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[DJ]

No, it's more like a penny being delivered by monkey butlers.

Oh, and I reckon that asteroid belt isn't all that rich in heavy metals. Even M type are mostly lighter metals. heavy stuff tends to be closer to the system's centre, which tend to be fairly asteroid-free.

[dragnar]

Yeah, monkey butlers that proceed to steal the penny and punch you in the face just for good measure. Sure aliens might be superior to us in every way, but it would still take them some amount of effort to take over, and earth does not have that many resources.

[JoshuaFH]

Yeah, monkey butlers that proceed to steal the penny and punch you in the face just for good measure. Sure aliens might be superior to us in every way, but it would still take them some amount of effort to take over, and earth does not have that many resources.

Compared to...?

[redacted123]

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[DJ]

And just what do you think we can do against orbital bombardment? If they blow up a couple of major cities, we're going to be crawling into their asses so deep you won't see our shoelaces, just if they promise to stop killing us.

[Vester]

If they blow up a couple of major cities, we're going to be crawling into their asses so deep you won't see our shoelaces, just if they promise to stop killing us.

And that's when we strike!

[DJ]

We shall beat them with haemorrhoids!

[redacted123]

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[JoshuaFH]

"Easily consumable"? What are you talking about, aliens or Unicron?

[dragnar]

And just what do you think we can do against orbital bombardment? If they blow up a couple of major cities, we're going to be crawling into their asses so deep you won't see our shoelaces, just if they promise to stop killing us.

Blowing up cities takes resources. Resources that would be better spent mining some other planet for whatever they need. We offer some resistance simply by existing. No matter how advanced they are we must still be removed before earth can be taken over.

In summary: No resistance is always better than minimal resistance.

[DJ]

But that's just the thing. We *are* a resource! Workforce is hardly worthless. And they'd only need to kill like .001% of us to get unconditional surrender.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

Anything capable of getting here in the first place would be at such a point that machine labor would be far more... sane, than trying to enslave a bunch of weak, fragile, psychotic aliens. Stronger, cheaper, more efficient, inherently obedient...

[Il Palazzo]

Earth as a resource:
+It's got some heavy metals on it(like titanium, iridium, Metallica, AC/DC)
+It's populated with cheap workforce

-Apart from Metallica and AC/DC, all the metals can be found anywhere else in the universe, most likely the very same solar system the aliens came from.
-It's populated with angry, warmongering savages.
-It's a huge gravity well, making it so much easier to exploit a planet with a lower gravity, or even one of those asteroids.
-So I've got enough energy available to travel lightyears long distances, but I can not use this same energy source to get all the gold I'll ever need through nuclear transmutation, and without the time lag involved in harvesting from a faraway planet?
-What the hell is wrong with my sciencists, couldn't we at least target some young planetary system, which is so much more likely to have higher ratio of heavy elements than this? I mean, come on, Sol is so old, it's original star cluster managed to completely diperse.

a 1,000,000 lightyear radius from the center of the universe.

You might want to add a few zeros there, unless you're planning on making the Milky Way center of the Universe(which is an idea you best drop anyway).

[Neruz]

This is assuming they do have FTL. That their technology isn't more like how science will realistically go without it - higher and higher speed computation, towards digitization of intelligence, or at least very powerful research and engineering tools. Realistically, interstellar distances are the exact opposite of what you need to build better computers. That means they might not have bothered to establish a foothold on other planets, and even if they have, they might be more vulnerable than we are to sudden attack, or at least more cautious with better tools to exercise that caution.

We aren't afraid of swords and plate-mail anymore. We have guns. Does that mean we'll let someone walk around in the city threatening people at sword-point? No. We detain them, kill them if we have good reason to believe they are about to kill someone else. Same, I think, with us. Our best bet is to step carefully. Unfortunately that will never happen.

If they don't have FTL, the chances of them finding us are pretty much nonexistant.

Seriously, space is just that big. Without FTL it's just flat out not feasible to travel beyond your star system and any immediate neighbours.

It's a tossup. They might be quite close, depending on how common life is. http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-ks.htm and http://www.solstation.com/stars3/100-gs.htm is one reference, for G and K type stars. Obviously the number in range is going to increase non-linearly - you won't find 1500 more by going out 200 light years, rather quite a bit more. 200 LY is not an impossible distance at sub-light speeds, especially not relativistic speeds relatively easily achievable with an unmanned device. If they were at exactly 200 ly, and were actively looking for radio waves with large telescopes and without much interference from their own technology (something we can assume given they are at a stage that requires long-range communications, since we haven't heard anything out there yet), we'd still have well over 300 years to prepare for an automated attack. But the way things are going now I don't think we'd be prepared, even given that time span... Eh, who knows really?

Oh i'm not saying it would be infeasible to find other aliens nearby, just that it would be infeasible to actually do anything to them.

To take your 200 LY example, that means that even at light speed, it's going to take at least 200 years to get from there to here. There is no way in hell you can manage any sort of invasion or anything with a 200 year travel time.


The old Medieval kingdoms managed with a few years travel time, and i'd say anything out to ~10 light years would be doable, but difficult. Anything further than that isn't though, especially since in order to go much further than that you're going to need 'generation' ships, which are never going to work.

And just what do you think we can do against orbital bombardment? If they blow up a couple of major cities, we're going to be crawling into their asses so deep you won't see our shoelaces, just if they promise to stop killing us.

We can already send nuclear missiles into space you know. If they're in orbit, they're in range.

[Eagleon]

No, it's more like a penny being delivered by monkey butlers.

Oh, and I reckon that asteroid belt isn't all that rich in heavy metals. Even M type are mostly lighter metals. heavy stuff tends to be closer to the system's centre, which tend to be fairly asteroid-free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#Composition

10% of an estimated 3.0-3.6 × 1021 kg (hurf Wikipedia source), with ample propellent in the same spot you find the metal (assuming they're after metal, and not silicon or carbon for computers/mega-constructions), no planetary gravity well, vastly less powerful solar gravity well, no atmospheric/climate issues, simplified geology for easy automated refineries, and no angry/noisy apes. If I were an alien I'd go after those first. And if I wanted to go for a metal-rich planet anyway, I'd just go the whole nine yards and head for Mercury. Regardless, they have a choice of other systems too, potentially very young ones in the process of forming planets nearer the star, with much more interesting and low-grav accretion disks.

Oh i'm not saying it would be infeasible to find other aliens nearby, just that it would be infeasible to actually do anything to them.

To take your 200 LY example, that means that even at light speed, it's going to take at least 200 years to get from there to here. There is no way in hell you can manage any sort of invasion or anything with a 200 year travel time.

To quote yourself,

We can already send nuclear missiles into space you know. If they're in orbit, they're in range.

They wouldn't have to come here to kill us at all. That would be silly. They'd just have to send something that could. Nukes are primitive though, and would ruin a perfectly good planet. I'd expect Von-Neumann machines programmed to destroy sources of electromagnetic radiation. That would bring us to our knees pretty quickly (can you say Dark Ages?), and keep us there unless we were very, very organized and reacted quickly to preserve the technology to -maybe- rebuild and fight back with our own machines. Which humans tend not to do in the face of crisis.