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2016/12/19 13:03:31
Subject: Re:Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Hollywood seems to only be capable of fathoming humans defeating an alien invasion of Earth by having the aliens choose to invade Earth in defiance of the fact that Earth is a Death World for them. The most egregious of them are the ones where aliens cannot tolerate water or terrestrial bacteria.
Of course, in reality, humans at this point in time could never fend off any alien force that sought to either wipe us out or take control of the planet, as we simply are too far behind technologically to defeat any conquering space aliens capable of attacking Earth.
The obvious solution is to set the scene in a distant future where humanity has the technology to have an interstellar empire of our own, but they don't go for that.
Also, a 40k movie in Hollywood would be terrible because the writing team would insist on stuffing a romance in somewhere, and it would really kill the mood to have love blossom on a 40k battlefield of any sort.
2016/12/19 13:13:15
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Skymate wrote: If Hollywood can turn a movie about toy robots into an unfunny teen sex comedy then imagine the horror of what they'd do to the 40k universe
A Hollywood 40k movie would be more disjointed than a chaos spawn. It would most likely feature unlikeable leads, a convoluted plot, shoehorned Easter eggs and be tooled to fit the studio's political views.
The Ultramarines movie has problems but its better than anything Hollywood will ever excrete
I think the Dawn of War 1 opening trailer's the best we're likely to see in terms of 40k movies.
2016/12/19 14:01:50
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
A small group of Imperial Guardsmen are tasked with a secret mission to find and secure Inquisitor Ryna behind enemy lines. He is carrying vital intelligence on the location of an Imperial Titan the heretics are planning to activate and take control of.
--Skip to End--
Just when all was lost and the team is ambushed with few survivors and Inquisitor Ryan crying like a fool on the ground, drop pods fill the air and the Space Marines come to save the day.
I was hoping for the IG soldiers realizing they could kill the Inquisitor and blame it on the heretics since both sides use lasguns.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
oldzoggy wrote: Its a great trailer and movie for gaming purposes. But this is on so many ways one of the worst ideas to make a 40k movie. Having to watch 100 minutes of this is a nightmare I as a 40k player can't even endure just think of the regular folks who do not like the setting as much as we do.
I wasn't suggesting making an entire movie like that.
Literally I was saying that that opening cinematic, itself, will be the pinnacle of 40k movies for the foreseeable future.
I mean, it's still holding onto its championship belt despite the game coming out in 2004, a full 12 years ago.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 14:03:56
2016/12/19 17:01:40
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
agnosto wrote: As long as none of their regular writers write the script, it can only be decent. Tissue paper thin plots with cardboard cutout characters is a sure way for it end badly (i.e. garbage dump level cinema). You can only hear "for the emprah!" so many times before you just close you eyes and ask the bad man to stop already or one company of marines landing in a relatively small geographic area but somehow conquering an entire planet populated by billions.
For hollywood to make a decent 40k movie, they'd have to ignore half the topes that some people love about the fluff and make it more like a vin diesel movie.
Also if Uwe Boll comes asking to make the movie, you look him straight in the eye, and tell him to feth off in the most diplomatic way possible.
Uwe Boll is notorious for making garbage-tier video game movies purely for profit by shooting in countries with laws that incentivize making movies that do kinda-okay but not amazing.
Essentially he deliberately makes crappy movies.
2016/12/19 22:57:29
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
gummyofallbears wrote: Our understanding of technology is so linear that it is almost impossible to know the technology that aliens would have.
But most likely, it would result in cataclysmic losses for both sides due to diseases and bacteria and the such.
And theoretically, couldn't there be a space fairing alien society with no understanding of weapons or war? Like it's just an unknown concept.
It's also possible that there is an alien species that perceives things we don't, like the only reason you perceive sound is because your body is tuned to do so, so theoretically there could be something out there that your body isn't tuned to do.
HOWEVER, I will say that Stephen Hawking did agree with Pouncey.
I differ from Hawking a bit.
Personally, I believe that aliens have zero interest in ever setting foot on any planet with life already existing on it. Diseases are horrific enough when they jump the species barrier, jumping the planet-of-origin barrier could lead to the extinction of entire species. It's just safer not to go anywhere with life on it.
So when they need to expand their territory, they would choose barren, lifeless worlds to terraform, of which the universe has a great many. Natural resources are so plentiful throughout the universe and unclaimed territory is enormous, so they would likely never run short.
I like to believe that any species that founds an interstellar civilization also has a fundamental respect for life strong enough that they simply would refrain from launching wars of conquest on primitive planets like ours that offer no threat of any sort, and they would just deem Earth a wildlife preserve.
I also believe that they would question what would've happened to themselves had their own world been colonized by aliens, and decide to not inflict that fate on any new planets. They may even provide any habitable planet its own sizable territory in case any life does develop a civilization. Space is so vast, they can probably afford to do this.
Seriously, space is so big, there's absolutely no reason to ever invade a place like Earth. Any species suitably violent to launch a xenocidal war would've wiped itself out when it developed nukes.
Of course, in reality, humans at this point in time could never fend off any alien force that sought to either wipe us out or take control of the planet, as we simply are too far behind technologically to defeat any conquering space aliens capable of attacking Earth.
That's a misconception really.
Technology is only linear because we only know of one species with technology. To even know of war is not necessary for a space-faring species.
Even if it was, since the general assumption is that the invading planet is united; if this were always so, they'd have no reason to invent anything more efficient than their analogue of hunting rifles.
Also, regardless of technology, if your weapons are just flashier versions of ours (eg Battle: Los Angeles), invading a species that outnumbers you bullets by a thousand to one is suicidal.
If they have no concept of war, why would they ever invade Earth? Surely they'd send a diplomatic envoy should they wish to interact with us, not an army?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/19 23:07:27
2016/12/19 23:25:02
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
I have never thought of it that way, and considering even hostile planets like mars have a capacity to allow life on earth to survive, it isn't too far fetched.
There is definitely a chance that a united society like your vision exists, but there is also a chance that there is an alien empire built on fear and control, very Orwellian.
And obviously both can exist.
Theoretically, space is literally only getting bigger so it is very possible that an alien species will just spectate us like a terrarium in their room.
Topics like these are why I want to pursue Astrobiology instead of cosmology
Generally NASA engineers who are presented with the question of whether humanity could relocate to a terraformed Mars wonder why the heck you wouldn't just fix Earth if you have the capacity to terraform a planet.
No doubt that a wide variety of alien species exist, there are likely trillions of civilizations with the capacity to become interstellar civilizations in existence right now (Drake Equation was solved, and there are likely 7 civilizations similar to ours in the Milky Way, multiply that by the literal trillions of galaxies out there...
Of course, no one's saying all alien civilizations would be the same. Humanity would be the kind to wage a religious war against aliens who offend our sensibilities, like in Warhammer 40k fiction.
Galaxies are spreading out, yes, but the amount of matter and energy remains finite. You may also want to look into the "heat death of the universe."
Personally I lack the ability to study formally due to crippling social anxiety problems that have plagued me since I was a teenager.
2016/12/19 23:36:47
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
(The Drake Equation is a thought experiment that doesn't work very well for trying to get hard numbers, simply because our sample size of one civilization gives us zero answers about common elements necessary for intelligent civilizations to arise. R, f(p), and n(e) (rate of star formation, fraction of stars that have planets, and fraction of planets with the necessary conditions to support life) are doable from here. f(l), f(i), f(c), and L (percentage of planets that could develop life that do, percentage of life-developing planets that develop intelligent life, percentage of intelligent civilizations that release signals into space, and the timeframe in which they do so) are all guesses made off of no actual data.)
You make a good point. I talk a big game but I'm actually pretty ignorant of the reality.
Mostly I just like listening to Cinema Sins. : P
They have good points about sci-fi movies. Like how often the aliens are defeated because their species' weakness is essentially "Allergic to Earth" which makes invading Earth pretty stupid if they can't handle living here.
2016/12/19 23:40:45
Subject: Re:Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Pouncey wrote: Hollywood seems to only be capable of fathoming humans defeating an alien invasion of Earth by having the aliens choose to invade Earth in defiance of the fact that Earth is a Death World for them. The most egregious of them are the ones where aliens cannot tolerate water or terrestrial bacteria.
Of course, in reality, humans at this point in time could never fend off any alien force that sought to either wipe us out or take control of the planet, as we simply are too far behind technologically to defeat any conquering space aliens capable of attacking Earth.
The obvious solution is to set the scene in a distant future where humanity has the technology to have an interstellar empire of our own, but they don't go for that.
Also, a 40k movie in Hollywood would be terrible because the writing team would insist on stuffing a romance in somewhere, and it would really kill the mood to have love blossom on a 40k battlefield of any sort.
You know what i would like to see?, the reverse.
i mean a movie where it present and sets an alien race somewhere far, with likes a mix of 50's and 80's tech and culture with some alien stuff in it.
And then they get invaded by ruthless towering Machines and Androids, where they have to face cruel adversary who shows no remosre and no pity, the things are so outragiously "beast" like, that they give the creeps, the aliens try to resist and finaly comes up with a plan, they manage to capture one of those machines to study it, and find out that its actually telepathically piloted, they manage to find the origine of the signal and finds whats attacking them.
Humanoid creatures, with no distinctive features, except that their skins is pinkish for certain, brown for others, their hairs are short, they don't have any claws or fangs and they arn't that tall comparted to them.
Yup humans, they just encountered humans, Humans ARE the ALIEN INVADER!, plot twist=Mind blown.
Yeah, a sci-fi movie where humans are the aggressive jerks invading a helpless alien planet would be great. Bonus points if the humans are defeated.
I am a bit misanthropic though, so I'm tired of humans winning in movies all the time, and I wanna see alien protagonists kick human butt for once.
2016/12/20 00:15:31
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
(The Drake Equation is a thought experiment that doesn't work very well for trying to get hard numbers, simply because our sample size of one civilization gives us zero answers about common elements necessary for intelligent civilizations to arise. R, f(p), and n(e) (rate of star formation, fraction of stars that have planets, and fraction of planets with the necessary conditions to support life) are doable from here. f(l), f(i), f(c), and L (percentage of planets that could develop life that do, percentage of life-developing planets that develop intelligent life, percentage of intelligent civilizations that release signals into space, and the timeframe in which they do so) are all guesses made off of no actual data.)
You make a good point. I talk a big game but I'm actually pretty ignorant of the reality.
Mostly I just like listening to Cinema Sins. : P
They have good points about sci-fi movies. Like how often the aliens are defeated because their species' weakness is essentially "Allergic to Earth" which makes invading Earth pretty stupid if they can't handle living here.
Honestly science fiction that attempts to take the 'science' part seriously is incredibly hard to film, simply because the realities of it all are really, really boring. The best 'science fiction' usually goes and throws the 'why' out the window (the less exposition you need before things start happening the better. In an ideal world burn the exposition and move on, but writers have this thing about opening narrations...), goes for internal consistency over realistic physics (pulling 'the aliens were allergic to earth!' out of your bum is one of the cardinal sins of writing because it was pulled out of the writer's bum more so than because it's inconsistent with reality, build up to it), and then just gets on with it.
:: nods :: The really good sci-fi needs text descriptions which would be tough to show on video.
Loved Baen sci-fi when I was younger.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ynneadwraith wrote: I must say it's refreshing to hear an optimistic view of alien life I would agree that, provided the universe is as plentiful as needed to prevent conflict, it's likely that any alien races we could possibly meet would be peaceful.
Not to say that I think it's a dead cert though. Just because aliens value life, doesn't mean that they'd value ours. For an example of how something very noble at heart could lead to warfare, check out the Yuuzhan Vong.
S'fine. I'm sure humans would start the war anyways the moment it became clear the aliens did not possess any terrestrial religions.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/20 00:16:21
2016/12/20 00:31:59
Subject: Re:Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Pouncey wrote: Yeah, a sci-fi movie where humans are the aggressive jerks invading a helpless alien planet would be great. Bonus points if the humans are defeated.
I am a bit misanthropic though, so I'm tired of humans winning in movies all the time, and I wanna see alien protagonists kick human butt for once.
Avatar.
I did see that, yes...
I enjoyed it the first time around, but never wanted to watch it again. Apparently that wasn't an uncommon response.
Are there any other examples?
2016/12/20 01:51:53
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Those where what I can think up now, I think Publicity campaign is the one with the major human ass kicking (but I haven't read/seen these works for a long time)
Point taken, thank you.
2016/12/20 14:07:14
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
If they have no concept of war, why would they ever invade Earth? Surely they'd send a diplomatic envoy should they wish to interact with us, not an army?
Well, maybe if they're after the Earth's resources, they might want humanity gone. Though I suppose they could give humanity the means to go somewhere else.
Why would they want Earth's resources? They have access to interstellar travel, they could just mine our asteroids and take water from Europa and we wouldn't be able to do a damned thing about it other than send radio messages, "Hey, that stuff's ours, can you please stop?"
Pouncey wrote:
Why would they want Earth's resources? They have access to interstellar travel, they could just mine our asteroids and take water from Europa and we wouldn't be able to do a damned thing about it other than send radio messages, "Hey, that stuff's ours, can you please stop?"
It doesn't make sense, but that's what happens in some Hollywood alien invasion movies.
Not sure why there's a "but" in that sentence, when it should've been replaced by "and therefore"
Pouncey wrote:
I'm not an Otherkin. I only RP a dragoness, I am fully human in real life.
It's a joke.
Ah.
Pouncey wrote:
Inquisitor Obi-Wan Sherlock Clouseau might run into copyright issues...
Doubtful, homages or references probably don't fall under plagarism.
For that make, The Asylum make very obvious cash-ins for years and nearly all lawsuits against them have failed.
If copyright were 1/10 the be-all, end-all its often mistaken for, Nintendo would be successful of ridding themselves of rule 34 of Nintendo characters instead of being the laughing stock of people who make it.
Explains all the Samus Aran stuff happily existing.
Also did you know there's a decent quantity of Warhammer 40k rule 34 artwork out there?
2016/12/20 20:16:56
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Why would they want Earth's resources? They have access to interstellar travel, they could just mine our asteroids and take water from Europa and we wouldn't be able to do a damned thing about it other than send radio messages, "Hey, that stuff's ours, can you please stop?"
Provided the resources they're after are the same as the resources we use.
What if they wanted our biological diversity? Life appears to be rare in the universe. If their experimentation on life involves melting it all into gloop, then we'd have a problem.
Life's not THAT rare, because as rare as it is, the universe is god damned enormous.
What biology experiments could they possibly have conceived that would require liquefying all organic matter on a planet?
You're starting to sound paranoid.
Also, it's a common fallacy that a culture that is technologically superior to us is all-powerful. They may very well be technologically superior to us in the field of interstellar travel, but that's no guarantee that the rest of their technology would be similarly advanced.
Don't get me wrong, it's extremely likely that they would be insurmountably more advanced, but it's not a certainty.
What if they are otherwise at a similar technological level to us today, but there were derelict starships from some long-extinct spacefaring race in their solar system. Too technologically advanced for them to reverse-engineer in time to avert some sort of disaster, but offering them a handy way to jump over to the next viable planet (Earth!!!).
Fantastically slim chance, but still a possibility.
If they decide to wage war on an entire planet, their military hardware is undoubtedly advanced beyond our comprehension. Not even the USA could hope to take on the entire world and win.
So basically their UFO stuff about their equivalent of Roswell would be real for them, instead of a conspiracy theory like it is for us in real life?
Also did you know there's a decent quantity of Warhammer 40k rule 34 artwork out there?
...I'm not surprised!
Considering what Rule 34 literally states, the revelation that anything whatsoever has pornography derived from it should not be of any surprise to anyone.
Rule 34 is literally, "If it exists, there is porn of it." And yes, it applies to fictitious things.
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gummyofallbears wrote: There is always a chance that the space fairing society doesn't have advanced weaponry or communication skills, but they do have interstellar travel because reasons
There is a chance for anything to happen, and there is a no definite way for us to know what is more likely, we do have a really really small sample size.
If they saw no need to invent weapons of any sort, but they're the kind of species that uses tools to the extent that they create starships, they're pacifistic enough that the concept of killing off an entire species on purpose should be abhorrent and perhaps traumatizing.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/20 20:25:35
2016/12/20 21:57:21
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Verviedi wrote: Hmm... perhaps there is an incredibly simple method of FTL travel that we simply never discovered, and the aliens will come for us with flintlock pistols and sabres, thinking that because we have no FTL we must be practically stone age.
Simple?
According to our knowledge of physics it's actually flat-out impossible to travel FTL and our best spaceship would take 2,000 years to make it to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbour.
We have a theoretical design for a probe that would be able to make the trip to Alpha Centauri and report back to us in 20 years, but it involves using a laser to propel it with enough G-forces that no human crew could possibly survive.
Why would they want Earth's resources? They have access to interstellar travel, they could just mine our asteroids and take water from Europa and we wouldn't be able to do a damned thing about it other than send radio messages, "Hey, that stuff's ours, can you please stop?"
Provided the resources they're after are the same as the resources we use.
What if they wanted our biological diversity? Life appears to be rare in the universe. If their experimentation on life involves melting it all into gloop, then we'd have a problem.
Life's not THAT rare, because as rare as it is, the universe is god damned enormous.
What biology experiments could they possibly have conceived that would require liquefying all organic matter on a planet?
You're starting to sound paranoid.
Assuming that they can move across these vast distances. It's certainly rare enough in our locality that we haven't spotted any sign of it yet.
Remember, that the universe may be huge, but it has also been around for a very, very long time. If intelligent life is a flash in the pan compared to the the size of the universe, it massively reduces the chances that two intelligent species exist at the same time, let alone one of them also being capable of interstellar flight.
You're also applying a lot of assumptions that alien life would think in any way similar to how we do. As gummy said, we have a very small sample to be working from of what aliens might be like...
The universe is simply so vast that alien civilizations undoubtedly exist, they're just, in all likelihood, far enough away we can't contact each other. It won't be like Star Trek though, and even WH40k's setting has too many technologically-advanced civilizations in the Milky Way in all likelihood.
That said, earlier this year there was a report that we may have discovered an actual Dyson Sphere, though of course no one had confirmed it.
You want a real glimpse into how big the universe is? If you're in the northern hemisphere, look at the stars on a clear night. Then realize that the vast, vast majority of those are not in fact stars, but galaxies.
Yeah, you want a good view of the Milky Way, you have to go to the Southern hemisphere. The northern hemisphere of Earth faces away from the center of our galaxy, and Earth is pretty much on the outer edge of the Milky Way.
And the vast majority of stars are so dim we can't even see them at all.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Bobthehero wrote: There was a book about that, some alien race discovered space travel conquered the other aliens who did have ships.
The thing is all those races never discovered black powder. They were fighting eachother with medieval era weapons, but with space ships. You can guess how poorly things went for them when they've reached modern age Earth.
There was a Chris Bunch book I once read where alien civilizations decided that their own technology was so powerful that they couldn't war with each other without wiping out entire planets (Iike MAD during the Cold War) so whenever they wanted to go to war, they kidnapped low-tech armies from relatively primitive planets, equipped them with high-tech versions of their native weapons, and had them fight each other. The book followed a Roman Legion that had been kidnapped in such a manner, the Roman Legion having been chosen for being highly-trained professional soldiers. They weren't armed with guns, just their standard weapons and armor made with highly-advanced technology. Like how if you made a sword or suit of armor for battle in the modern day, it would be way, WAY better than anything the Romans actually had, because every step of the production process in the 21st century, even how we mine the metals needed, is so much more advanced than what they could do then that we really have no data on the effectiveness of weapons, as we simply cannot replicate them now the way they were made then.
That's right. Modern swords, compared to medieval swords, are so high-tech that there is no real comparison in how good a weapon it is.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/20 22:09:37
2016/12/20 22:41:26
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Pouncey wrote: There was a Chris Bunch book I once read where alien civilizations decided that their own technology was so powerful that they couldn't war with each other without wiping out entire planets (Iike MAD during the Cold War) so whenever they wanted to go to war, they kidnapped low-tech armies from relatively primitive planets, equipped them with high-tech versions of their native weapons, and had them fight each other. The book followed a Roman Legion that had been kidnapped in such a manner, the Roman Legion having been chosen for being highly-trained professional soldiers. They weren't armed with guns, just their standard weapons and armor made with highly-advanced technology. Like how if you made a sword or suit of armor for battle in the modern day, it would be way, WAY better than anything the Romans actually had, because every step of the production process in the 21st century, even how we mine the metals needed, is so much more advanced than what they could do then that we really have no data on the effectiveness of weapons, as we simply cannot replicate them now the way they were made then.
You're probably thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranks_of_Bronze by David Drake. They didn't get advanced weapons or armor by scifi standards, just copies of the low-tech stuff they already had. And determining how effective ancient weapons is not an impossible goal. We have existing examples of ancient weapons and armor, and people still make them with ancient methods. Maybe we can't do it with 0.00000000001% accuracy, but for all practical purposes the information is available.
That's the one yes. My apologies to Mr. Drake, I often find it difficult to remember who wrote each book I've read.
Also, correct, they didn't get high-tech equipment by sci-fi stuff, just well-made versions of their ordinary equipment, since keeping low-tech equipment is the point in the book.
Fair enough on the recreation standpoint, but I want to point out that should the modern day Earth take on a medieval-era civilization and not use guns and bombs, the swords and compound bows we use would be made with modern techniques.
However, I think the most serious reasons not to invade a planet are first and foremost:
1. Avoiding native pathogens. Ever seen what happens when a pathogen jumps the species barrier? Wanna see what happens if one jumps a planet-of-origin barrier? No? Me neither.
2. Can you, like, actually bring enough soldiers in your star navy to occupy an entire planet? They're kinda big, you know.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, now that I think of it, the long-term occupation of a planet would prove tricky long after the war was over. You could get around the pathogens by having your armor so well-contained your soldiers are practically wearing hazmat suits, but what would your troops eat?
What would your soldiers eat? Not local cuisine, since you have no idea what local foods are toxic to your species. You'd need to keep up a supply train of rations for every one of your soldiers from a friendly planet until you can get agriculture going. If your species needs some sort of animal meat due to being carnivorous, you still need to grow your own plants, since those food animals need to eat too and Earth cuisine could be just as toxic to them. Then you'd need to keep supplying your own fertilizer, and eventually you'd come to the conclusion that supplying your forces with food would be like keeping millions of people fed on space stations without easy resupply, since you can't allow any of your plants or animals loose on Earth, because they can't be allowed to interact with native Earth species. You'd end up recreating a small portion of your own planet on Earth or in close orbit, at which point why not just go terraform a barren planet anyways, since it'd be the same damned amount of effort and you wouldn't have to go to the trouble of shipping millions of soldiers to another star system and fighting a war with people who have nukes?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh god, I just realized something.
Any civilization that invents FTL travel has the power to destroy entire planets.
All they have to do is take a big mass of metal the size of a house, attach an FTL drive to it, and ram it into a planet at full speed. Due to the relativistic velocities, the projectile goes THROUGH the planet, and the planet is destroyed in the process. Not just all life, the planet itself is shattered by the force of the impact.
And all they have to do to make more powerful guns than us is apply FTL drives on a smaller scale to their projectiles and a lower speed.
Boltguns would be pathetic, because their weapons could go through an Abrams the long way.
They don't need gunpowder to outgun us, just a knowledge of physics and the very technology they'd need to invade us in the first place.
And if they show up at all, they've disregarded every reason I've given to avoid planets with life.
If aliens show up in our solar system, we are beyond fethed.
That's why Hawking said he hopes we find them, and they don't find us. If they find us, the only possible reason we'd know about it is because of a scenario that means we're all about to die.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/20 23:48:23
2016/12/21 05:08:39
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Verviedi wrote: Hmm... perhaps there is an incredibly simple method of FTL travel that we simply never discovered, and the aliens will come for us with flintlock pistols and sabres, thinking that because we have no FTL we must be practically stone age.
Simple?
According to our knowledge of physics it's actually flat-out impossible to travel FTL and our best spaceship would take 2,000 years to make it to Alpha Centauri, our closest neighbour.
We have a theoretical design for a probe that would be able to make the trip to Alpha Centauri and report back to us in 20 years, but it involves using a laser to propel it with enough G-forces that no human crew could possibly survive.
I know it's impossible, but it's fun to think "what if we were wrong?". Say, there's a rock on some alien world that functions as a magnetic monopole, and allows them to easily get into space without a need for fuel by abusing that rock's magnetic properties. I just love the mental image of Victorian space pirates.
It's considered impossible due to the increasing energy requirements of acceleration combined with the fact that all massless things travel exactly at the speed of light. Without mass, you have zero resistance to being moved. Things without mass traveling at the speed of light suggests that it is literally impossible to go that fast if the object has any mass whatsoever, as it would have some resistance to being moved.
Literally, there is not enough energy in the entire universe to propel so much as a single atom to the speed of light.
Any civilization that invents FTL travel has the power to destroy entire planets.
All they have to do is take a big mass of metal the size of a house, attach an FTL drive to it, and ram it into a planet at full speed. Due to the relativistic velocities, the projectile goes THROUGH the planet, and the planet is destroyed in the process. Not just all life, the planet itself is shattered by the force of the impact.
And all they have to do to make more powerful guns than us is apply FTL drives on a smaller scale to their projectiles and a lower speed.
Boltguns would be pathetic, because their weapons could go through an Abrams the long way.
They don't need gunpowder to outgun us, just a knowledge of physics and the very technology they'd need to invade us in the first place.
And if they show up at all, they've disregarded every reason I've given to avoid planets with life.
If aliens show up in our solar system, we are beyond fethed.
That's why Hawking said he hopes we find them, and they don't find us. If they find us, the only possible reason we'd know about it is because of a scenario that means we're all about to die.
I don't think a single projectile, even at near-c velocities, would destroy a planet entirely unless it was miles across. Now, at .95 c, a lump of metal the size of a person would still be way more powerful than any nuclear weapon we've ever built, and would cause widespread devastation, but would be unlikely to actually shatter the whole planet. It even happens in the first book of Ian Douglas' series Star Carrier. Earth is hit with a near-c impactor launched by an alien ship. Humans manage to stop all but one of the projectiles, but the one that gets through lands in the Atlantic Ocean and causes large tsunamis (think Deep Impact). One thing I've always liked about those books is the somewhat more realistic physics than other sci-fi. The major stretches are ships generating black holes for propulsion, and the Alcubierre drive for FTL travel.
Funny how a thread about a 40k movie has turned into a discussion about whether or not aliens would want to invade Earth. Of course, I just fed that side discussion, so I'm not complaining...
I based that statement on having read Randall Monroe's article about what would happen if you slammed a giant diamond into Earth at near the speed of light.
Its worth noting that not only is the entirety of Earth converted to plasma before we even knew it was going to happen, but two other planets in the solar system are "scoured" by the effects of the planet exploding, and debris from the impact is detectable by alien scientists on their own planets hundreds of lightyears away.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also, this is what happens if you launch a baseball at 90% of the speed of light within an atmosphere:
Seriously, any civilization capable of propelling a planetary invasion fleet of starships at near the speed of light has access to weaponry so powerful that it makes everything humanity has at its disposal, including the Tsar Bomba, look like nothing. It doesn't matter if they have firearms or not, their weapons make firearms look like a sharpened rock tied to a stick in terms of destructive potential. Them BREAKING the speed of light to go at FTL velocities requires a mastery of physics so superior to our own that we cannot even fathom the ways they have devised to kill people and break things, the same way a Roman Centurion would have no clue what the hell a nuke was or how it worked.
The idea we ever win in these situations in movies requires the aliens to be so ludicrously underpowered they should never have been able to reach us in the first place.
This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2016/12/21 06:05:57
2016/12/21 11:31:17
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Ynneadwraith wrote: 'According to our knowledge of physics' is the thing you want to look at in that sentence What if our knowledge of physics has missed something fantastically obvious?
Extremely doubtful we've overlooked anything that would make interstellar travel easy and simple.
I have heard of a brand-new idea in physics that might make it possible though. Negative mass.
The problem with going at the speed of light is with mass, really. If we could somehow entirely remove mass from our vessels and everything on and in them, we could go the speed of light, and in fact would have no choice in the matter as the only way to stop going at the speed of light would be to return mass to our vessels.
If we can manipulate mass like that, theoretically we might be able to push mass lower than 0. If we did that, then we could travel faster than light by activating our engines, since we'd have a negative resistance to being moved.
An interesting effect of that though, is that even though we'd have no mass to add gravity from the relativistic velocities, we'd still have to deal with the effects it would have on time. At lightspeed, we would be effectively frozen in time and would interpret traveling literally any distance whatsoever as teleportation, even though the actual journey to another star system would take years to an outside observer watching us from Earth. If you go faster than light, time outside the vessel appears to start going backwards. If you go fast enough, you arrive at your destination before you left, and effectively we just invented a time machine too, and can effectively put ourselves in stasis by traveling at the speed of light exactly whenever we want to return to the present. Or future, for that matter.
Assuming that they can move across these vast distances. It's certainly rare enough in our locality that we haven't spotted any sign of it yet.
Remember, that the universe may be huge, but it has also been around for a very, very long time. If intelligent life is a flash in the pan compared to the the size of the universe, it massively reduces the chances that two intelligent species exist at the same time, let alone one of them also being capable of interstellar flight.
Actually, our own generation of stars are the very first in the universe's existence that are capable of supporting technologically-advanced civilizations. Previously the heavier elements our technology relies on to function did not exist yet.
And it's almost certain there are other civilizations like ours out there, they're just so far away we can't communicate with them. We may have spotted a Dyson Sphere though.
You're also applying a lot of assumptions that alien life would think in any way similar to how we do. As gummy said, we have a very small sample to be working from of what aliens might be like...
Fair enough.
I'm aware of how big the universe is not just in space, but in time as well. Awe-inspiringly big Intelligent spacefaring life with the capability to travel interstellar distances faster than the speed of light might be fantastically common (relatively speaking), but if they only pop up every millennia or so, and die out (for whatever reason) every couple of hundred thousand years then there's even less of a chance that we'd ever get to meet them.
Uhh, you might want to run the math on how many alien civilizations that would lead to if you think they're being created 200 times faster than they're dying out.
Maybe look up what a "millennium" is, as well.
Also, if we pick up radio signals from another inhabited planet, the chances are that the alien civilisation we've discovered is long-since extinct.
We've had radio IRL for about 100 years. Our radio signals have reached a 100 lightyear radius around Earth. Our closest neighbour is Alpha Centauri, and it's only 4.3 lightyears away.
That's assuming that this hypothetical FTL works by accelerating things faster than the speed of light.
What if it works by a device that folds space, so you simply walk through a gate on your planet onto the surface of another one?
How'd they get the gate to the second star system, exactly? And why do you want to fold space in the atmosphere of a planet you intend to live on?
Also, maybe look up what FTL stands for too.
Of course, any species that is capable of such a device is also likely capable of producing enough energy to make whatever the hell offensive weapon they like, so we're probably equally screwed (provided technological development follows a broadly similar path to what we've experienced).
As for the folding space thing, I love the depiction in Pratchett/Baxter's Long Earth series. Basically, a scientist somewhere invents a device that allows people to 'step' one dimension to the 'west' or 'east' (relative terms to describe 5D space using 4D terminology), and posts it on the internet for everyone to use. The device itself consists of a 3-way switch, a host of other cheap electrical gubbins and a potato.
It's an utter flight of fancy, but if something similar to that is the trick to FTL travel, there's no reason any race would have to be technologically advanced to do it.
If any human actually figured out an easy way of interstellar travel that actually worked in real life, we would be exploring other star systems by now and you'd be browsing photos of alien planets on the Internet taken by human explorers who went there and brought pictures back.
There's an assumption that if there's something that we can't do at the moment, it must take a more advanced society to accomplish it. It could equally just be a society that thinks just a little differently to us
You realize that all of the authors thinking up these stories are in fact humans positing ideas that, by definition, humans came up with, right?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/21 11:32:24
2016/12/21 13:16:02
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Ynneadwraith wrote: I'm not sure you've got it right with time going backwards though. In our current understanding of physics that's impossible. As you get close to the speed of light, from the outside universe looking in, time on the starship would appear to have ground to a halt (or rather be moving imperceptably slowly). I'm not certain that time running backwards as you go past the FTL barrier is anything more than a 'maybe it works like that'.
Well, we don't even know how we'd achieve negative mass, since we don't even know how to reduce mass at all in the first place as far as I know. We call that concept "inertial dampening" in sci-fi though and on a smaller scale it would do things like let power armored infantry wearing half-ton suits of armor, just, kinda, you know, fly without a jetpack or wings or airplane or anything, because they become so light they can float in air.
And, uh, relativistic speeds messes up ordinary physics to the point where, uh, well... weird stuff starts happening. Like, atoms literally passing through each other. The effects of an asteroid made of diamond plowing into Earth at the speed of an "Oh-My-God Particle" (named after what the first scientist who discovered one said out loud after reading what their monitor said) would convert the entire planet into plasma as Earth explodes with enough force to strongly affect the Sun and "scour the surface" of Venus and Mercury.
And we're not simply talking "relativistic speeds" we're talking about going faster than we believed to be possible to go within the laws of physics until the past year or so.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ynneadwraith wrote: Based on what evidence do you think we'd already have discovered it? The time that we've had to explore our universe/set of physical laws isn't nearly enough to have exhausted the possibilities for something really simple to be the case.
The fact that we have seven billion people on Earth and going to other planets is something we consider cool enough there are people willing to pay ten billion dollars to book a reservation to live on Mars.
Also that the rules the universe operates on are not purely a human concept and are in fact universal.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ynneadwraith wrote: As much as anyone can prove people on the internet are human
Apologies, but I don't understand the point your making.
My point was that it's an assumption that you're making that just because a culture is technologically advanced enough to produce FTL travel, it must also be similarly advanced in other areas. Don't get me wrong, it's likely to be the case given the evidence that we have available, but it's far from a certainty.
My point is that if they have the knowledge of physics needed to invent a vessel capable of traveling faster than light, it doesn't matter what weaponry they ever came up with, because physics itself tells them that the FTL drive they used to get to Earth, attached to an asteroid is a solid-slug torpedo capable of destroying an entire planet.
Literally, they could probably just ram one of their ships into Earth at full speed and put an end to all life on Earth.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/21 13:32:09
2016/12/21 14:31:02
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Ynneadwraith wrote: That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...
You may want to research what things like "acceleration" and "velocity" and "speed of light" even MEAN at this point, really. Maybe the word "faster" too.
It's also assuming that their goal is solely to destroy the earth, rather than something that would involve leaving the planet mainly intact.
Want to cause less destruction? Just go slower. No biggie.
Like, you don't even have to go lightspeed to cause massive devastation. An object the size of a baseball traveling at 90% the speed of light causes a nuclear explosion comparable with one of our nuclear weapons. You'd actually WANT to slow it way the hell below lightspeed when designing your infantry's weapons so that firing their weapons stops causing city-ending nuclear explosions at point-blank range.
I'll agree with the premise though. It's fantastically unlikely that a FTL-capable civilisation is similar in military strength to us. The knowledge-base of physics required to produce working FTL would give them the ability to create weapons far more advanced than anything we could produce, even if they had no concept of weaponry before they met us. Again though, far from impossible given the assumptions we're making about technological progression.
I'm telling you, the kinetic energy weapons they would inherently know how to make simply by being capable of reaching us means that any alien invasion fleet that attacks Earth outclasses us in military hardware. They don't need gunpowder, they have weapons BETTER than any kind of firearm that is physically possible to create, and the fact they got to Earth PROVES they know how to make them.
That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).
I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.
If they can figure out how to work a starship, they're advanced enough to build their own, too. And figuring out how to work the ship properly over time would give them the same knowledge. You need to know how tech works in order to operate it properly. You start pushing buttons at random, you could easily ram into your own planet instead of going to Earth.
Really though, you are right. You'd have to make far more assumptions to end up with an FTL-capable civilisation we could take in a fight than one that would steamroller us from orbit.
Plus, the idea of an aggressive spacefaring race simply plowing their starships into a planet as a weapon feels very 40k I approve
They could also run those ships by remote or autopilot and not even sacrifice the crew to do it, too.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Like, seriously, their surface troops would have to be trained never to fire their weapons into the air in celebration, because their space navy got annoyed by the celebration bullets occasionally smashing into their ships' hulls. If humans had weapons like these, Looney Tunes' Yosemite Sam would be a public menace for occasionally taking out satellites, space shuttles, or the ISS with stray rounds.
This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2016/12/21 14:54:04
2016/12/21 15:39:40
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Ynneadwraith wrote: That's again assuming that FTL travel is achieved by acceleration. Even if it is achieved by acceleration, what would happen if you ram something with negative mass into the earth? A question for the XKCD chap methinks...
You may want to research what things like "acceleration" and "velocity" and "speed of light" even MEAN at this point, really. Maybe the word "faster" too.
Please see my earlier reference to how folding space so you can travel distances faster than the speed of light (all the while travelling at walking pace) constitutes Faster Than Light travel before suggesting I go and look up dictionary terms
FTL. Faster than Light.
Please consider that that is a literal term and refers to actual velocities, not simply any case of traveling a very great distance in a short amount of time..
It's already known that there are ways we can cut down on the travel time without actually traveling faster than light. Folding space or creating a wormhole is a relatively old idea, and we could probably do it eventually. It's not considered to be FTL though, because your ship is merely taking a shortcut, not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.
Want to cause less destruction? Just go slower. No biggie.
I'll give you that one
: D
I'm telling you, the kinetic energy weapons they would inherently know how to make simply by being capable of reaching us means that any alien invasion fleet that attacks Earth outclasses us in military hardware. They don't need gunpowder, they have weapons BETTER than any kind of firearm that is physically possible to create, and the fact they got to Earth PROVES they know how to make them.
The fact that they've got to earth proves nothing other than the fact that they have access to FTL technology. It proves nothing about whether they can manufacture, or even understand it.
The fact that they have FTL categorically does not mean they are inherently able to produce kinetic weapons of equal sophistication. Give a farmer access to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and a button to press and he can smash particles together at stupid speeds. Doesn't mean he know's anything about how to make it, operate it, or anything else apart from how to press the button.
New counter-argument: You're suggesting that aliens who understand and create that advanced technology are supplying a less-knowledgeable race with technology and weapons from their own civilization, and teaching them how to use them effectively.
Earth is still fethed. Iraq wasn't less destroyed by the US military in 2003 just because most US soldiers don't understand the science that went into their weapons and equipment.
It would suggest that they are advanced, but there are enough plausible scenarios around to make it far from a certainty.
The tech's being created and used against us in a war intended to conquer Earth. Probably even if the civilization that made the tech was using it themselves, most of their military wouldn't actually grasp the science. The weapons are no less effective or advanced.
Ynneadwraith wrote: That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).
I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.
You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.
If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.
Once they figured out that buttons do stuff, how much of the ship's systems do you think they'd catastrophically wreck by learning what each and every thing does by simply pushing every button to see what it does?
For an example, close your eyes and start pressing buttons on your keyboard at random while moving your mouse around and clicking a random assortment of buttons. Continue this for about a minute. Then stop and open your eyes and see what state your computer is in. Now consider what that might do on a war vessel instead of a home computer.
More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.
Most of our soldiers IRL don't understand how their own weapons work.
A good analogy would be the colonisation of the Americas by the Europeans. The Native Americans had no knowledge of how to manufacture muskets, no knowledge of the chemical processes by which gunpowder works. However, they could still shoot you dead as ably as the next man if they were shown how a musket works.
Yeah, I mean, if the guys that made the tech and understand it show you how to use it... of course you can come to operate it properly.
But that means you're no longer simply discovering an abandoned derelict, you're now being used as a proxy military and supplied by the people who made the tech, who train you in its use. That's literally how modern militaries train with their own weapons and vessels, since the actual engineers who designed the ships and guns in the first place are not typically soldiers themselves being sent out into the field.
I don't think that's remotely true.
Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.
A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.
If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).
Yeah, uh, the owner manual taught you how to use it. Maybe even an employee whose job it is to teach you how to use that stuff.
The aliens who built it would basically have to be instructing the less-advanced race in its use.
I actually read a book like that. Humans in the early 21st century (about 15-16 years ago, actually) were recruited as a military force by a galactic federation of pacifistic races who were being attacked and losing badly. The aliens offered us their science, technology, and production facilities to supply us with any weapons and tools we could come up with, since they knew from observation we were good at fighting, and had a bit of a penchant for wanting to defend the helpless from aggressors, and they simply couldn't fight back very well on their own (they tried, it didn't work). Humanity came up with power armor so advanced it makes 40k stuff look crappy, guns that shot so fast at relativistic velocities they looked like lasers and punched through like 5 ranks of enemies, exploding the torso of every one of them (they should've cut down on the fire rate actually, as it was too high and they ran low on ammo on occasion, but one particular Gunnery Sergeant insisted on a laser and that was the best they could do), anti-starship lasers that basically kept a nuclear explosion rolling and focused the explosion into a coherent beam (techniccally didn't use lightt, but it was a coherent beam that was like a laser whose beam was made of nuclear explosions) and at one point they made a couple of kilograms of anti-matter, which the general freaked out about because that's an amount typically used to fuel an entire fleet of starships, then they used it as a bomb and took out a massive area. The guy who invented humanity's first antimatter bomb couldn't bear to look as he pushed the button tto launch the rocket, because they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't explode in the silo. The general in charge just watched the whole thing, knowing that if it detonated, his death would come so swiftly he literally would not be capable of comprehending the fact anything went wrong before his body was obliterated.
Oh, also, they might have antimatter bombs. I was once informed by a physicist (during a discussion about WH40k conversion beamers where I thought they converted the target's body to antimatter for some reason) that an optimal detonation of a 60kg antimatter bomb would end all life on Earth due to the ensuing environmental effects, though the planet itself would remain intact.
Automatically Appended Next Post: As for operating computers properly... Uhh, I guess their understanding of computers might be cut short if they enter the wrong thing. There's a text command you can type into your computer which will instruct it to delete literally every file on your hard drive. All of them. In every folder. Literally every file of every sort. No, I don't just mean your photo album, I mean literally every piece of information on your computer. I won't say what it is because I damned well don't want anyone to try it out of curiosity. It won't get them all of course, because eventually it'll stop when it's deleted enough files that the computer is no longer capable of operating whatsoever and shuts down permanently.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2016/12/21 15:56:51
2016/12/21 17:27:58
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Please consider that that is a literal term and refers to actual velocities, not simply any case of traveling a very great distance in a short amount of time..
It's already known that there are ways we can cut down on the travel time without actually traveling faster than light. Folding space or creating a wormhole is a relatively old idea, and we could probably do it eventually. It's not considered to be FTL though, because your ship is merely taking a shortcut, not actually traveling faster than the speed of light.
Quibbling over literal meanings of terms
The context of the discussion is if a hypothetical alien race could travel to earth faster than light could do so without having a similarly advanced level of tech in other areas.
If you want to get really literal with terms, 'faster' could relate to time as well as speed. For the purposes of interstellar travel, cutting down travel time is the important goal, and speed is only one particular way to achieve that. Folding space is another equally valid way of travelling somewhere in less time than it would take light to travel there (so...faster than light).
Okay, clearly you're not accepting the real meaning of the tterm from me. I'll link you to Wikipedia's page about FTL and you can read it yourself.
New counter-argument: You're suggesting that aliens who understand and create that advanced technology are supplying a less-knowledgeable race with technology and weapons from their own civilization, and teaching them how to use them effectively.
Earth is still fethed. Iraq wasn't less destroyed by the US military in 2003 just because most US soldiers don't understand the science that went into their weapons and equipment.
Hah, true. In all of these cases, the overwhelming probability is that yes, Earth is fethed
Still, Iraq wasn't destroyed. It's beat up, but it's still there. Vietnam's still there, despite the US' best efforts.
Also, what if the advanced race is anything like the Dark Eldar? They might send their less advanced neighbours our way simply because it's funny to watch us try and fight for survival. No idea what the motivations of interstellar arms dealers would be
Interstellar treaties that prevent arming less developed societies, but allow sharing of other technologies?
Plenty of possible scenarios (although admittedly again, none of them more likely than the 'we're fethed' scenarios).
The tech's being created and used against us in a war intended to conquer Earth. Probably even if the civilization that made the tech was using it themselves, most of their military wouldn't actually grasp the science. The weapons are no less effective or advanced.
No-one said it had to be created by the same people who are using it to get to Earth
Beyond that it's back to the whole linear technology development thing. It's likely that it is linear, but not a certainty. Our technological understanding has progressed in the areas it's progressed in because of the events of our past and our surroundings. Who's to say that different circumstances wouldn't produce a vastly different level of understanding in different areas?
Ynneadwraith wrote: That's also assuming that any hypothetical alien invader invented the FTL in the first place, rather than inheriting it in some way. Either from another species, or from previous generations of their own species (from which they've subsequently regressed).
I am 100% certain that if a fully functional, armed, supplied and fueled Nimitz-class carrier and its fleet found its way into the hands of Earth during the US civil war, but somehow without the crews, the people of the time would completely lack the understanding of how to even operate the vessel. They wouldn't even know what the nuclear reactors are because they have no idea what radiation is. They don't know about keyboards because computers didn't exist yet. And that is with human-created technology and humans existing in time periods about 100 years apart on the same planet.
You've sort of demonstrated my point that a civilisation could have access to FTL tech, but also have similar level tech to humanity.
If they discover a FTL spacecraft with a big red button in the middle that says 'press this to travel faster than light', they could reach earth without having any sort of understanding of how it worked. Who's to say that a complicated ship needs to have complicated controls? If the navigation system is simply a star-chart, and you press a star and it takes you there, I'm fairly certain your US Civil War folks could stumble upon how to work it through basic trial and error.
Once they figured out that buttons do stuff, how much of the ship's systems do you think they'd catastrophically wreck by learning what each and every thing does by simply pushing every button to see what it does?
For an example, close your eyes and start pressing buttons on your keyboard at random while moving your mouse around and clicking a random assortment of buttons. Continue this for about a minute. Then stop and open your eyes and see what state your computer is in. Now consider what that might do on a war vessel instead of a home computer.
More plausibly, however, what if they were shown how to navigate an FTL craft? Again, they could reach earth without having any understanding of how it works.
Most of our soldiers IRL don't understand how their own weapons work.
Precisely just because you're able to use a piece of technology, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean you have to understand how it works. Just because you can use an FTL starship, doesn't mean the rest of your technology base has to be at a similar level.
Yeah, I mean, if the guys that made the tech and understand it show you how to use it... of course you can come to operate it properly.
But that means you're no longer simply discovering an abandoned derelict, you're now being used as a proxy military and supplied by the people who made the tech, who train you in its use. That's literally how modern militaries train with their own weapons and vessels, since the actual engineers who designed the ships and guns in the first place are not typically soldiers themselves being sent out into the field.
True, it's another possible scenario in which someone could reach earth with FTL.
Would you want to arm your warlike proxy militia-species with weapons that can hurt you as well? Surely it would be far safer to equip them with the means to get to Earth, and leave them with whatever weaponry is just enough to do the job...
Likely we're still fethed, but less fethed! Maybe even less fethed enough that we might not all die!
I don't think that's remotely true.
Personally, I don't understand the internal workings of Ni-Cad batteries, or how touchscreens work, or the functioning of complicated networks of satellites used to relay messages. Doesn't stop me from using my phone to call people.
A lot of people have no idea how their cars work, yet they can still get from A-to-B perfectly fine.
If anything, one of the main functions of technology is to make something immensely complicated easy to use. Apply that to a starship (if whoever built it is capable of manufacturing FTL, they'd sure as hell be capable of making the controls simple to use).
Yeah, uh, the owner manual taught you how to use it. Maybe even an employee whose job it is to teach you how to use that stuff.
The aliens who built it would basically have to be instructing the less-advanced race in its use.
Yep. That's my point. I don't need to understand how the physics behind the technology works, I just need the user manual. A spacefaring race doesn't need to know how the technology behind an FTL craft they've found works, they just need the user manual
Ergo, spacefaring race with similar levels of tech to us is a possibility
I actually read a book like that. Humans in the early 21st century (about 15-16 years ago, actually) were recruited as a military force by a galactic federation of pacifistic races who were being attacked and losing badly. The aliens offered us their science, technology, and production facilities to supply us with any weapons and tools we could come up with, since they knew from observation we were good at fighting, and had a bit of a penchant for wanting to defend the helpless from aggressors, and they simply couldn't fight back very well on their own (they tried, it didn't work). Humanity came up with power armor so advanced it makes 40k stuff look crappy, guns that shot so fast at relativistic velocities they looked like lasers and punched through like 5 ranks of enemies, exploding the torso of every one of them (they should've cut down on the fire rate actually, as it was too high and they ran low on ammo on occasion, but one particular Gunnery Sergeant insisted on a laser and that was the best they could do), anti-starship lasers that basically kept a nuclear explosion rolling and focused the explosion into a coherent beam (techniccally didn't use lightt, but it was a coherent beam that was like a laser whose beam was made of nuclear explosions) and at one point they made a couple of kilograms of anti-matter, which the general freaked out about because that's an amount typically used to fuel an entire fleet of starships, then they used it as a bomb and took out a massive area. The guy who invented humanity's first antimatter bomb couldn't bear to look as he pushed the button tto launch the rocket, because they weren't entirely sure it wouldn't explode in the silo. The general in charge just watched the whole thing, knowing that if it detonated, his death would come so swiftly he literally would not be capable of comprehending the fact anything went wrong before his body was obliterated.
Oh, also, they might have antimatter bombs. I was once informed by a physicist (during a discussion about WH40k conversion beamers where I thought they converted the target's body to antimatter for some reason) that an optimal detonation of a 60kg antimatter bomb would end all life on Earth due to the ensuing environmental effects, though the planet itself would remain intact.
Neat sounds like a cool book. What's it called?
It's a series actually. John Ringo's Posleen series. The first four books are "A Hymn Before Battle," "Gust Front," "When the Devil Dances," and "Hell's Faire."
There are more, but those are the best ones.
I recommend skipping Cally's War entirely. It starts with an incredibly graphic torture scene in the first chapter. I put the book down after that, but according to what I've head, it only gets worse from there.
If you've read any of the Culture books they've got a cool example of how multiple societies with differing technological levels could exist and interact
I have not, actually.
Honestly, I'm not responding to any of your points, nor did I read them, because it's clear you're completely unwilling to accept the reality and prefer to linger in the fantasy of humans somehow being able to fend off an alien invasion.
And that's kinda my point. All of these alien invasion stories invent a critical weakness for the aliens that the humans then exploit to win. There's no alien invasion Hollywood Blockbusters written about a more realistic alien invasion force that sets its sights on destroying Earth and then has the aliens win. The aliens always blow up a bunch of stuff, then humans find a way to defeat them, by exploiting a weakness that shouldn't really exist.
The closest we come is stuff like The Day the Earth Stood Still, where the humans talk the aliens into giving up on killing us. But even that has problems - these aliens decided an entire species needed to be exterminated for the benefit of the planet, and were making it happen. Why would our promises of being willing to change in the face of an unstoppable force sway the aliens at all? If they believed we were willing to change, why would they try to wipe us out at all instead of simply convincing us change was necessary? Disseminating the command to change would also have proved difficult given how much stuff was already destroyed by the time they chose to stop - they basically set us back 1800 years in terms of technology and wiped out our global communication systems, so no one has any idea why the aliens stopped or even that they should change, because there's no way to relay any information short of sending a human being by one of the surviving ships or planes to tell everyone. They effectively wiped out the Internet, telephone, and television systems in the process of ravaging most of the planet in a sentient, deliberate Grey Goo scenario.
Huh. Humanity, right now, has laser technology powerful enough to convert our own atmosphere to plasma, killing all life on the planet, and push the Moon out of Earth's orbit, we simply lack the energy production to power an array of such lasers in a sufficient manner to do so.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2016/12/21 19:11:47
2016/12/31 19:44:08
Subject: Re:Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Here's an idea that could work
Alien, but with a Genestealer. 1 lone Genestealer aboard a Freighter. You won't even need to do a 20 minute monologue of background to have things make sense, cause who would even care about the Horus Heresy. These would be ordinary people, all you have to is have one or two say 'Throne' instead of a swear, or sub Emperor instead of God. Hell, they probably would be on the same level of technology; huge space ship, tiny black and white screen. Sure, throw in the odd 40k Phrase, like Space Marines, but the average person knows what a Marine is, so they would get the connection. If you want to really bridge the gap at the end the survivors could be met by a Space Marine vessel, and then it has a quick moment of "Oh gak, thats what they meant by Space Marine".
Uhh...
You DO know that "Space Hulk" is basically a direct ripoff of Alien, right?
2016/12/31 23:49:18
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Giantwalkingchair wrote: Possibly a different can of worms, but what if instead of a Hollywood blowout. (I mean seriously, what mob is going to commit serious finances to a movie with a niche audience.). Suppose this was put into the hands of Japanese animation studios?
Or maybe something like Heavy Metal?
2017/01/01 00:56:09
Subject: Why you NEVER, EVER want a Hollywood 40k movie.
Couldn't you have said "shoestring budget" rather than think of a specific number?
Do you have to be so ridiculously literal about nitpicking this?
Edit: I'm done with this nitpicking tangent. Everyone else understands that $10 is an exaggeration to make a point, we can continue the discussion from there instead of arguing about precisely how much I should have exaggerated it.
Fair enough, but I think the fact that I was nitpicking over it should suggest that I felt a need to do so. However, that has ceased to be the case, so yes, we can continue. You may now continue the conversation as you like, and I will respond if I feel like it.
I would agree that, provided the universe is as plentiful as needed to prevent conflict, it's likely that any alien races we could possibly meet would be peaceful.
