to-protein-transcription mechanism - it has taken the best and brightest of Earth scientists a very long time to reach the still incomplete understanding they have of genetics now - never mind epigenetics. I am consciously not writing *we*, the matter is complicated enough for the general public to have only a very simplified grasp of the mechanisms involved. Think of all the nonsense spouted by anti-vaxers. Basic observation played a big part in gathering the information - cogitate - synthesise the beginning of understanding.
An alien species would likely have a transcription mechanism of hereditary information to bio-functional 3D-shaped compounds (counterpart to Earth proteins) with little if any resemblance to its Earth counterpart. That's before we even get into the nitty gritty of replication, repair, et cetera of hereditary information.
The alien species would most likely have to start from scratch to understand Earth genetics. Unless, of course, they start reading Earth text books

 

[southwestforests]

Frequently, it's because YA fantasy/romance sells very well

Yep, books are a business, and business like to sell things at enough volume to finance making/acquiring more things to sell while at the same time paying the bills which come as a result of being in business, and having enough money left over to have some fun with.

And speaking of business ...

Stories in general are a business, book, radio, comics, manga, television, movie, and you want the audience to get emotionally invested/involved enough to buy that story and come back to buy more stories.

And part of getting that emotional investment is getting the audience to care about the Big Struggle of the story characters.

There is a certain quantity of Great Struggle which generates Great Caring in the audience. You want your story to hit a sweet spot which is between too little struggle to raise audience concerns for the characters and approaching but not quite reaching the point of Too much struggle this is impossible.

At the same time, there can also be stories which study how their characters are impacted, are affected, when winning is simply not possible; what happens to the human who is in that condition.

And then, the more the characters are required to do, to have, in order to kill the monster, the more the writers, producers, directors, effects makers, get to play.

In the end, the whole thing is about finding the balance point of tension and appeal.
And that goes for both the creators and the consumers.
Creators need to find the balance point which will reward their efforts.
Consumers look for stories which have a balance point which satisfies their desires.

"And so, there you have it", my thoughts on the matter.

 

[Dilandu]

The alien species would most likely have to start from scratch to understand Earth genetics.

Exactly.

 

[Arjen]

Exactly.

Reading the relevant text books would entail the chore of first working to understand Earth languages, which should be quite a project in itself.

 

[southwestforests]

What kind of boomer gets their scifi fix from books?

The kind I am.
Videogames give me nothing of value.
Books give me an experience which lasts.

 

[southwestforests]

the chore of first working to understand Earth languages, which should be quite a project in itself.

Ahh, just watch them when they come to English where you drive on parkways and park on driveways; and you wear boots and bonnets in Oklahoma while your cars have boots and bonnets in Oxford.

It is a pretty good bet that their efforts to comprehend English will so traumatize the aliens they will be driven to require lifetime psychotherapy and thus abandon their efforts to invade Earth.

 

[Dilandu]

Reading the relevant text books would entail the chore of first working to understand Earth languages, which should be quite a project in itself.

Yep, especially if aliens aren't close to humans in terms of sensory complex. Frankly, I suspect that any communication with aliens would be a major scientific project (for both sides) of its own. No "universal translator", but a hard work of many scientists to produce the most likely approximate meaning of any message.

 

[southwestforests]

No "universal translator", but a hard work of many scientists to produce the most likely approximate meaning of any message.

"Oh great. Transmission garbled. Resend."

"What'd they say?

"I think they want us to send them pictures of Greta Garbo."

 

[shin_getter]

Well I'd question why aliens who have crossed interstellar space would comcern themselves with a species stuck on a single planet.
The resources they might want be mostly available without having to waste fuel landing and taking off from a deep gravity well like on earth.

If life is as rare as it appears from observations of stars, the sheer rarity would make it interesting to any other intelligent life.

If the alien is a evolved social species (as opposed to eusocial, engineered) you can expect most of the same motivation as humans.

Which is to say good chance that alien intellectuals will need us to "prove" their grand theories of life. Alien moralists will spread moralisms here and back their. Alien bureaucrats will try to figure out how to imposed more rules on everyone everywhere. Alien capitalists will try profit from tourism and trade while monopolizing the operation. Alien imperialists will be thinking about how to use military power on the matter. Alien conservationists will be trying to stop first contact and so and so on.

It is the same reason why humans bother learning about dophins even though they do not hold useful resources.

Humans are too developed to be seen as a mere curiosity, as the secrets of interplanetory existence and general machine intelligence is accessible with a century if collapse does not happen. Without stuff like non-turing intelligences and post relativistic physics aliens may not be all that ahead.

 

[shin_getter]

Yep, especially if aliens aren't close to humans in terms of sensory complex. Frankly, I suspect that any communication with aliens would be a major scientific project (for both sides) of its own. No "universal translator", but a hard work of many scientists to produce the most likely approximate meaning of any message.

They get internet access, they run it through their version of chatgpt, they figure out humanity.

The bandwidth of modern civilization is far beyond that of animals waving at each other with limbs.

The success of no-prior learning algorithms is that just about anything can be brute forced, and zettabytes left and right may look hefty, it may take no clock time whatsoever with advanced sensors and data processing.

 

[Arjen]

Signal to noise. If they are the discerning kind to zip past fifty seasons of Judge Judy... I really don't want to spend any more time in presenting more items of garbage-to-be-avoided, Piers Morgan just said hi, I need some industrial strength tipple to wash away that particular image.

 

[Dilandu]

"Oh great. Transmission garbled. Resend."

"What'd they say?

"I think they want us to send them pictures of Greta Garbo."

More likely "Doctoral thesis: Probabilistic analysis of ten potential meanings of the word-construct "trk-RED-trk-trk (ultrasound) trrrrrrrrrrrrrk-GREEN" common in the language of Trk alien specie"

 

[Dilandu]

They get internet access, they run it through their version of chatgpt, they figure out humanity.

What could ChatGPT work out of something it have no clue what it is? You got some kind of digital signal. You have absolutely no clue how exactly and WHAT exactly is encoded here. Okay, let's assume you bruteforce the coding - which may not be possible even for aliens - and you are able to... do what? You have absolutely no clue what those chunks of information supposed to be. You can't say what parts of data stream are what. Internet didn't work on analogue signals; video stream, statistical data, encyclopedic knowledge and naughty pictures of local inhabitants copulating looks the same.

Okay, let's even assume that super-poweful alien AI would somehow manage to discriminate the data and figure out, say, video stream. And oh, we have a big problem - humans use video and audio data, but aliens main sensor input is echolocation. The super-AI could not turn the video stream into anything comprehensible for aliens, because it have no clue how exactly objects on video are ranged in therms of ultrasonic echolocation. There is NO such data in human video stream. And human written language did not "sound"; aliens could not comprehend how flat characters on paper could represent information (their "writing" is three-dimensional to form echo patterns).

The success of no-prior learning algorithms is that just about anything can be brute forced, and zettabytes left and right may look hefty, it may take no clock time whatsoever with advanced sensors and data processing.

Yep, and you would get some utterly fantastic story that have no relation to reality. For example, tapping the Internet, the AI would come to reasonable conclusion that humans have enormous interest in reproduction, and all their culture build around various forms of sexual intercourse (simply because there are A LOT of porn in the web). Tapping the American TV, it would came to conclusion that some humans - mainly those who wear capes - could fly, punch through the meter of steel and fire lasers from eyes. And oh, the humanity main purpose seems to be doting for small furry creatures that make purring sounds.

 

[Arjen]

aliens main sensor input is echolocation

There's that. Think. Squids communicate by coloured spots on their bodies. Communication by pheromones? Bees dance. Those are just Earth examples, now extrapolate to the real exotics exobiology might throw our way.

 

[Dilandu]

There's that. Think. Squids communicate by coloured spots on their bodies. Communication by pheromones? Bees dance. Those are just Earth examples, now extrapolate to the real exotics exobiology might throw our way.

Exactly. And for basically any case outside of "aliens have near-human sensory system" - which is not exactly highly probable - would made Earth data streams utterly incomprehensible for aliens. No AI could possibly figure out the data that simply wasn't included into data stream. Aliens use echolocation? Humans imaged are flat and provide no ranging or Doppler data. Pheromones? Human data streams have almost zero mention of smell or anything like that. Even simple colours would be problematic, because aliens most likely have different visual spectrum.

 

[zen]

shin_getter.
Good points based on certain assumptions of what kind of alien intelligence might arrive into our System.

Such a society is unlikely to have quite the same nature as our own as their natures would be subtly different and this could be the most dangerous element to our interaction. To both sides fooling themselves they understand each other well and in the process triggering violence.
After all humans manage this between our societies. Even though we be the same species.

There's a rather nice series by C.J.Cherryh called the Foreigner series. That charts just such difficult interaction. Albeit under unique circumstances.

 

[hesham]

Right. One single lonely alien in a single lonely flying saucer lands next to a single lonely house in the Egyptian desert with a single lonely human inhabitant that secretly stalks the alien and promptly kills him without provocation or as much as a "hi there" or "how do you do". No wonder aliens probably declared Earth off limits after that - thanks a lot, Egypt...

It was not my magazine,also I am not the writer of this article,all he said: the
craft was 2.5m and it accommodated one alien only,with a weapon looks like
a gun in his hand,and the saucer was high up about 2m,when he did that the
disk shut down and got down to earth ?!.

I just displayed what he claimed exactly,and I mentioned that; no confirm
about his novel.