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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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Yes to the first assumption - with a caveat. To cross the width of space, their technology must be far ahead of ours. Imagine a modern army fighting one from the 18th century, and you could imagine what a tank, a machinegun, modern artillery or whatever other aspects would do.
BUT: There is also the point that we would fight locally, while they would need quite long-winded logistics. OK, they could mine asteroids, and if they have all the means of production, we would be f-ed.
Regarding the disease, well, any disease needs a host, and it is formed by evolution over millions of years to work on that host platform. Just imagine the aliens have a different interpretation of DNA, maybe for pairs forming a codon instead of three, or just different encodings of amino acids for their codons, and nothing would work. And that would assume that they are similar enough to actually have DNA.
What they could do, though, if they are technologically far ahead, they could probably synthesize a virus that is basically made to kill us off the planet before we know it.
So better not piss off any aliens that made their way to us... Gray lives matter!
There’s an interesting caveat, looking at recent war history …..
War technology has always been a “battle” between offensive technology and defensive. However in recent years, offensive dominates. We may have reached the limits of physical materials such that there is no defense. Certainly a lot of todays fighting requires stopping the attack or making it miss, rather than trying to survive it.
There’s no reason to expect that shields can exist, so it’s quite possible we can hurt the aliens and their advantages are standoff and intelligent weapons, reconnaissance, targeting. Looking at recent wars, would we be like Iraq, appearing similar in destructive ability but overwhelmed, or more like Ukraine, appearing to have no chance but successfully fighting back? Ukraine’s advantage is partly economic: using cheap drones to destroy expensive or nonreplaceable tech. Imagine the Aliens as Russia, with all the apparent advantages in size, tech, experience ….. but they only have the weapons they came with and we can at least sting them, we can make them spend irreplaceable weapons on our much cheaper technology
Or think of Stargate SG-1. Humans technology was primitive, but the weapons could still kill. A combination of unwieldy political structure of the aliens and clever application of force managed to minimize the impact of the technology advantages. Then of course making the right friends enabled those humans to leapfrog ahead
SG-1 was an amazing series. I bet I was too young to really appreciate it the first time around.
People don't realise it, but current physics explains everything we've ever measured. We know there must be more from theoretical arguments, but it probably comes up very rarely, so in a lot of ways the alien engineers will be doing the exact same stuff as us. Most likely, bunkers and kinetic impactors will be just as effective as against other humans.
Strong AI and something resembling nanotech are the main things that should be possible, but that we can't do yet. Everything a living organism can do should be replicable. There's also a lot of things we just haven't spent the money on, which covers most space stuff.
In regards to the long winded logostics (I read this from a second hand account and I'm sure this idea is from some scifi book) -a really fun idea is that if the aliens would send a war fleet our way and it takes say 50 years to get here... it is reasonable to assume that in those 50 years the aliens will do some technological breakthrough in both drive and weapon departments that by the time the fleet would get here a more advanced fleet would already be fighting the war - possibly even already won.
I think the idea can be found in Ender's Game. As the story progresses further into enemy territory, he 'controls' ships which are increasingly outdated because those are from older fleets sent decades ago.