Canadian Ex-Minister Calls For Serious ET Study

Nom du Keyboard writes "A former Canadian Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister wants Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics - relations with Extraterrestrials - to avoid the possibility of intergalactic war. Unfortunately he also proposes starting a 'Decade of Contact', which seems to mean spending a whole lot of public money on UFO education. Is he on the right track here, that we can't afford to ignore the rest of the Universe any longer?" From the article: "The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning ... The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide."

Comments

"Intergalactic war", huh?

[TripMaster Monkey]

Wow... a new low. The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris. The possibility that our weapons might prove a threat to a culture capable of mere interstellar travel (let alone "intergalactic") is about the same as an ant colony against the U.S. Army.

Re:"Intergalactic war", huh?

[utnow]

If you've never read "Ender's Shadow" then I highly suggest it. The biggest problem in defending yourself against an enemy in space is that it can come from virtually any direction (on earth you have to defend yourself on a 2d surface... slighly more complicated with aircraft are involved but still essentially a 2d plane of attack). In space the planet is mearly a dot and an attack can from any angle.

So if you intend to protect the planet, you have to protect the entire sphere. If you want to take the attack 'away from home' as would be advisable if using a huge nuke as you suggest, then you have to move the defence sphere outward. As you move it out, you increase the surface that you must protect exponentially. It's virtually impossible (virtually... don't hop down my back about a general statement) to defend yourself against a space offensive due to this feature of battle in space. The only way to win is to be on the attack.

Re:"Intergalactic war", huh?

[HanzoSpam]

The aliens must be laughing themselves sick at our hubris.

If they laugh themselves sick, are they eligable for treatment in the Canadian free health-care system?

Re:"Intergalactic war", huh?

[Ex-MislTech]

Trip I don't think I can agree with you enough .

I served in the US military on a weapons test platform built on a
old DLG destroyer renamed a CG cruiser class, think vietnam era .

The ship was nearly 25 yrs old and in bad shape .

Needless to say we are not anywhere near a 100% target rate .

Taking it a step further, if we have had more than one shuttle blow
up just trying to fly we are in VERY sad shape if a alien race
did decide to take us out .

I think what you see in "War of the Worlds" would be a friggin joke compared to
pinpoint strikes from space by a Instellar Battleship with multiple fusion reactors .

Cloaking technology maybe ??? I think if they didn't want us to see them they
could do that as well, even our gimp tech has stealth .

We have a weak version of the cloak due to a US general wanting the predator tech .

I think the might just bombard the earth with short lived radiation that affects certain
DNA strands and leave the planet completely unscathed but devoid of humans .

What they "could" do is so far and beyond what we can imagine, we would be stunned .

Hell one guy in scooter could fly by and release a bio weapon and we wouldn't even know,
imagine what their molecular biologists could design .

Poof bye humans !

We better hope that so called aliens that can wormhole across the universe are friendly or else
we are so very very screwed .

Ex-MislTech

Re:"Intergalactic war", huh?

[fyngyrz]

And just because they have the technology to travel to Earth from some distant universe doesn't necessarilly mean they have any decent weapons or protections against types of weapons they've never seen before or developed.

If you are able to place yourself in space, at any relative velocity, at any location relative to another object (which is basically the definition of successful space travel, no matter what the means), then you should probably also be able to place an object, for instance a nice, dense lump of lead with a steel jacket, at any relative position and velocity to another object, in this case, let's say, Earth. Launch position may be arbitrarily distant, if you accept additional time-to-target.

So. Object (eventually, if you like) weighing, say, 1 kiloton (to give you some perspective, the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier, is about 77 kilotons), comes into Earth's atmosphere at a relative velocity of, oh, say 1,000,000 K/sec, coming straight down (to minimize friction and time-in atmosphere.) Object impacts military target, for instance, the Pentagon. Washington, and large amount of the surrounding area, is now missing in action, and we have a large crater (probably a new opening on the sea, actually, thought I've not done the math) we should probably get around to dealing with. The radiation and blast effects may require a slight delay, perhaps, oh, I don't know, a few centuries.

Total cost to those accidental discovers of space travel? Some lead or other dense material, a steel or other relatively tough jacket, and whatever space drive resources it takes to get to where launching it delivers enough energy to target. But remember — if they can get here and arrange a relative stop, then they can just as easily get anywhere else in the solar system at any other relative velocity. If they decide we're toast... we're toast, and there isn't squat we can do about it.

Basically, the fact is if you assume interstellar space travel with any vehicle larger than a telephone booth, then you have to assume military superiority as well, and to a degree that is difficult to comprehend and requires no additional technology beyond moving inert materials around.

Sorry to burst your bubble. ;-)

That Movie

[kai.chan]

Did you not watch that movie?? The aliens would die from all the germs and bacteria that humans are immune to! Simply coughing and sneezing at them will be our ultimate weapon. There is absolutely nothing to worry about!

Re:So, they figured it out

[TripMaster Monkey]

So just because they might have "figured out simple fission/fusion weapons" doesn't mean they can deal with a few gazillion joules of energy suddenly appearing 50 meters off the port quarter of their space ship.

"Suddenly appearing", huh? Exactly when did we develop teleportation technology? Oh, that's right...we haven't.

Any culture capable of interstellar travel should be more than capable of detecting and either sidestepping or shooting down whatever we lob at them with our pathetic chemical rockets.