Are Sci Fi monsters and aliens too hard to kill?

[Justo Miranda]

One Certain Desert Nation has an active nuclear power program, and could probably have nuclear bombs within a relatively few years. They have plans and goals for vast megaprojects, advanced structures hundreds of km long. They dream of spaceflight, having had astronauts sent to space along with their own satellites; moon probes are not too far away. At the same time, they have a big box that religious people feel the need to walk around in the blazing summer sun while worshipping a rock. Hundreds regularly die in stampedes for this activity.

Advanced technology and backwards superstitions are not mutually exclusive, especially when you are able to simply buy the advanced tech from someone else. In Babylon 5, humans do not develop FTL, but buy it from the Centauri; in Star Trek, the Klingons, who remain violent savages, have an interstellar empire because *they* were once invaded and conquered by someone more advanced, drove them off and adopted their tech. The world today is filled with savages armed with advanced weapons and carrying smartphones, from Houthis with "hypersonic missiles" to urban thugs with switch-equipped Glocks.

In the westerns of the last century there was always a Frenchman who sold rifles to the Sioux

 

[Orionblamblam]

Many reasons to exterminate us

The core of our planet is filled with creamy uranium nougat, and the easiest way to get at it is to gravitationally disrupt the planet into a field of rubble. Prior experience has shown the miners that the native populations of such worlds tends to object, so it's more convenient to wipe them out in advance.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Each Interceptor was armed with a single low yield nuclear weapon

Ummm... if that's the case, why are the payload sections of the missiles the size of a large thermonuclear device?

 

[Orionblamblam]

In the westerns of the last century there was always a Frenchman who sold rifles to the Sioux

And now you get Nic Cage selling boxes of AK-47s to African warlords, Chevy Chase selling AI-controlled UCAvs to Latin American dictators. None of these people developed these weapons or understand the first thing about the technology; they might as well be Magic Boom Sticks. But someone with an understanding of the world barely more advanced than a Cro Magnon's can still kill ya dead if shown how to *use* the Magic Boom Stick.

 

[southwestforests]

Even stranger is that the plane is launched from a submarine that happens to always be in the right place in the ocean to intercept UFOs

As Spock so famously said about that at one Anderson con, "The needs of the story outweigh the nerds of the reality"

 

[southwestforests]

Ummm... if that's the case, why are the payload sections of the missiles the size of a large thermonuclear device?

As far as what I can offer, best thing I can say is locate and refer to the prop designer's personal notebooks.

 

[martinbayer]

Look at the world. There are cultures all about world religious domination *and* have developed their own nukes. Having a culture stuck in the 8th century *ethically* and religiously doesn't mean they won;t glom onto the latest technology. The jackholes who crashed into the Twin Towers happily trained on Microsoft Flight Simulator.


Roko's Basilisk, baby.

Myself, I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocko's_Modern_Life, but I realize that may be a uniquely personal choice.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Myself, I prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocko's_Modern_Life, but I realize that may be a uniquely personal choice.

Maybe (but really most probably) it's just my onset boomer age, but I really don't get this obsession with (to our best knowledge rather than our worst imagination) completely illusory long cancelled animated cartoon shows rather than what we are doing to our home planet *right now*?

 

[martinbayer]

You'll get to it eventually, padawan, once you cleanse your mind and free yourself from any obsessions with ongoing media franchises ...

 

[Hood]

Trouble is humans can only come at the problem from a humanistic level because we only know (slightly) how the human brain and psychology is wired.

We don't know what other lifeforms on this planet are 'thinking' or motivated by. Why do birds migrate (and why don't they get bored going to the same places every year)? Why are bees slaves to nectar addiction to act the whims of the flowering plant world? Do cows believe in a green grass God? Do viruses feel remorse at killing their host (and therefore themselves)? Do Dolphins ponder the meaning of life? Do oak trees wish they could move to some other village green cos' the local humans are rowdy where they are?

An alien species' motivation will be its own, we can't second guess it.
From all life on Earth we can ascertain that the fundamental reasoning will be to breed, multiply and sustain its life from nutrients. Everything else is icing on the cake, things like 'religion' seem confined to erect humans (and seems to have evolved very early in humanoid society if the first "caveart" by Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens is to be believed), we have no way of knowing if such explanation mechanisms are unique to the structure of the human brain. Perhaps species without means of expressing or communicating thoughts lack the means to develop such thoughts (although maybe Octopuses' gardens are temple shrines, who knows?).

 

[publiusr]

If alien life develops on a moon of a gas giant—I imagine it would be like a mobile hung over a crib to encourage reaching up in spaceflight.

They would have a gas-giant centric cosmology, thinking their star orbited it like everything else.

It might be that spaceflight had to come first and a heliocentric understanding came later.

 

[T. A. Gardner]

The core of our planet is filled with creamy uranium nougat, and the easiest way to get at it is to gravitationally disrupt the planet into a field of rubble. Prior experience has shown the miners that the native populations of such worlds tends to object, so it's more convenient to wipe them out in advance.

The Spanish preferred to enslave them and make them do the mining... At least until they were worked to death that is...

 

[Orionblamblam]

The Spanish preferred to enslave them and make them do the mining... At least until they were worked to death that is...

The Spanish were closer to their slaves than interstellar miners will be to planetary denizens.

 

[Justo Miranda]

The Spanish preferred to enslave them and make them do the mining... At least until they were worked to death that is...

The real Spanish rulers of the time were not the kings who had not been born with excessive genetic defects or had not been poisoned, but their confessors. The policy of the American colonies was decided in the sinister Casa de Contratación in Seville with the sole purpose of extracting the maximum volume of gold and silver. The pettiness and avarice of this institution went so far as to require the captains of the galleons to acquire provisions in Seville for the outward and return journey.

Buccaneer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The salary of a navigator pilot was lower than that of a constable, which explains why British corsair ships knew the navigation routes of the fleet of the Indies.

When the galleons unloaded their cargo, the officials quickly appropriated the metal and threw away everything else: geophysical investigations, seeds, official reports, requests for materials, weapons, naval supplies, navigation equipment, dictionaries of local dialects, examples of indigenous art...

I know of a case of a researcher who sent packages of medicinal herbs, including significant quantities of quinine, for years without getting any response.

He was imprisoned "for embezzlement" upon returning to Spain.

The saddest part of this story is that we Spaniards contributed the ships and the blood and the Genoese and Austrian bankers kept the money to pay off the enormous debts contracted by our foolish rulers.

 

[Hanz2k]

An alien species' motivation will be its own, we can't second guess it.

Let me disagree. I will be surprised if aliens will do not have something similar to Maslow Pyramid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

You simply need them to build civilization. Otherwise you stay on tribe level.

 

[Justo Miranda]

If alien life develops on a moon of a gas giant—I imagine it would be like a mobile hung over a crib to encourage reaching up in spaceflight.

They would have a gas-giant centric cosmology, thinking their star orbited it like everything else.

It might be that spaceflight had to come first and a heliocentric understanding came later.

The moons of gas giants can have very deep oceans; no one knows what happens to water at great depths because on Earth there are no examples to study them.

Superheated water - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

No one knows what can happen to amino acids under high pressure near the inner rocky core. The history of life formation in our solar system could begin at the bottom of one of these oceans, and falling on Earth after the moon disintegrated, due to tidal effects or a collision with another moon. Part of the inner ocean would freeze as it was ejected into space, and germs could reach Earth preserved by ice.

Moons are more numerous than rocky planets so we may assume that extraterrestrial life have been able to form elsewhere in the galaxy in the same way as it has in our Solar System.

 

[robunos]

Even stranger is that the plane is launched from a submarine that happens to always be in the right place in the ocean to intercept UFOs

According to HERE, there were four SkyDivers, I assume on patrol in different oceans, perhaps with one in port / refit . . .

cheers,
Robin.

 

[The K2]

Ummm... if that's the case, why are the payload sections of the missiles the size of a large thermonuclear device?

I believe in “The Complete Book of Gerry Anderson’s UFO,” it mentions that one Interceptor missile carries 10 nuclear warheads. They are ejected and create a “blanket” detonation where the UFO is damaged or destroyed when flying through it. In the episode “Exposed” the term “blanket” detonation is used.

 

[The K2]

According to HERE, there were four SkyDivers, I assume on patrol in different oceans, perhaps with one in port / refit . . .

cheers,
Robin.

“The Complete Book of Gerry Anderson’s UFO” states each Diver submarine has two Sky fighters for it. One replacement at each base. The info in the book is considered canon. This was also seen in the episode “Ordeal.”

 

[Orionblamblam]

I believe in “The Complete Book of Gerry Anderson’s UFO,” it mentions that one Interceptor missile carries 10 nuclear warheads.

Quantity has a quality all its own.

 

[CJGibson]

And of course there are the clothes... Stringvests are a very British quirk.

Indeed.


'See you peepil...'

(also difficult to kill)

 

[Nik]

IIRC, one analogy was with U-Boot hunting, where you'd straddle perp's probable location with a spread of tossed 'charges' to get a kill.

Another, more recent analogy was the nuke-armed surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles widely deployed by US...

 

[Rhinocrates]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7ogIuxegkQ