With Falling Skies having just finished it's run on TV over here i'm in the mood for more! There were very few things i would call problems with the story, without being overly picky. It would have been nice if the 'using the aliens weapons against them' had turned out to be more than just using their magic bullets though.
So the skitters were a slave race (mutated slaves, too) afterall and the real leaders seem to be the sterio- typical alien basketballers. I thought the Mechs might be the leaders for a while. I mean, if you are the leader would you go out unarmed and vertually unarmoured or would you be riding the mechanical suit of exoarmour with a heavy machine gun? Turns out the leaders didn't even go out on patrol which makes even more sense really.
There's still one big question to be answered in the second series and that is: Why are they here? Have they really travelled across interstallar space just to collect sccrap metal? Maybe it's an interplanetary ring of pedophiles? Whatever it is it's probably not going to satisfy my requirements for what is a good reason for aliens to invade earth (or any other extra system planet) but with a bit of thought Spielberg and Robert Rodat might come up with a good reason.
So what are some bad reasons to invade earth?
Let's look at an oldschool classic, atleast one i loved when i first watched in the 80's, V.
While it doesn't seem to say on IMDb or Wikipedia why the aliens were here, except for general domination i clearly remember the plot involving a, wait for it, plot to steal the earths water. Dun dun DUN! But the earth is 70% covered with water, that sounds plausible, doesn't it?
Sure, on a superficial level and that level was more then enough for me when i was 9. But now i'm a fair bit older and i am more fully aware of the absurdity of an invasion force travelling across many hundreds, possibly thousands of light-years to come to earth to take our water. But we still have a whole planet of water, why isn't it plausible? Because water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, two of the most abundant elements in the universe which readily react with each other to form water and this water can be found freely available just floating around in space!
In short, why would you go to the trouble of creating faster than light space travel, find a suitable planet, invade under false pretenses, defeat the locals and suck up the water against the force of gravity when all you'd need to do would be to build a mega scale wet and dry vacuum cleaner and suck up the free water in space?
How about plain old "fuck you" as a reason for invading, ala Independence Day?
Well, i suppose that depends on their motivations really. Maybe a human leader said something which translated as an insult to the alien leaders mother, maybe they think we smell funny. Were the ID aliens even given a motivation for their attack? I don't remember and don't care enough to look it up.
I suppose the reason behind "fuck you" is "who cares". The film makers didn't care enough about the story to give a decent reason because all the wanted to do was show off Will Smith savingamerica the world(!) In a fairly obvious remake of H. G. Wells War Of The Worlds. Put in some flashy effects, give Smitty some clever quips and make him punchout an alien, then save everyone with a computer virus!
No reason counts as a bad reason.
Various different media offer us enslavement as a reason for invasion.
Again there is the massive obstacle of travelling-across-half-the-galaxy-just-to-get-here to overcome. And what would they do with us once we were their slaves? Send us to work in some sort of LEO labour camps building their next invasion fleet? (That opens them up for some of their precious FTL and frickin' laser technology falling into the hands of the slaves and eventually being used against them, maybe generations later) I'm pretty sure that a race capable of such a feat of space travel would be more than capable of building completely compliant automated manufacturing robots, much like we non-space-faring-folk already possess, which would be more capable, and less troublesome than enslaved humans to do the work we would be doing.
So what this leaves, first is an honourary recipient of my reasons to invade and this is only honourary as they didn't really invade, they were just going to the (sorta) local garden center.
ET. He didn't invade but he had a good reason to come to earth, well, better than most anyway. As a race of space faring vegetation theives borrowers (kinda like my mum) earth would be a popular destination. Of all the things that are out in space a viable ecosystem would probably be one of the less common. Especially one which is apparently a perfect match for the biology of whatever species ET belongs to.
There are probably (many) millions of planets like earth in the universe but only a small number are likely to be within a manageable distance from any given intelligent species home. For a race of plant collectors like ETs people earth would be something of a goldmine. We have what is probably, to be honest, a very typical level of biodiversity here, which means many millions of plant species for the anoraky little guys to froth over. None of our plants would be exactly the same as any plants they had seen before.
Academic research is a valid reason for invasion but as we know, ET didn't invade us so misses out on a prize.
Third place goes to these beauties!
Sure, the 'invasion' was of a pretty small scale and they left after they got what they wanted but it was still a group of aliens making a hostile landing on foriegn shores (ours).
Another species with a biology uncanily compatable with our environment, meaning that earth becomes a Preds ideal holiday spot too. With the timespan required to give rise to intelligent life on a planet the predators must cherish any planet they find which has, not only advanced life like humans but also prevalant violence and sometimes globar conflict, two of their favourite things. Another one is probably rye whiskey.
So your favorite passtime is hunting dangerous animals? Try earth, they have atleast one culture with more guns than people! What better place to find a wanna be tough guy you can cut your teeth on then cut out his spine!
Predators win my Bronze medal for "Hunting and Sport" as a reason to invade earth.
Some people might think that my Silver medalist is a bit suspect after what i said about how freely available water is in outer space but the silver, ironically, goes to gold.
And gold is what the aliens were after in Cowboys and Aliens, which was a very good movie, IMO.
Ok, so if water is so easy to get in space why isn't gold? Well gold is #79 on the periodic table with an atomic mass significantly higher than oxygen and even way more than hydrogen (heaps more) plus is requires even more specific conditions to form in the first place. But basically the gold is going to be mixed up with other matter and that matter is mostly going to coalesce into planets and maybe more suns. So there will be a lot less of it freely floating around and most of it will be squished in with 'rock' and 'stone' and other metals, making mining a necessity.
So in short. Finding heavy elements which are required by an alien culture, for whatever reason (C&A didn't really say) means going to planets to dig it up and is a good reason to invade earth. Assuming the aliens can't find an uninhabited planet to mine instead. Gold wins Silver.
Oh yeah, this too:
Ok, finally my favourite reason to invade earth but as yet (as far as i know) only depicted once in film...
The movie is Bad Taste and the director is some virtual unkown called Peter Jackson (yes, actually it is that Peter Jackson). Hopefully you've already seen Bad Taste and i don't need to explain why this gem of a movie has THE MOST PLAUSIBLE reason for alien invasion EVAR!! and instead you can just sit back and fondly remember all the classic scenes...
In case you haven't seen it and you haven't got time to rectify that oversight before finishing reading this entry, i'll let you know.
The aliens are here for food.
But what about hydroponics, intensive farming, cloning meat animals, Qourn. Haven't the aliens got these things? Why do they have to come and steal our food? Actually they don't. Not steal our food atleast, because in Bad Taste the aliens have come to earth for us. We are the food.
On earth right now we have 7 billion people (didn't notice when we passed the milestone? Well, we did.) And we are currently producing enough food for all those people, the only issues we are reall having are logistical, meaning some poeple are getting way more food than they need and some aren't getting any. That's purely logistic...
Now fast forward 1000 years and the earth has 10 billion people and the solar system is home to, say, 10 billion more. Earth still only has the capacity to feed about 7 billion, maybe less due to lose of arable land for more housing estates and golf course but we have more people to feed. How are those peoeple fed? We use hydroponic farms in space, greenhouses on mars, anything we can to feed the masses.
Imagine that we discover a worm hole, for the sake of arguement, which takes us to a planet full of healthy, plump, and tasty looking natives. If we don't think about it too much we might be able to convince ourselves that those plaintive noises they make as they're being herded contain no more intelligence than a sheep or cow. So thosepeople cattle aliens are quickly processed into burger patties and shipped back through the worm hole to the famished masses of human consumers and Worm Hole Burgers becomes the fastest growing burger bar in the solar system!
Except now imagine that it's not 1000 years in the future and it's the aliens in the picture above who found the worm hole and decided to make us into burgers... Well, thank god for Derek! Is all i can say. (That's him in the first pic, played by Peter Jackson.)
COMING HERE TO EAT US is the number one, gold medal winner for reasons to invade earth.
(sleep well)
So the skitters were a slave race (mutated slaves, too) afterall and the real leaders seem to be the sterio- typical alien basketballers. I thought the Mechs might be the leaders for a while. I mean, if you are the leader would you go out unarmed and vertually unarmoured or would you be riding the mechanical suit of exoarmour with a heavy machine gun? Turns out the leaders didn't even go out on patrol which makes even more sense really.
There's still one big question to be answered in the second series and that is: Why are they here? Have they really travelled across interstallar space just to collect sccrap metal? Maybe it's an interplanetary ring of pedophiles? Whatever it is it's probably not going to satisfy my requirements for what is a good reason for aliens to invade earth (or any other extra system planet) but with a bit of thought Spielberg and Robert Rodat might come up with a good reason.
So what are some bad reasons to invade earth?
Let's look at an oldschool classic, atleast one i loved when i first watched in the 80's, V.
While it doesn't seem to say on IMDb or Wikipedia why the aliens were here, except for general domination i clearly remember the plot involving a, wait for it, plot to steal the earths water. Dun dun DUN! But the earth is 70% covered with water, that sounds plausible, doesn't it?
Sure, on a superficial level and that level was more then enough for me when i was 9. But now i'm a fair bit older and i am more fully aware of the absurdity of an invasion force travelling across many hundreds, possibly thousands of light-years to come to earth to take our water. But we still have a whole planet of water, why isn't it plausible? Because water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, two of the most abundant elements in the universe which readily react with each other to form water and this water can be found freely available just floating around in space!
In short, why would you go to the trouble of creating faster than light space travel, find a suitable planet, invade under false pretenses, defeat the locals and suck up the water against the force of gravity when all you'd need to do would be to build a mega scale wet and dry vacuum cleaner and suck up the free water in space?
How about plain old "fuck you" as a reason for invading, ala Independence Day?
I suppose the reason behind "fuck you" is "who cares". The film makers didn't care enough about the story to give a decent reason because all the wanted to do was show off Will Smith saving
No reason counts as a bad reason.
Various different media offer us enslavement as a reason for invasion.
Again there is the massive obstacle of travelling-across-half-the-galaxy-just-to-get-here to overcome. And what would they do with us once we were their slaves? Send us to work in some sort of LEO labour camps building their next invasion fleet? (That opens them up for some of their precious FTL and frickin' laser technology falling into the hands of the slaves and eventually being used against them, maybe generations later) I'm pretty sure that a race capable of such a feat of space travel would be more than capable of building completely compliant automated manufacturing robots, much like we non-space-faring-folk already possess, which would be more capable, and less troublesome than enslaved humans to do the work we would be doing.
So what this leaves, first is an honourary recipient of my reasons to invade and this is only honourary as they didn't really invade, they were just going to the (sorta) local garden center.
There are probably (many) millions of planets like earth in the universe but only a small number are likely to be within a manageable distance from any given intelligent species home. For a race of plant collectors like ETs people earth would be something of a goldmine. We have what is probably, to be honest, a very typical level of biodiversity here, which means many millions of plant species for the anoraky little guys to froth over. None of our plants would be exactly the same as any plants they had seen before.
Academic research is a valid reason for invasion but as we know, ET didn't invade us so misses out on a prize.
Third place goes to these beauties!
Another species with a biology uncanily compatable with our environment, meaning that earth becomes a Preds ideal holiday spot too. With the timespan required to give rise to intelligent life on a planet the predators must cherish any planet they find which has, not only advanced life like humans but also prevalant violence and sometimes globar conflict, two of their favourite things. Another one is probably rye whiskey.
So your favorite passtime is hunting dangerous animals? Try earth, they have atleast one culture with more guns than people! What better place to find a wanna be tough guy you can cut your teeth on then cut out his spine!
Predators win my Bronze medal for "Hunting and Sport" as a reason to invade earth.
Some people might think that my Silver medalist is a bit suspect after what i said about how freely available water is in outer space but the silver, ironically, goes to gold.
Ok, so if water is so easy to get in space why isn't gold? Well gold is #79 on the periodic table with an atomic mass significantly higher than oxygen and even way more than hydrogen (heaps more) plus is requires even more specific conditions to form in the first place. But basically the gold is going to be mixed up with other matter and that matter is mostly going to coalesce into planets and maybe more suns. So there will be a lot less of it freely floating around and most of it will be squished in with 'rock' and 'stone' and other metals, making mining a necessity.
So in short. Finding heavy elements which are required by an alien culture, for whatever reason (C&A didn't really say) means going to planets to dig it up and is a good reason to invade earth. Assuming the aliens can't find an uninhabited planet to mine instead. Gold wins Silver.
Oh yeah, this too:
Ok, finally my favourite reason to invade earth but as yet (as far as i know) only depicted once in film...
In case you haven't seen it and you haven't got time to rectify that oversight before finishing reading this entry, i'll let you know.
The aliens are here for food.
But what about hydroponics, intensive farming, cloning meat animals, Qourn. Haven't the aliens got these things? Why do they have to come and steal our food? Actually they don't. Not steal our food atleast, because in Bad Taste the aliens have come to earth for us. We are the food.
Now fast forward 1000 years and the earth has 10 billion people and the solar system is home to, say, 10 billion more. Earth still only has the capacity to feed about 7 billion, maybe less due to lose of arable land for more housing estates and golf course but we have more people to feed. How are those peoeple fed? We use hydroponic farms in space, greenhouses on mars, anything we can to feed the masses.
Imagine that we discover a worm hole, for the sake of arguement, which takes us to a planet full of healthy, plump, and tasty looking natives. If we don't think about it too much we might be able to convince ourselves that those plaintive noises they make as they're being herded contain no more intelligence than a sheep or cow. So those
Except now imagine that it's not 1000 years in the future and it's the aliens in the picture above who found the worm hole and decided to make us into burgers... Well, thank god for Derek! Is all i can say. (That's him in the first pic, played by Peter Jackson.)
COMING HERE TO EAT US is the number one, gold medal winner for reasons to invade earth.
(sleep well)
