We Will Destroy Your Planet (20 page)

This is worth exploiting as part of your strategy, both before consolidating your takeover, as a part of fragmenting terrestrial defences, and as part of controlling your subjugated populations. It is always resource-efficient – and often amusing and satisfying – to have your enemies weaken and destroy each other, so that the burden of doing so yourself is lessened.

Posing as rival deities or prophets to rival groups should generate conflict between human groups quite quickly and efficiently, but the best era for that in Earth history is past. Most of present-day Earth's societies are sufficiently advanced – remember that humanity has travelled into space already – that it will be unlikely that you can simply pose as gods in order to issue directives. The human populace is aware of the concept of non-divine extraterrestrial life forms, and will not simply assume that your advanced technology is a sign of godhood.

Therefore, the use of religion as a means of control will have to be arranged somewhat more subtly. You will want to have as many humans as possible willing to side with your aims on at least some level. One strategy would simply be to claim to be followers of an existing terrestrial religion, and integrate your policies as you would with any political chain of command.

If you intend to – or insist upon – installing your own native religion as one which humanity should follow, there are three basic strategies you can attempt. The simplest, and least likely to result in a widespread belief system, is to introduce your religion by means of texts and broadcasts, tell the human population about the benefits it offers, and hope that they will take it to heart as they have previously taken so many other religions. Whether this approach succeeds is almost a random gamble; It may or may not appeal, it may come along at the right time or the wrong time, and so on. The second option, of course, is to impose your religion by law and force of arms. Fear of earthly punishments will keep many worshippers in line, and eventually this will transfer itself to belief for many of them. The downside is that strictures imposed from outside tend to spark resentment in both individual humans and in cultures, and this kind of approach is likely to backfire, especially by inspiring those who refuse to follow your belief system to turn to violent resistance.

Historically the best, most successful strategy is actually almost as simple as the first choice, and far less resource-intensive than the second. That is to introduce the religion you wish to use, but to tailor it to the local population, in particular by incorporating structural underpinnings of the pre-existing local religions into your new official religion. For example, notable dates or deities can be adapted, so that the population need only really switch to using your new names and ceremonies for the same things they are already conditioned to understand and go along with.

On a related note, because the Earth is so acquainted with religious conflict throughout its history, there has always been an exploitable connection between religion and military service, with one often using the trappings of the other to attract recruits, or provide a reason for conscription, or an excuse for combat.

This can be useful for your rule of humanity, if you want to recruit local auxiliaries to serve in your forces, or any other form of service that works best with willing volunteers. Making assisting you an act of religious devotion to whichever deities your humans believe in will make many of them want to serve you, and completely shun the idea of resistance or rebellion.

If you have the ability to directly affect the thoughts and feelings of others purely by the power of your mind, then feel free to do so. You will need a constant rota of able telepaths and empaths to do this, however, depending on how many human minds each can affect. If your telepaths can influence or affect many human minds, then a few in each region might be able to do the job. However, if it's only a one-to-one ratio, then you'll need at least as many of you as there are humans – and probably more, because your telepaths will need to rest at times, and someone will have to pick up the slack when they do.

Alternatively, you can get the same effect by using the media to direct human culture. This is how Earth governs itself anyway, so you would be able to adapt the current system with the minimum of fuss, by having the messages you want placed into entertainments and news releases. This principle has been used effectively for thousands of years, and is sometimes referred to as the ‘bread and circuses' approach, as this is how it was implemented by the historic Roman Empire. Avoid the temptation to try inserting your propaganda into subliminal tones or images, however – research on Earth has shown that, although there is a popular belief that these work, they in fact do not, but instead simply irritate. Openness or subtext are the best approaches.

Finally, the simplest means of mass control is chemical. Introduce relaxants into the atmosphere or water supplies, and you will find that populations in the affected areas are far more docile and happy to go along with your directions for society. The small percentage who are immune to the effect or find a way to avoid exposure to the chemicals can be dealt with in other ways – either hunted down and eliminated, or bribed, or otherwise brought to heel.

Likewise, parasitism can offer direct control over the human mind, though this will certainly require a population equal to the human population. If your species is a type of intelligent parasite, then you must be able to link with humans in great numbers.

If you are few, you will have to adapt one of the other strategies along with the direct control of your human host. That is to say, you can directly control your host, but must use that host as a proxy through which to control a wider group of humans by means of bribery, religion, or whichever other means suits your society and purpose.

Yes, this happens too.

You will find that if you wish to maintain a collection of humans, or a workforce, you will have to ensure that they continue to produce further generations of humans. This is a simple enough matter – so long as you ensure that there are at least 50 breeding pairs to maintain genetic diversity, they'll take care of the matter themselves. The population of the Earth will continue as per usual.

There is also, however, the issue of breeding from humans and yourselves.

Much of humanity's concerns about the possibility of conquest seem to centre around the desire of the
invaders
to mate with human women and produce alien-human hybrids. In fact, any subjects you abduct for interrogation or testing will almost certainly assume that this is the purpose of their abduction. Conversely, much human thought has also gone into the idea of seducing extraterrestrial females, should the opportunity occur.

Thankfully (or unfortunately, if your expedition to Earth is being arranged with this in mind) this is pretty much impossible, at least without a lot of genetic manipulation, and if you're going to go around building genomes from individual chromosomes and genes, all artificially put together, then you may as well just build your desired life form and save yourself the bother of mounting an expensive military campaign.

Humans, as visitors to the planet since at least medieval times have noticed and recorded, are not split into different species, but are separated into two distinct forms on a gender basis. They are generally easily distinguishable. The males tend to be sturdier with greater upper body strength, while the females have finer hair, and a thorax of a different construction.

These differences are due to the species – like most of the animal species on the planet – having a relatively crude and inefficient primary and secondary reproductive system, which relies on the male implanting the female with one set of DNA, while her body provides a second set and combines them into a new human. As mammals, humans give live birth and do not lay eggs.

For some reason, humans familiar with the concept of alien life have long displayed a fear and fascination for the idea of that alien life attempting to intervene in the reproductive cycle, usually by seeking to replace the human male in the act of providing DNA. This may well lead to some misunderstandings when you encounter humans, regardless of your actual intentions towards them. This fear is probably tribal in origin, but, where extraterrestrials are concerned, it is a fear reliant upon ignorance of how DNA works – or even what it actually is.

DNA is essentially a set of instructions to a mother life form of how to create a next generation life form: what chromosomes to put where (determining gender), what to make the cells out of, and where to put each one, and so forth.

Humans have an average of about a hundred trillion cells in their body, each containing a nucleus made of a molecule called, on Earth, DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. In purely chemical terms, the molecule is made of two strands twisted together, of a combination of only four chemicals (adenine, cytosine, thymine and guanine). These chemicals are paired off into links (base pairs) that join the two strands together. Three billion of these base pairs make up a DNA molecule, but the molecule is more than just a chemical lump. This is what humans tend not to understand; the sequence is a coded instruction.

Specifically it is a chemical programme that instructs a female human's body in how to construct a new human. Obviously the programme, like any software, can only be run on hardware that can interpret the instructions, and there are limits to this. Species on Earth can only interpret the instructions for their own species, or at least related species from the same genus. This would also be the case with alien invaders and humans – the DNA from the male would have to be re-coded in such a way that the mother's body, of whichever species, is capable of interpreting the instructions.

This is all a problem even without asking the simple question of why a nonhuman would be attracted to a human anyway, since – at least on Earth – the reproductive urge and triggers are hardwired in at a biological level. Species are designed to mate with their own species, to propagate that species. On the other hand, if humans fall within your definition of beauty regardless of the biology, then recreational interaction should actually be quite safe, if potentially falling foul of planetary and galactic obscenity laws.

But, if you really want to be shown some of that Earth thing called kissing, it's really going to depend on how human-like you yourselves look, as humans on the whole are known to be very parochial. Not to mention fussy and more concerned with outward appearance than inner magnificence.

It is always possible that your interest in Earth has little or nothing to do with either its people or resources, but as a factor in galactic politics and overall strategy. In other words, you may be mostly concerned with the planet's – or the whole system's – strategic position in relation to both your own home planet or civilization, and other species and civilizations with whom you must deal.

Perhaps the Earth is in a vital location through which several trade routes pass, or would be a source of vital resources for an enemy you're at war with. Such situations are many and varied, and all require measured and thoughtful responses.

If the issue you face is one of the physical structure and presence of the Earth being of value to an enemy but not to yourself, then the obvious solution is to remove the Earth. This is the obvious solution, but, as we've already seen, not the simplest or easiest one. The Earth is, after all, very difficult to destroy. If you are unwilling or unable to destroy the planet, a number of possible solutions to this strategic problem present themselves.

The trick, then, is to remove it from play by other means.

Hiding the planet will be the first potential means to keep it out of enemy hands. If you have the ability to cloak your ships with any form of stealth technology, then up-scaling this technology to cloak the planet as a whole is an option to try. The energy requirements would surely be enormous, but your enemies will be unable to land on the Earth and exploit it for their own desires if they can't find it.

The practical problems with such an approach of this nature is that the planet's location would still be noticeable through the effect of its mass on the rest of the system, and its size and position could be calculated from its gravitational effects on the Sun, Mars and Venus. In essence, therefore, you'd have to somehow cloak, camouflage, or otherwise hide the entire Solar system. This could probably be done by constructing a Dyson sphere around it – a shell that would absorb all the energy of the Sun before it could escape into interstellar space, but, again, the mass of such an object would still be noticeable. Sadly, there's too much risk that a gravitational mass that can't be seen or identified, but can be detected, might be more likely to attract attention from the curious.

The other potential downside to rendering a planet invisible is the danger of a ship crashing into it before noticing that it was there.

Distraction is another option. Positioning gravitational masses outside the Solar system could be used to create gravitational lensing when seen from the viewpoint of a specific approach or enemy. This would bend light around the gravitational mass, which would make the Sun and/or the Earth appear to be in a different location, or cast false images of it in addition to the genuine article. This wouldn't really be worth the effort, though, as any astrophysicist or starship navigator worthy of the name would be able to run the calculations to reveal the true location of the actual object.

Playing tricks with time is another option. If you have the ability to manipulate time, through whatever means, and are able to affect the entire planet – which would mean everything within a certain distance from the centre of the planetary mass out to a point in the gravity well beyond the atmosphere – you can shift the Earth out of temporal phase with the rest of the universe. In essence, you could make it always a few seconds ahead of the rest of the universe. The presence of the planet would be as detectable as ever, but it couldn't be approached, attacked, or landed upon.