We Will Destroy Your Planet (17 page)

Believe it or not, there are several contexts in which it is possible to take up a necessary or desired position on Earth without having to expend the time, effort, or energy in conquering it.

In most of these cases, making alliances with native factions will be perfectly serviceable, and you can always betray them by launching a proper attack later if you so desire. In some other cases, conquest would simply be non-applicable, or even counter-productive.

As well as making alliances, it may be less resource-intensive to trade with the native humans for what you want, or even to actually make friends with them.

Establishing a military garrison on the planet may be necessary, if you're looking to prevent activity by other civilizations in the vicinity. It may not, however, be necessary to conquer the Earth in order to establish a garrison there. In fact, it may not even be desirable to do so. This is one of those situations in which simply making peaceful overtures to terrestrial authorities may well achieve the result you want: permission to establish a garrison.

This is because, since humans are already quite preconditioned to accept the idea of hostile forces among the stars, it should be a relatively simple matter to establish that your enemies are bent on the conquest of the Earth. With careful manipulation of the collective psyche it should even be possible to persuade human forces to form the bulk of your garrison, risking their lives under your guidance so that your forces don't have to. Aside from negating the need to conquer the Earth, this also has the advantage of sparing your forces for more important duties elsewhere.

It's always possible that you came to Earth in order to escape some persecution, warfare, or other threat elsewhere. In this instance, you may find it more useful to simply ask the local populace for help, or at least to manipulate them into getting what you want, rather than causing yourself more trouble. This is especially the case if you have no means of returning home or moving on, or if your equipment is limited by your situation. Also, if you're looking to hide, then conquest is very conspicuous, and so likely counterproductive.

Think instead about setting up an Alien Nation in the US, or living in District 9 in South Africa…

On second thought, don't do either of those things. You didn't come to Earth to be viewed as inferior either. Your best course of action if you are seeking sanctuary or political asylum on Earth is to work with some appropriate shadowy government cabal or agency – or better still, several, in different nations, so that you can spread your population over a wider area, and move on as and when one agency betrays you – who will make sure you are covertly re-homed on Earth, usually in return for technology or scientific and mathematical formulae.

Be warned, though, that some such agencies have been reported as willing to abduct and conduct medical experiments on aliens, rather than waiting for you to do it to them.

Those of you who have parental interest in Earth may decide to make yourselves known in order to avert disaster or improve humanity's attitudes and morals. In many ways this is just as arrogant as the invaders who feel themselves superior to non-spacefaring civilizations, as it implies that you have a right to judge other species, and determine their worth.

Deciding that unworthy species should be improved and uplifted rather than destroyed is certainly a more reassuring option, but it still smacks of what humans call the ‘nanny state'.

Though arrogant, this can be achieved by negotiation as well as direct conquest. The benevolent nanny state society can still invade and conquer the Earth for its own good, but you will find that humanity is more receptive to your teachings if you instead offer rewards for learning the right lessons. This approach also works for slavers and military recruiters, of course.

You do not need to be entirely selfless to take this approach, of course. You could well be concerned about turning humanity away from an aggressive expansionist path before it gets too much of a foothold in space.

Another far more practical reason for uplifting humanity is if you have become stranded, and require a superior level of technology to be attained in order for you to repair your ship or otherwise complete preparations for your return home.

It is possible that you are a non-sentient creature of some kind, and that your arrival on Earth was by pure chance, perhaps carried by an unsuspecting sentient traveller. If this is the case, your whole objective in life will be to survive and possibly reproduce.

Since if you're not sentient you won't be reading this, there is very little advice that can be given, other than to watch out for hunters, either human or otherwise. Certainly you will have no need to conquer the Earth in order to roam wildly, and nor would you ever conceive of doing so anyway.

For what it's worth, general advice for such a species would be to make sure to find a suitable location in which to create a nest or den, because hunting is a popular pastime in most regions of Earth.

On Earth, the human race often refers to itself as the most dangerous game, in the context of big game hunting, or hunting animals for sport. If such hunting is a part of your society's life, then it may be worth considering using the Earth for this purpose.

The wide range of terrain and environments make for a good choice of types of chase. Although human bodies are relatively flimsy, you may always find, or even breed and train, specimens who will give the most satisfying chase, or prove to be worthy opponents in physical combat to test their mettle.

If you are going to engage in blood sports on Earth, you will not necessarily need to conquer the planet in order to do so. There are enough remote areas of all kinds for you to conduct hunts without being disturbed by human authorities in most cases, though you will have to ensure that your prey do not bring others into the game. You may even be able to gain permission for such hunts with the collusion of terrestrial governments, who may be willing to give you their enemies or criminals for the purpose.

You also will not need to conquer the Earth if you simply want to blow off some steam by having some raucous fun, blowing stuff up, recreational fighting (Glasgow has been good for this sort of weekend off for aliens since Victorian times), and so on.

So long as the native authorities and militaries do not have the ability to seriously harm your holidaymakers and their activities, it doesn't matter whether they know about you or not. You can simply carry on enjoying yourself in whatever way takes your fancy.

There is so much to see and do on Earth that you could simply enjoy yourself for years, with every whim catered for, and nothing to stop you. Visiting the Earth simply to see the sights, insult the natives, play pranks on them by strutting up and down making ‘beep beep' noises, or destroy things that don't matter to you for the sheer joy of it, are all perfectly valid reasons for going.

Why shouldn't the Earth be a vacation spot? It has many beautiful sights. If you want to sample the sights, the food, the sports, or just to have whatever your society considers to be a good time, there really is no need to mount an expensive and complex military campaign.

Well, it does happen from time to time that visitors to the planet are either so taken with the lifestyle of humanity that they decide to join in, or are stuck for so long that they assimilate into a human lifestyle by exposure over time becoming habit-forming.

This is far more likely to happen to visitors who have crashed, been exiled, or otherwise ended up living on Earth for extended periods not by choice. This, logically, will happen to individuals rather than societies. And so conquering the Earth would be neither practical nor desirable. By doing so, the adopted native will be denying their preferred status.

If you find yourself in this situation, probably by trying to blend in at first, you can try seeking help from government agents with suburban families or interested amateurs.

If your interest in the Earth is in its strategic position or mineral/chemical resources, you're probably wondering what would be the point of preserving some humans. After all, they're going to get in the way, resist your control of the Earth, try to prevent you from actually getting at all those resources you want, and generally prove themselves to be a nuisance.

There are several reasons why you, as triumphant planetary conquerors, may decide to try to keep humanity around, some more obvious than others, and some more practical than others.

Enslavement
. Humans are apparently often considered excellent work machines. Nothing can crawl into a narrow crevice in a quarry and carry out some rocks to dump on the rock-crusher's conveyor belt like a human can. According to most theorized alien invasion reports and propaganda stories, there is usually little regard for the health and well-being of these organic work machines. This is, of course, highly inefficient and generally motivated by an immature desire to play at being powerful; in reality, healthy and happy workers are always more productive.

You will undoubtedly find that offering the carrot rather than the stick is generally more effective in motivating your workers. In fact, rather than openly enslave them, and thus generate resentment and rebellion, you should simply offer the population jobs in which they will be paid in the local currency. Since Earth's currencies will mean nothing to you, this will increase productivity while decreasing the odds of resistance and rebellion.

Food
. The Earth is teeming with life, pretty much all of which depends, in some way, upon consuming the biomass of other life forms. Since humanity is the dominant life form, it is at the top of the food chain, and some believe, therefore, that it must contain the most superior nutrition. Even if not, it's certainly the case that any organic life forms coming to the planet will require sustenance, and since all the life forms on Earth will be equally as, well, alien, to the invader's digestive systems, there is perhaps little reason to differentiate between species that contain nutritional value for you.

Presumably if you yourselves are human, you can skip the idea of keeping humans for food. Otherwise, any good farmer knows that the best food – be it fruits, vegetables, fish, poultry or animals, needs to be looked after and husbanded. Different breeds of the same species may have noticeably different flavours and nutritional values. Battery farming is obviously the most cost efficient for large scale processing, but you'll find that properly bred free-range humans are far tastier and more nutritious.

Even so, if terrestrial organisms are edible and nutritious to your species, you would be better off farming and consuming the larger food animals, which have more food on them, and are unable to form organized military resistance groups.

Also, the fact that any organism you can digest can transfer dangerous bacteria to you definitely applies to humans. Eating them will put you at risk of cross-species bacteriological warfare, because it absolutely will not take long before it occurs to the resistance to start infecting themselves in order to introduce harmful bacteria into your food chain. It would be a long game, true, but they may well eventually succeed in causing mass illness among their forces. Since the humans you eat would be being killed anyway, they wouldn't really have anything to lose.

Zoology
. You may simply be interested in studying captive specimens, either because this species in particular interests you, or as part of a wider study. It's even possible that your specimens would be valuable to private collections. This is quite inadvisable in general, as you will be spreading a potentially rebellious enemy to several of your locations away from their home, and that will be asking for trouble, as at some point in the future you may face insurrection in many different locations, from the descendants of your specimens, rather than just on Earth.

Medical research
. It's always difficult to calculate how useful a study of a species from a completely different biosphere would be in medicine, but there is a common theory among humans that aliens have a particular need to conduct medical experiments on them, as humans conduct experiments on other species on the planet. If your species is carbon-based, then perhaps you have found enough similarities between yourselves and humanity to make such scientific comparisons valuable.

If this is the case, then you will need to make sure your specimens are suitable for the scientific method – that you have a range of samples, and that they have not been contaminated by your biosphere in any way before the experiment begins. You will also need to maintain a control sample of average, normal (if there is such a thing) humans for comparison.

Whatever the reason for keeping a group of humans around, you will need to be sure that they are healthy and fit for the purpose, and that they are suitably trained and conditioned to accept the situation with equanimity.