I've recently watched some of the latest sci-fi movies about Alien invasion and I've noticed that most of the movies of the kind have some common keys.
First of all, the Aliens are always represented as extremely ugly and scary creatures, which increase the level of dread about the invasion. An incursion of cute little alien bunnies wouldn't probably frighten us.
Curiosity and fear are common elements too. We are as curious to know everything about the Aliens as scared of them and their presence.
However, the biggest similitude is that humanity is, almost always, pictured as the winner of the fight against the extraterrestrial community.
Despite the numerous political, religious, and racial conflicts between people, and the wars we've never been able to stop, in the desperate time of an Alien invasion humanity unites.
The idea of a strong and confident united humanity under the believe of "Good always overcomes Evil" is wonderful but have we ever thought all this through?
What if the aphorism of good and evil apply for them too? What if they think we are the evil side?
Aside thoughts and beliefs, let's consider how we usually win this battle.
Movies show that the most common ways to defeat the Aliens are:
Using nuclear weapons;
Using their own technology.
Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons in our arsenal.
For those who do not know, nuclear weapons get their destructive power from nuclear reactions (either fission or combination of fission and fusion) which release a huge quantity of energy.
We have two kind of nuclear weapons the atomic bombs (A-Bombs) and a Hydrogen bombs (H-Bombs or Thermonuclear).
Skipping the differences between them at the physics level , let's just say that the H-bombs are more powerful.
Did you know, by the way, that the sun and other stars use nuclear fusion to generate thermal energy?
So, Aliens may have a clue of nuclear physics too.
Considering now that in chemistry exist exothermic reactions which release energy but we have also the endothermic process able to absorb energy; who knows if Alien technology is able to reproduce that process making harmless our nuclear attacks against them. Maybe their spaceships have endothermic shields able to absorb the power of our weapons and turn the same against us. If so, they would basically drop the F-bomb right on our face.
Moreover regarding the nuclear weapons, I ran a research on the web and found out that approximately 16,300 nuclear weapons are located on different sites in 14 countries.
The former Cold War foes still hold an arsenal capable of destroying the world several times over.
Obviously, the exact locations of those weapons are not of public knowledge, but papers and webpages report potential locations.
If I could find that info just using Internet, maybe Alien technology could actually locate these weapons.
They would then need just strategic attacks and...bye bye to humanity!
So, nuclear weapons can destroy them as they could destroy us.
What about defeating them by using their own technology?
That's even worse in my opinion.
First of all, we should be so lucky to get close enough to take it.
We should then understand how it works and how to use it.
If they are so stupid to wait till we figure that out, we certainly deserve to prevail.
It's their technology though, so they may know how to evade attacks or how to disable it.
Maybe they will just stare and laugh at us while we destroy our planet trying to use their weapons against them.
Have you ever thought, by the way, about their technology and how advanced it may be?
Just to have a small clue, we should first review what we learned so far about the universe and about space and what we achieved with our technology in that subject.
The Universe has an unknown size and the only part we know is the so called "observable universe" which diameter is 93 billion light-years. The edge is at 46.5 billion light-years away from us.
The farthest distance in space covered by a human being was during the Apollo 13 mission reaching the distance of 400,171 km or 248,655 miles from Earth.
However, we reached a farther point with Voyager 1, a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. It reached the distance of approximately 20.5 billion kilometers or 12.7 billion miles so far. It is considered the farthest man-made object.
About the speed, the probe Helios 2 holds the record with the incredible speed of 252,792 km/h or 157,078 mi/h.
Let's check now some recent fact.
Some of you may have heard already about TRAPPIST-1 and its planetary system. Basically, TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf star and recently it was found that this star holds a planetary system composed of seven terrestrial planets, of which three orbit within a habitable zone. TRAPPIST-1 and its planetary system are located at about 39 light-years away from us.
Do you know the length of a light-year? It's approximately 9.6 trillion kilometers or 6 trillion miles. Big numbers, I know.
Let's put it this way; it is like going from Rome to New York and back 695 million times or from the Earth to the Moon and back 12 million times. Got it? And that's only 1light-year.
TRAPPIST-1 is at 39 llight-years so at about 374 trillion kilometers or 234 trillion miles from us.
Since some of those planets could be habitable, let's suppose for a moment that the Aliens come from there.
Travelling at the same speed of the probe Helios 2, it would take about 169,000 years to cover that distance.
Of course, travelling at the speed of light (almost 300,000 Km/s or 186,411 Mi/s) it would take 39 years.
In both cases, I would consider the Alien technology extremely impressive.
In the first case, Aliens covered such a huge distance with a technology built 169,000 years ago. In the second case, not only their technology reaches the speed of light but they accomplished that 39 years ago.
I cannot imagine what they could achieve in technology in the meantime; or worse if they come form a distance farther than the observable universe.
We can cover such distances just with telescopes while they may just cross them.
Reaching a conclusion to this post, differently from the movies, I honestly think that the Alien tech and knowledge may be way too advanced, giving us no chance of victory if approached in war against them.
If their spaceships do nothing but float above our heads, I would give them the benefit of the doubt rather than thinking they came to attack us. They may be able to erase Earth from the universe in a matter of seconds so, what's holding them from doing that? to find out if we are a threat or not? In that case, I would wait for them to get in contact with us, or try to interact sending signs of peace. Getting extremly scared and bomb them, may put us in a dangerous position.
However, if they show a threatening approach, we can still unite and fight the common enemy hoping for a triumph. We have experience from the movies.
Maybe this theory is mine and only, but until it won't get disproved, I will keep on enjoying those movies and our fictional victory while still thinking that in reality Aliens would seriously kick our @$$!