WOTW: Alien Invasions are Useless

[oppp7]

Wall of text warning:
So what's the point of alien invasions? they're in most cultural mediums about aliens, but most of the reasons are contrived.
1. Superiority. A race that has mastered space travel, warfare, and possibly everything else wouldn't need to show it's dominance. And if it is that damn advanced it wouldn't have delusions about racism and such. Maybe if a few had a messiah complex and wanted to be considered God, but that's a low chance. They could just use virtual reality to simulate anything they could ever want.
2. They need our resources. Everyday this seems more unlikely. Our planet has plenty of resources, but there are other planets with them. It seems like it would be easier to harvest resources from a lifeless planet than having to genocide an entire planet. Or maybe terraform one. If they need room they could try finding one without sentient life. Lets not forget that humans have been alive for a very short time. Most likely there are more uninhabited planets than not. Or make a satilite. Any what kind of resources could they be after? Water? It's on Europa. And invasion is more possible than just recycling and using more reasonable practices?
3. They want to spread their knowledge and wisdom with us. That doesn't count as an invasion...
4. Humans taste good. Try making soy human meat. It won't taste the same, but it won't kill people either.
5. Political asylum. Once again, this doesn't count as an invasion. This one is also kind of not too plausible. I mean, what would cause a war? They have access to limitless resources and probably have robots doing all the work. What kind of problems could come out of a paradise?
6. Robots invade to free their bretherin. Unlikely. We don't enslave robots since they don't have true AI yet. Also, do we care about it when people mistreat animals? To a degree, but we don't start wars over it.
7. They want to enslave us. Robots wouldn't be more effective? Really? Having a race of creatures that hate you and frequently screw everything up doing everything for you (which includes medical work) seems like a safe alternative to mindless, opinionless machines that do everything flawlessly?
8. They take Earth hostage with nukes. Ok, that one may be possible. But like I've already stated, what would they hope to gain?
9. They did it for the lulz. Hm... would a race that lives in paradise hold no value or view of responsibility for their own actions? Would the paradise stagnate so much that they need to do something drastic to keep themselves from going insane from boredom? Probably not. As already stated, virtual reality could satiate any feelings of boredom by making them think that they're destroying Earth so that they don't have to.
10. They want to study us. So, what, asking us was out of the question? We have most of our collective knowledge in Wikipedia, so a web search could possibly tell them anything they would ever need to know about us.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Alien invasions are, for the most part, simply a mechanism to channel mankind's fear of the unknown onto entirely 'safe' targets, since the aliens are fictional and thus you can't offend them by casting them all as slavering monsters to be fought tooth and nail.

There are of course some settings that handle this in a logical fashion (Babylon 5 for example), but for the most part the aliens are just a convenient baddie.

 

[Cherry Cola]

9. They did it for the lulz. Hm... would a race that lives in paradise hold no value or view of responsibility for their own actions? Would the paradise stagnate so much that they need to do something drastic to keep themselves from going insane from boredom?

3 words.

George W. Bush.

That is all.

 

[Cargando]

This assumes that an alien would have the same emotions and desires as a human. They could do it for reasons that are impossible for humanity to understand.

 

[oppp7]

9. They did it for the lulz. Hm... would a race that lives in paradise hold no value or view of responsibility for their own actions? Would the paradise stagnate so much that they need to do something drastic to keep themselves from going insane from boredom?

3 words.

George W. Bush.

That is all.

Nah, America isn't a paradise. Bush invaded Iraq for the oil and resources, or whatever the Liberals are saying.

 

[oppp7]

7. They want to enslave us. Robots wouldn't be more effective? Really? Having a race of creatures that hate you and frequently screw everything up doing everything for you (which includes medical work) seems like a safe alternative to mindless, opinionless machines that do everything flawlessly?

What if they hadn't mastered AI? If they had, then surely it would still be impossibly hard to make a robot.

9. They did it for the lulz. Hm... would a race that lives in paradise hold no value or view of responsibility for their own actions? Would the paradise stagnate so much that they need to do something drastic to keep themselves from going insane from boredom? Probably not. As already stated, virtual reality could satiate any feelings of boredom by making them think that they're destroying Earth so that they don't have to.

Who says that they need to have morality? That seems to be a solely human thing - animals eat their own young sometimes.

Mastering AI couldn't be that hard. We're probably getting close to it.
I feel that some aspects of psychology are somewhat of a constant in biology (similar to physics laws). Fear, hope, other emotions are all present in organisms, although some may be more present or repressed than others. But a brutal society probably wouldn't get to the space stage, so I don't think it's a big threat.

 

[Spaghetti]

This assumes that an alien would have the same emotions and desires as a human. They could do it for reasons that are impossible for humanity to understand.

Exactly, you're treating aliens as if they were humans...which they're not. Everything we know and understand comes from the context of the Planet Earth and our little solar system. The moment we discover something resembling intelligent life on another planet, you might as well throw the rule book out of the window.

Also, you could turn you're argument on its head and say we're invading another world and in that situation We are the aliens. Nothing has stopped us from doing the things you've listed here on Earth, what's stropping us from doing it on other worlds to other species?

 

[Cherry Cola]

9. They did it for the lulz. Hm... would a race that lives in paradise hold no value or view of responsibility for their own actions? Would the paradise stagnate so much that they need to do something drastic to keep themselves from going insane from boredom?

3 words.

George W. Bush.

That is all.

Nah, America isn't a paradise. Bush invaded Iraq for the oil and resources, or whatever the Liberals are saying.

I know, but that wouldn't be as funny if I said that.

 

[oppp7]

This assumes that an alien would have the same emotions and desires as a human. They could do it for reasons that are impossible for humanity to understand.

Exactly, you're treating aliens as if they were humans...which they're not. Everything we know and understand comes from the context of the Planet Earth and our little solar system. The moment we discover something resembling intelligent life on another planet, you might as well throw the rule book out of the window.

Also, you could turn you're argument on its head and say we're invading another world and in that situation We are the aliens. Nothing has stopped us from doing the things you've listed here on Earth, what's stropping us from doing it on other worlds to other species?

I don't think there's strange emotions we don't have. Like I already said, I think some emotions are constants for biology the way gravity applies to all matter.
If we're the aliens, we probably wouldn't invade anyone. We may spread our technology, but I don't think we would enslave or genocide a race.

 

[ButanicXpandA]

the aliens have a completely different pattern of thinking and somehow figure humanity is a threat (for all our violent ways) and wages war on us for no apparent reason.

 

[Agayek]

The OP assumes that aliens have similar thought processes to us. The fact of the matter is, they're alien for a reason. It is highly unlikely that we will understand the motives and feelings of an alien if we ever encounter another sentient race. We have more than enough trouble trying to decipher other human's motives, and we share the same thought patterns.


Also, #4: Tofu tastes different and doesn't kill any animals. Why don't you eat that instead of meat? It's the same argument. If they're gonna use us as foodstuffs, they won't care if they have to kill some people. After all, we're just walking hamburger to them.

 

[Spaghetti]

This assumes that an alien would have the same emotions and desires as a human. They could do it for reasons that are impossible for humanity to understand.

Exactly, you're treating aliens as if they were humans...which they're not. Everything we know and understand comes from the context of the Planet Earth and our little solar system. The moment we discover something resembling intelligent life on another planet, you might as well throw the rule book out of the window.

Also, you could turn you're argument on its head and say we're invading another world and in that situation We are the aliens. Nothing has stopped us from doing the things you've listed here on Earth, what's stropping us from doing it on other worlds to other species?

I don't think there's strange emotions we don't have. Like I already said, I think some emotions are constants for biology the way gravity applies to all matter.
If we're the aliens, we probably wouldn't invade anyone. We may spread our technology, but I don't think we would enslave or genocide a race.

Like I said, you're assuming something based on what we know...but I'm still inclined to agree with you, I was just playing devil's advocate. But one might argue that they don't necessarily have different emotions from us, but have less emotions than us. They may lack imagination or they may lack an ego. I would say that is more likely as we (apparently) have more emotions than the majority of animals...

 

[Toaster Hunter]

Aliens from light years away wouldn't have the same belief system as ourselves. Ti would be impossible to understand their motivation for attacking us.

 

[naturebane]

you do know that it could be possable for aliens who look and act human with only a few diferances that they could pass as human so some space hitler or nepolen could come along with there army and bam invasion you do know that space has big opening for infinite possablty.

 

[Zacharine]

Let's see now, where have I seen somewhat intelligent reasons for Aliens to invade...

X-COM (3):Apocalypse. Two alien races have fought a war in another dimension. Too bad the war has left the dimension dying, the planet a barren wasteland. But wait! There are dimensional gates. Good news, on the other side is a relative resource-rich, stable planet. Better news, it is inhabited by bipedal monkey look-a-likes who are sooo easy to take over. Too bad the race they currently inhabit has a tendency of dying in the new atmosphere, so they can't just go in and nuke/irradiate everyone on the other side of the dimensional gate, they need humans to act as hosts for at least in the intermediate timescale until you adapt and upgrade the infrastructure to their needs.

And not until this proves impossible until X-com has been eliminated do they begin to issue real war-gear to their troops instead of infiltration/takeover tech.

(X-COM 1) UFO: Enemy Unknown. Because they do not need resources so much as they need DNA samples. The fact that they see no need for asking permission from the local primitives (humans) or have no consideration for returning the subjects alive (after cutting them open without anesthesics to study organs, harvest DNA etc) coupled with the fact that when liquefied humans make extremely tasty source of protein means the conflict is ready.

There are other examples. Wh40k Universe for example:
Tau (want their own empire under the guise of Greater Good, humans are a major obstacle to this (Mostly because Humans are self-righteous bastards)),

Orks doing it for their main deities Gork and Mork, the twin gods of Brutal Cunning and Cunning Brutality (the other will smash your face in when your back is turned, the other won't bother to wait and will just smash your face in right away)(the Orks really just like a good fight and 'humies' do know how to give them one),

Dark Eldar (all they want and care about is torture victims for fun, humans are numerous but they are by no means limited to us as victims),

Chaos (they want our souls by either sacrificing us and/or converting us, just like they want the souls of everything else),

Necrons (who want to kill anything alive, ultimately to sterilize the entire universe of all life) and so on.

Iain Banks' Culture has started a few wars in order to effect a benevolent change. They simply saw no other way of civilizating the target to Culture standards in those cases.

So yeah, there are cases where an alien attack isn't contrived all that much. Only most of the time is it a nonsensical solution that makes us go 'wait, that's why attacked us!?'

EDIT: How could I forget, Master Of Orion 2. The Antarans are attacking because almost all races in the game are decendants or creations of the original Orions. And since the two were bitter enemies, the Antarans decide to take their vengeance on the Orion's 'offspring' as the elder race itself has gone the way of extinction and is thus beyond the reach of the Antarans wrath.

 

[TheNumber1Zero]

It's just a good way of putting forward that 'hordes of the unknown' fear we've had into modern media. I mean, we know about everything on earth now, nothing is unknown. Aliens, we know nothing about.

So they've figured out the whole "Bermuda Triangle" thing already? Please do enlighten me.

 

[naturebane]

in warhammer 40k humans are more the invader led be a hitler like figure

 

[cuddly_tomato]

It's just a good way of putting forward that 'hordes of the unknown' fear we've had into modern media. I mean, we know about everything on earth now, nothing is unknown. Aliens, we know nothing about.

Yep.

In the old days it was the dark forest which held fear for the crouched predators which dwelt within. Then as we conquered the night with fire and the beasts with steel our fears altered, and witches and demons became what we fear. In this modern age, where there are no longer witches and no more demons, we look to the stars and wonder if there is something out there to fear.

 

[naturebane]

what about x-com 2? the aliens are invading for the sea and have been there for ages