Are Sci Fi monsters and aliens too hard to kill?

[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

 

[pathology_doc]

The Bomb whether A (1950s War of the Worlds) or H (1990s Independence Day) is equally useless.

But is this convention realistic?

No.

The invulnerability was brought in because Wells's original Martians would have been dead meat in the face of modern weapons. Even in War of the Worlds itself, the humans were quite capable of destroying Martian war machines if they could get the element of surprise with heavy artillery (Shepparton, the Thunder Child).

 

[1635yankee]

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.

Those enormous debts were contracted because a) they had no sensible system of taxation (exempting the people with something like 99% of the wealth and income is not brilliant economics. See how well it worked for Louis XVI and Nicholas II) b) they spent it on conquering or buying their way to taking over most of Europe.

 

[uk 75]

This old thread was great fun and ranged far and wide without getting a rock dropped on it.
One idea that has always fascinated me is the suggestion that "aliens from space" have been on Earth throughout our history.
Evolved humans from civilisations thousands of years more advanced than our own use Earth as a kind of experiment or source of entertainment (or both). Since they are identical in every way to us we have no way of knowing who they are. In some cases they may also not know who they are.
Scary, comforting or impossible?

 

[shin_getter]

Since they are identical in every way to us we have no way of knowing who they are. In some cases they may also not know who they are.
Scary, comforting or impossible?

Sounds like a setting for pixie manic anime girlfriend [/brainrot]. I mean I did watch one two with such a premise with the moon being the alien surveillance mega-structure to have the final battle (after 5 seasons for one of them).

Being effectively identical means reproduction which just make the difference ultimately, social. Learning about the "truth" in such a environment can increase the sense of scale/awe/status/importance over the mundane, before one realizes whatever "truth" just get you into a new circle of annoying social comparisons that is a given for human-like social animals. (and being the equivalent of being uncontacted amazon tribes being observed by advanced electronic surveillance is so low status)

Then there is the whole, "The real cylons" thingy too.

 

[DWG]

This old thread was great fun and ranged far and wide without getting a rock dropped on it.
One idea that has always fascinated me is the suggestion that "aliens from space" have been on Earth throughout our history.
Evolved humans from civilisations thousands of years more advanced than our own use Earth as a kind of experiment or source of entertainment (or both). Since they are identical in every way to us we have no way of knowing who they are. In some cases they may also not know who they are.
Scary, comforting or impossible?

There's Weber's Dahak trilogy, where the advanced Humans are our own ancestors, marooned here for 50,000 years, in which time they/we've multiplied across the globe.

 

[Orionblamblam]

"Ancient spacefaring humans" are conceivable, though unlikely. Some civilization rose to industry during the depths of some Ice Age when sea levels were 100's of meters lower, and all their cities were on the coast. They launched out into space without leaving anything bigger than a peanut in geosynchronous, no industry on the Moon, no colonies on Mars, then wandered off into the Kuiper belt or something.

Beyond the obvious problems there, humans seem to be able to generate entirely new and distinct ethnic groups in 10K years or maybe less. Space Humans separated from us by 20K or more years would probably look quite distinct. Japanese people with black skin, blue eyes and all-over blond fur, or something.

 

[shin_getter]

"Ancient spacefaring humans" is a fun trope..... wait

The correct line of thinking on this matter is obviously... TVTROPES~

I guess a place to start can be...

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanAliens

 

[Dilandu]

There's Weber's Dahak trilogy, where the advanced Humans are our own ancestors, marooned here for 50,000 years, in which time they/we've multiplied across the globe.

"Perry Rhodan" was MUCH earlier, and handled the matter better (David apparently did not knew at this time much about biology, and the obvious genetic similarity between Earth humans and all other Earth life)

 

[Dilandu]

"Ancient spacefaring humans" are conceivable, though unlikely. Some civilization rose to industry during the depths of some Ice Age when sea levels were 100's of meters lower, and all their cities were on the coast. They launched out into space without leaving anything bigger than a peanut in geosynchronous, no industry on the Moon, no colonies on Mars, then wandered off into the Kuiper belt or something.

Well, as I mentioned - "Perry Rhodan" done that with ancient Lemurian civilization. According to the series, Lemurians were the first human civilization on Earth; they evolved on Lemuria continent in Pacific, and essentially became spacefaring civilization before properly settling all the Earth (their development was complicated by interference of both alien species and time-travelling humans from the future, so it was NOT exactly completely natural). Lemurians created their own interstellar empire, while not spreading much around the Earth - if I recall correctly, they considered it to be sort-of sacred homeworld, and wanted to preserve its unpopulated areas.

Then Lemurians came into a conflict with the technolocially superior alien specie, the Haluters. After about a century of fierce fighting, Lemurians lost the war. While they managed to protect Earth from total destruction, their home continent - the Lemuria - was hit by a thousand-gigaton range bomb, that caused so much tectonic instability, that the whole continent sunk (conveniently erasing all signs of Lemurian civilization from the planet). The remaining Lemurians from Earth and other colonies escaped to Andromeda Galaxy.

The coming Ice Age, made worse by Haluter bombardment, erased what's left from Lemurian civilization on Earth, and reduced a very small number of surviving Lemurians to stone age conditions. They eventually became the ancestors of modern mankind (survivors on other Lemurian-colonized worlds also became the ancestors of several "human aliens" species)

 

[DWG]

"Perry Rhodan" was MUCH earlier, and handled the matter better (David apparently did not knew at this time much about biology, and the obvious genetic similarity between Earth humans and all other Earth life)

That's covered in (IIRC), book 2. Galactic history is a repeating cycle of human civilizations rising and being knocked over by the Achuultani, a berserker species. So over multiple millennia pretty much any planet in the local region matching their/our original home has been been seeded with that biosphere. Humans match everything else because we all evolved together, we just didn't evolve here.

I'm not sure it would stand up to current knowledge of evolutionary genetics, but for a 1990s book it does make a decent attempt to cover it.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Well, as I mentioned - "Perry Rhodan" done that with ancient Lemurian civilization.

Meh. The real problem with "ancient humans as aliens" is that an industrial civilization recent enough for *humans* to have been involved would have left detectable traces. Maybe all the buildings and roads would have eroded away... but all the oil would have been pumped out, all the readily accessible coal scraped off, long-lasting chemicals (plastics, radioisotopes, etc.) scattered all over everywhere.

A somewhat more realistic way to get human aliens: 5,000 years ago aliens swung by, scooped up a village or three of humans and transported them elsewhere. Said humans either became part of the alien civilization or, being humans, learned their tech and rebelled.

 

[Dilandu]

I'm not sure it would stand up to current knowledge of evolutionary genetics, but for a 1990s book it does make a decent attempt to cover it.

It won't. But evolutionary biology is a science that rarely got appreciated by sci-fi writers. Albeit arguably it fare better than agronomy (recall that comedy, "Soylent Green", when mankind was DOOMED!!! from the terrible overpopulation of four billions?)

Meh. The real problem with "ancient humans as aliens" is that an industrial civilization recent enough for *humans* to have been involved would have left detectable traces. Maybe all the buildings and roads would have eroded away... but all the oil would have been pumped out, all the readily accessible coal scraped off, long-lasting chemicals (plastics, radioisotopes, etc.) scattered all over everywhere.

As I mentioned - and as you could read from my description - this was hand-waived by Lemurians not settling much on Earth outside Lemuria, and gaining (from aliens and time-travelling humans) the technology for spaceflight and nuclear fusion before they managed to create world-spanning civilization. They don't have much need for oil and coal after that. Basically, outside of Lemuria (which got sunk into Pacific), they have only a few settlements in Asia and North America, most of which were either bombed to dust by Haluters, or destroyed by glaciers.

 

[Orionblamblam]

As I mentioned - and as you could read from my description - this was hand-waived by Lemurians not settling much on Earth outside Lemuria, and gaining (from aliens and time-travelling humans) the technology for spaceflight and nuclear fusion before they managed to create world-spanning civilization.

That's all very unreasonable. Any species with the wanderlust to go to the stars is going to go to the next island over first.

But, shrug. It's low-science-fidelity space opera along the lines of John Carter/Lensman. Can't expect too much.

 

[Dilandu]

That's all very unreasonable. Any species with the wanderlust to go to the stars is going to go to the next island over first.

As I explained to you already, the Lemurian development was influenced by aliens and time-travellers from rather early position. It's not "natural" situation at all.

But, shrug. It's low-science-fidelity space opera along the lines of John Carter/Lensman. Can't expect too much.

3000+ books.

 

[Michel Van]

The HALO game series play with this trope Humans as Forerunners
The Human civilisation is wipe out by wars with aliens and following "Flood" plage.
The species survived thank to robot and computer that stored human DNA.
Who waited until the Flood died out and recreate Humans on new untouched planet, later called Earth.

I play with this trope for little project i work on.
Here Aliens land on Earth and there Humans
but surprise the real aliens are living inside the Humans bodies as symbiont.
Around 10000 years ago they discover Earth and Human population
and discover that human bodies have more applicability, as there plant eating Chalicotheriums host.
So they took humans as template for there new bodies

The Anti-Thesis to Van Däniken theory:
Aliens not create humans on Earth, The Aliens become humans !

 

[Foo Fighter]

I'm afraid aliens have evolved into a subset of hominid.

Lawyers.
Accountants.
Tax officials.
Conspiracy theorists.

I know, we should have been told yonks ago.........

 

[Michel Van]

But, shrug. It's low-science-fidelity space opera along the lines of John Carter/Lensman. Can't expect too much.

Perry Rhodan survived until today with 3320 issue publish
it now far from classic low-science-fidelity space opera along the lines of John Carter/Lensman.
Humanity try to find it way of living in a Univers full dangers

 

[Orionblamblam]

3000+ books.

And yet neither Disney nor netflix have snapped up the IP and made a crappy point-missing "adaptation."

 

[Dilandu]

And yet neither Disney nor netflix have snapped up the IP and made a crappy point-missing "adaptation."

Actually there was an American TV adaptation in 1970s. It was horrible and point-missing pretty enough.