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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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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.