Welcome to my totally original idea thread! Make yourself at home, I’ve got WiFi. Yeah that one. The password is “welcome to hell”. In essence I want to write about how humans might realistically react to alien life, and how alien life might react to us. The chapters could be different scenarios or I could have an ongoing idea through all of these. I want the end result to have a reasonable amount of cruel, intelligent humor and facts. Now, any ideas?
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Oi, that’s my territory!
JK, I was thinking of maybe integrating a newspaper type of segment here and there to know what’s going on, instead of boring narration.
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Well, if there is an alien invasion, there are two ways humanity might react. With an invader from the great beyond, humanity may feel a need to band together and unite against this force. This is good and all, but would humans actually do this? On a more negative note, citizens may begin feeling a sense of loss, may begin rioting, governments would divide with no clear idea of how to progress, a lot of "I told you so"s would be thrown around, and its very possible some countries might try and appeal to the alien invaders, to gain an upper hand over their old foes… So before we begin, we need to establish which route should be taken.
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Agreed, however the aliens may mean well, however seemingly unlikely this is. Which brings me back to if this is going to be more of a story, or more of a series of cautionary tales.
Of note, no alien would ever come down to Earth without having a heavily sterilized hazmat suit, unless they were stupid.
This is for the same reason why swaths of native Americans died of disease when the Eastern nations began to explore the continent. Going down without the upmost of caution could lead to a global pandemic from a disease borne from a completely different evolutionary path. Nothing on Earth would be prepared to fight that off.
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ALSO agreed, but I’ve been tossing around the idea of a bio-mechanical species. Something like a highly adaptive sphere of metal. It could have thousands of identical parts that could work together to accomplish a task. Any species with the tech to do this would be highly advanced and would be much more dangerous than a less developed still-biological species. A biological species would need a “haz-mat(?)” suit and would probably pose much less of a threat.
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Unless they managed to completely rid their bodies of bacteria and replaced them with nano-machines that would perform the same tasks as the bacteria, they would still have to deal with sterilization. Plus, that feels illogically excessive for a highly advanced species.
Perhaps some hyper-advanced drones controlled like some sort of virtual reality robot.
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- A singular story
- Several cautionary tales
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This poll will go down in two days, and then I will begin the treacherous decent into insanity that is writing.
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I got one word about this… XCOM!
DING DING DING
THE WINNER OF THE MOST MEANINGFUL POST AWARD 2019 GOES TO BLACKJACKSIKE
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As it happens, I’m working on something similar. By working on, I mean I’ve been stuck on the third draft for nine months.
The basic premise is that a potentially alien spacecraft appears in Earth orbit, so what happens next? How does the world we live in every day change during such an extreme event?
Minor spoilers, but I wouldn’t exactly call it an invasion story, and with the exception of about three chapters it doesn’t cover the aliens themselves much, it’s more focused on our reaction. The general first contact narrative is pretty commonplace so I tried to give it my own spin, which is what I suggest you do if you do go forward with this.
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The first question you should ask yourself is “why must they invade us?”
If they want resources, what do we have on earth that they can’t get by themselves? Minerals can be mined from asteroids and water from comets, we have a lot of those in our solar system and they are unpopulated so there wouldn’t have any resistance to an invasion.
If there’s still something unique on earth, how are they going to invade us? They wouldn’t even need to set a foot (or flipper, tentacle, watever…) on earth if they can just destroy our armament from orbit, a few asteroids on the right places would be enough to cancel any opposition.
And they can even infiltrate our society and manipulate us to make us more vulnerable.
This video shows many tropes that authors follow when writing about this topic and also proposes some very interesting scenearios:
You should really check this channel out, it’s very useful for avoiding awfull writing tropes and also very fun to watch.
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If the poll does have the multiple short stories as the winner, I think that I should focus on aliens (obviously), but I also think it would be interesting to delve into (possibly) universal problems/ concepts. This would include uploaded consciousness, technological singularities and the like.
So, fundamentally what I’m saying is, if this trend continues and multiple short stories win, if you guys have any ideas for them… that’s the purpose of this thread…
One interesting scenario is an invasion working like a colonization. Even though aliens and humans would live together pacefully, the aliens would be dominating us, imposing their culture, technology and way of life, even terraforming our planet with us not having a say in the matter. This has a lot of advantages and disadvantages for the colonized people and gives an excellent opportunity to explore many different points of view of the same event.
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A typical invasion has been done to death, so it would be very interesting to see something along the lines of this…
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Not to mention that it could provide an interesting analog to the colonization of the Americas.
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Who is familiar with the theory of quantum immortality?
- I know what it is
- What is that?
- has existential crisis (but also “I know what that is”)
- has existential crisis (but doesn’t know what it is)
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The people have chosen! In the near future I will post the prompts that I will use for the “cautionary tales of sorts” in the form of another’s poll because I have no free will. Until then, thank you for voting!
- The Universe is an arms race
- Uploaded consciousness does not work
- Technological Singularity
- Humans are the most evolved in the Universe
- Humans are the least evolved in the universe
- The inhabitants of a simulation become aware they are in a situation
- Humans were being watched, it was just a matter of time before they found out by who
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