Kevin Daly
Skilled Investigator
A lot depends on the motive: do they practice war for cultural reasons, do they want to eliminate a potential future nuisance, or do they want the real estate?
If it's cultural (a society with rituals of dominance and aggression - "You're [not a man/don't get to breed/haven't honoured your dead] until you've conquered a planet"), that's the only scenario where I think you might see the up-close-and-personal style of invasion where they arrive in person and battle it out on the surface.
If it's extermination for its own sake, they could lob an asteroid at us.
It's also (apparently) theoretically possible to cause a star to go nova by firing a Bussard ramjet into it at close to light speed - that's a particularly nasty one.
I agree that if they want the real estate then biological control's the way to go - STDs are a good choice, especially if you're contagious long before you become symptomatic (and no I do NOT think E.T.s created AIDS. Sheesh).
Clearly with the most likely scenarios we would never know what hit us...it'd either be a sudden catastrophe or a "not with a bang but a whimper" scenario, and in neither case would we know our kind had been murdered - unless the perpretrators wanted us to. There are after all sick bastards in this world and no doubt on others.
There are of course unknown factors that could influence things: if there are agreements in place that forbid this kind of activity, they might try something more devious, like secretly giving us just enough rope to hang ourselves: "Here, take this chainsaw and stick of dynamite and go and play hop-scotch on the motorway".
If they've discovered us and decided we'll have to go, but have had no enemies for thousands of years and are not super-intelligent (and really, why should they be?) they might try something inept and amateurish (another marginal scenario for actual invasion). It's possible they'd come up with a strategy based on poorly understood (and inappropriate) historical or legendary accounts of wars from their distant past. This is unlikely, but also probably our best chance.
If it's cultural (a society with rituals of dominance and aggression - "You're [not a man/don't get to breed/haven't honoured your dead] until you've conquered a planet"), that's the only scenario where I think you might see the up-close-and-personal style of invasion where they arrive in person and battle it out on the surface.
If it's extermination for its own sake, they could lob an asteroid at us.
It's also (apparently) theoretically possible to cause a star to go nova by firing a Bussard ramjet into it at close to light speed - that's a particularly nasty one.
I agree that if they want the real estate then biological control's the way to go - STDs are a good choice, especially if you're contagious long before you become symptomatic (and no I do NOT think E.T.s created AIDS. Sheesh).
Clearly with the most likely scenarios we would never know what hit us...it'd either be a sudden catastrophe or a "not with a bang but a whimper" scenario, and in neither case would we know our kind had been murdered - unless the perpretrators wanted us to. There are after all sick bastards in this world and no doubt on others.
There are of course unknown factors that could influence things: if there are agreements in place that forbid this kind of activity, they might try something more devious, like secretly giving us just enough rope to hang ourselves: "Here, take this chainsaw and stick of dynamite and go and play hop-scotch on the motorway".
If they've discovered us and decided we'll have to go, but have had no enemies for thousands of years and are not super-intelligent (and really, why should they be?) they might try something inept and amateurish (another marginal scenario for actual invasion). It's possible they'd come up with a strategy based on poorly understood (and inappropriate) historical or legendary accounts of wars from their distant past. This is unlikely, but also probably our best chance.
. We'll be using the moon to escape our own solar system (If we make it through the nuclear age).
