Not sure whether to put this one under chat, ASBs or Books, but here goes. A number of Scifi authors, including Alien Dean Foster and to a lesser extent Harry Turtledove, together with several movies (Independence Day for one) have humanity more or less uniting to fight a common enemy - putting behind either entirely or to varying degrees the centuries of religious and racial conflict preceding "the event". How likely is this? Personally I find it very hard to credit, unless the aliens were out to completely exterminate humanity - unfortunately I feel the hatreds and resentments in some cases are just too deep. Any thoughts?
Alien Enemy
- Thread starter Wombat
- Start date
Diamond
Banned
In the event of imminent extermination, I think 99% of humanity would work together. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." How WELL they work together, that's another matter entirely. By that I mean questions of language, equipment compatibility, chain-of-command, etc. Nuts-and-bolts things.
And then you have to factor in the amount of time involved. With something like ID4, where the aliens were overcome in a matter of days, questions of 'cultural compatibility' among the defending humans never came up. But what if, for whatever reason, the war had dragged on for months or years - maybe the aliens don't have those nifty force-fields, giving the human defenders a little more even footing. How long would the US President's rousing speech hold them together if they had to face what might well be a decade(s) long conflict?
But you also have the other end of the spectrum, 'V', where factions and groups of humans actively support the Visitors, even after being made aware that eventually all humans are meat. Some people are just scumbags, and even in the face of annihilation, they'd try to make a buck.
Well, that's all the random thoughts I can muster right now...
And then you have to factor in the amount of time involved. With something like ID4, where the aliens were overcome in a matter of days, questions of 'cultural compatibility' among the defending humans never came up. But what if, for whatever reason, the war had dragged on for months or years - maybe the aliens don't have those nifty force-fields, giving the human defenders a little more even footing. How long would the US President's rousing speech hold them together if they had to face what might well be a decade(s) long conflict?
But you also have the other end of the spectrum, 'V', where factions and groups of humans actively support the Visitors, even after being made aware that eventually all humans are meat. Some people are just scumbags, and even in the face of annihilation, they'd try to make a buck.
Well, that's all the random thoughts I can muster right now...
Diamond said:But you also have the other end of the spectrum, 'V', where factions and groups of humans actively support the Visitors, even after being made aware that eventually all humans are meat. Some people are just scumbags, and even in the face of annihilation, they'd try to make a buck.
If I remember correctly, Independance Day has a very brief scene showing Iraqi and Israeli military forces working together against the aliens (you see their respective flags in two seperate shots whilst the soldiers are planning their moves). Sadly, I feel the V scenario would be the more likely outcome in reality: especially if whatever was threatening the Earth was advanced enough to know how to play each group of humanity off against the other using "divide and conquer" methods.
Just thinkin bout this: I agree that an alien invasion would involve more of a V-like scenario, with certain human nations allying themselves with the invaders in order to try to gain a decisive advantage over their longtime human adversaries. Just look at examples thruout the hist of Euro colonisation of America, Africa and Australasia, with Indian tribes siding with the white settlers to settle old scores against their old tribal rivalries, in New England (Mohegans vs Pequots, then Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucks), the southeast (Cherokee vs Yamasee and Tuscarora), the Great Plains (Pawnee, Crow, Arikara vs Sioux and Cheyenne), the southwest (various rival Apache bands vs each other); and the same thing in British colonisation of Aust and NZ, with certain Aboriginal tribes in NSW and Qld assisting the settlers to fight other Aboriginal tribes without regard for their shared Aboriginality, including re the Qld Native Police. Heck, what about the Jewish collaborationist ghetto police and capos during the Holocaust who kissed the Nazis' butt in order to get a better deal from the oppressor ? These hist examples provide very appropriate analogies for how human society and nations as a whole would respond to alien invasion.