We Will Destroy Your Planet (16 page)

Longer-term but forgettable assistance from other life forms can come in the form of plants, or similar in-place life forms. Anything that has thorns or poison harmful to humans can be used as a living barrier, to help keep humans out of important areas.

In the eastern hemisphere, the preference is for alien invaders to make use of the availability of large saurian and other life forms, possibly survivors from the dinosaur era or mutations created by unwise use of nuclear power, and to use them as weapons.

Unlike the early 20th century practice of using flocks of sheep to clear paths through minefields and other booby-trapped areas, the use of these so-called kaiju is more like unleashing a weapon – the kaiju in question can be used to destroy large areas of cities, either by controlling their brains remotely, or simply relying on their tendency to do so when on land anyway. If you can find examples of such beasts, they are most useful for distracting human military forces, prior to your main attack.

Given the interstellar distances involved, and therefore the time and expenditure of resources necessary to transport troops and officials, it actually makes more sense under certain circumstances for you to set up a client state on Earth, than to rule it by force of numbers.

Under the client state model, you would offer the local populace self-determination and the freedom to carry on as they have done, subject to your approval of leaders and of policies that would affect your objectives. For example, you would appoint a planetary governor from your forces, with suitable enforcement units and military backup, who would oversee that the correct local leaders were chosen, and that the resources you require are shipped back home. This approach has worked for thousands of years on Earth.

Alternatively, you can consider making alliances with existing Earth authorities. This is an especially useful approach if you have a preference for hands-off rule, have difficulty understanding humanity and life on Earth, or do not have the military power available to be projected effectively on Earth. Since you will doubtless have technology, if nothing else, that is desired by humans, you can forge an alliance for mutual benefit, or at least the appearance of such, by exchanging a few such technological trinkets for the kind of co-operation you require.

Such alliances can be genuine, or you can use them as delaying tactics while you conduct reconnaissance of the planet and study its defences or move your forces into position. You can use an alliance with humans to lull them into a false sense of security by pretending to be friendly visitors, and thus sow the groundwork for confusion that will inhibit the effectiveness of resistance later. For example, you can do this by offering medical advances, or enfolding certain preferred groups within your alliance while shunning others; divide and conquer is classic strategy for a reason.

Why
did
you come to Earth? Nobody embarks on a distant military campaign for no reason at all. Just because you have conquered the Earth doesn't mean your work is over. Quite the opposite, in fact.

If you came to mine the Earth's resources, you will need to be able to make use of them once you have mined them. At the very least you will need to be able to ship those resources back to your homeworld, or to wherever they are going to be put to use.

If you came by wormhole, dimensional portal, matter transmission, or time portal, you shouldn't have any difficulty in transporting you booty back home. Just as the planet's current owners transport their resources by ship and ground vehicle, you should be able to do the same, and simply pass containers on through the wormhole, or beam them to wherever they need to go.

Sending the materials to a different planet through space is a different matter. You can bring in ships to carry it off, but the more material you try to launch, the more fuel your ships will require, which makes them heavier still, and every load is another chance for something to go wrong with a valuable ship. Therefore you would be better off using a mass driver capable of accelerating cargo to the Earth's escape velocity. Rather than repeat the mistake of the Centauri, who wasted such devices on bombarding a planet, you would use it for its intended purpose, launching compacted raw materials of whatever kind into space.

You wouldn't be able to shoot the materials all the way home, because the payloads wouldn't be able to be accelerated to faster-than-light velocities – and even if you did, that'd just mean you'd essentially fired a giant gun at your home – but you could certainly put shipments of cargo easily into orbit. There, your transport ships can scoop them up and take them to whichever planet they need to go to, or indeed just process the materials in the microgravity of space and make whatever products from them that are required, without any deformations caused by a planetary gravity.

The same principle applies to anything you want to launch from Earth – foodstuffs, plant material, anything.

The best place to construct such a mass driver would be on the western slope of Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, at the north end of the Andes mountain range. This is not the highest mountain on Earth – that would be Everest in the Himalayas, of course – but because the planet bulges slightly in the middle, Chimborazo is about a mile and a half closer to orbit. The western slope should be chosen because the Earth spins west-to-east, and so launching towards the east always imparts an extra flick of velocity.

Of course, major mining operations will require more than one mass driver, but this should set the pattern: building them on the western slopes of mountains in the equatorial band bordered above and below by the tropics.

Oddly enough, this is one of those situations in which completely destroying the Earth is actually feasible. It just would take a very long time. In fact, removing a million tons from the Earth every
second
would completely remove the Earth from existence in 186,015,123 years, if the effect of having a large percentage of its mass didn't result in the force of its rotation tearing the rest apart in half that time. Interestingly, humanity itself already has the technology to do this if they really wanted to, so it would be a far simpler matter for a more advanced invader.

Removing the Earth's core while retaining the rest of the planet's surface, as seen attempted twice by the Daleks, is, sadly, not physically possible. This means that it won't be possible for you to remove the core and replace it with a power unit in order to drive the planet around, no matter how attractive the idea is.

One issue with it would be how big an engine you would need to pilot the Earth, and what type of engine – where would the exhaust for the thrust emerge, and what would it do to the atmosphere in the process. Not to mention the fact that the core of the Earth is nearly three thousand miles across, which is a lot of space to be filled.

The bigger problem with any attempt to eject ‘the molten core of the Earth' through any sort of mineshaft or excavation is that the actual inner core, at the very centre of the planet, isn't molten. Instead it is a ball of solid nickel-iron some 1,560 miles across. The molten core is a layer 1,400 miles thick wrapped around that. Even if you could draw out this magma, you'd still be left with the solid inner core rattling around inside.

There's really no excuse for the Daleks to have not known this, as the solid core was originally discovered by humanity in 1936, when seismologist Inge Lehmann calculated it from the propagation of seismic waves recorded during earthquakes. That said, study of the temperatures of the Earth has shown that the inner core has been cooling to its current temperature of 5430C since the planet formed four and a half billion years ago. At some point in the past the entire core of the Earth has been molten, but as it has cooled from the inside out, the solid inner core has been growing.

This may show the value of remembering that if you are studying the Earth from a great distance away, the conditions there will have changed by the time you arrive.

There are many ways of ruling a conquered territory, whether directly, by taking up residence and being in charge on a permanent basis, or more remotely, by issuing orders from a central throneworld and leaving it up to individual planetary governors to decide how to get the best out of their charge. As with so many other things, how you rule the Earth will depend on your motives for conquering it, your numbers in the vicinity, and your attitudes to your own culture and society in comparison to others.

Regardless of these factors, some things are going to be necessary no matter what. One is that you must establish that you are in charge. You do not have to rule by fear and terror, but even if you are magnanimous in victory and magnificent in your benevolence and granting of freedoms, you must ensure that the population understands that it is your decision to make it so.

If you choose to rule the Earth by fear, holding it in an iron fist (or claw, or tentacle, etc), you must be sure that the population fear and respect you. If you threaten violence for transgressions, you must follow through on that threat, or you will be perceived as weak. Your decisions must be understood to be decisions, not suggestions or requests. The disadvantage to ruling by fear is that it will tend to provoke resentment, and that will lead to resistance and rebellion.

Conversely, if you allow the Earth to carry on as it did before, with a self-determining population, you may run the risk of that populace returning to conflict among themselves, which will get in the way of your plans.

The golden rule for ruling however is this: don't flip-flop. If you want to rule by fear, rule by fear. If you want to rule benevolently, rule benevolently. However else you wish to rule, rule that way, but most of all be consistent. Consistency will carry you further than wisdom or military power on Earth, simply because human societies prefer the maintenance of a status quo.

One important information resource with which you must familiarize yourself, of course, is the legendary ‘Evil Overlord List', which contains many practical tips for being the evil (or otherwise) overlord of a planet.

Did you come to expand your empire or replace your homeworld? If so, then bringing your own population to the Earth is a necessity. Whether or not to do something about the native population is up to you. If there are very many of you, or you have slightly different environmental or climate requirements which will necessitate changes to the Earth, then you will have to look at eliminating or moving humanity.

If you are happy to share the planet, then you will probably have to make sure that the local population know who's in charge, and accepts that the superior newcomers have the edge. Note that even if you have no intention of declaring superiority, or have laws about not interfering with the natural development of native species, this will occur anyway. Historically, no contact between a technologically superior society and a technologically inferior one has resulted in anything other than the inferior society being absorbed into the superior one, and changed by it.

Depending on how rough the conditions on Earth are, there is a chance that your own forces or population might feel disinclined to remain there, especially if there is an easy way to return home. You may consider disabling your own ships to ensure that your colonists have to remain and make the colony work. Make no mistake; however superior your technology, setting up a viable colony on Earth will be hard work, requiring the building of suitable cities, systems put in place to ensure that edible food is available for your species, and so on.

‘Terraforming' may be necessary in order to make the Earth completely suitable for your population, but please note that if you came to radically change the place, you'd have been better off consulting the chapter on destroying all humans, since keeping them around will cause you endless trouble later.

Strictly speaking, you can't actually ‘terraform' the Earth, since the word means to make something like the Earth. Which the Earth, of course, already is. You can still alter the planet's environment and geology, but the phrase for doing this to the Earth itself is ‘Geoengineering', or you could call it planetary environmental engineering. Of course your forces will be more likely to refer to the process as ‘forming'.

The concept is known on Earth, having been originated by the astronomer Carl Sagan, in 1961, though he originally called the process ‘planetary engineering'. His original suggestion was that Venus be seeded with blue algae, to facilitate the conversion of water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen into organic compounds. (Do not be tempted to try this on your way to Earth – Sagan had the idea before it was discovered that the clouds of Venus are mostly composed of sulphuric acid, which would destroy such algae. In 1973 he revised his suggestion to engineer Mars instead, and the space agency NASA held a study on this, though they called it ‘planetary ecosynthesis'.)

The word ‘terraforming' itself was coined in 1982 by Christopher McKay of the British Interplanetary Society, in a paper discussing, again, Mars.

Note that if your requirements for a planetary colony require a mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere, with either acid rain and much greater surface temperatures than on Earth, or a thinner and colder atmosphere, you would be better off simply colonizing Venus or Mars, respectively. Those planets would be more suited to your needs for less resource expenditure, and have the advantage of not being occupied by a species who will resist you. As far as anyone knows, anyway.

Likewise, if you are going to terraform the Earth, you should have wiped out the surface life with an asteroid bombardment first. If you're making major changes to the biosphere, the native life will be killed in the process anyway, and this way you can start with a clean slate, without having to worry about sabotage or interference.