some of my readers are sadistic tacticians…
The subject of alien invasions came up on a couple of times on this blog, once during its early days, and as again as the much advertised documentary with Stephen Hawking warned us no to talk to any aliens. In the relevant posts, I dared to express some optimism that we might not be all that helpless should extraterrestrial armadas come knocking on our front door and that some of the weapons we have today are nothing to simply sneeze at or disregard. But it appears that reader Don Roberto found a weakness in my defensive strategy and could quite confidently apply to be the architect of our planet’s invasion should the job become available…
EMP? I laugh at your EMP. Petawatt laser? I sneer at your petawatt laser. Fusion bombs? I wave my hand dismissively at your fusion-tipped ICBMS. Ok, not my hand exactly, it’s my fneep (whistle). But you get the message. And why do I ignore all of these deadly devices? Because I’m out in the asteroid belt, dropping very big rocks on your measly technology centers. After a dozen or two are dropped on cities or in the oceans near cities, we inform you that not only will you not threaten us, you will build orbital ships and ferry up to us whatever materials we want. If not, we’ll stomp your technology entirely flat, then descend to sully our superior skins taking the resources we want. We have no shortage of rocks, and you live in a pretty deep gravity well…
Bravo Don, because that’s one hell of an interplanetary attack plan. Well done. Even though it would take up to a few years or as little as six months to successfully slam an asteroid into the Earth depending on whether an alien conqueror wants nature to do all the work, or wants to guide the rock with a small rocket for precision, it would be very difficult to stop the projectile and all it would take is just one really big asteroid to wipe out pretty much all of us in one fell swoop. I certainly hope any unfriendly aliens aren’t reading this and getting a few not too peaceful ideas on how to mine our planet for resources. Though as Don and I both agree, they’re probably far more likely to just mine the asteroids for whatever they want since they’re already there and sitting on over several trillion tons worth of copper, nickel, cobalt, gold, platinum, iridium, silver and lithium as well as organic molecules and water ice which could be used to manufacture deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors.
