We Will Destroy Your Planet Read online

  If, however, you want to make an area inhospitable, and tainted with a pathogen that will affect any visitors at any point over an unknown length of time, then you need a longer-lasting biological weapon. This can be in the form of bacterial or viral spores capable of returning to viability from dormancy after long periods. If you are merely denying one area on an otherwise occupied Earth – say you want to keep a particular island free of life, but with native life remaining in other locales – then such a disease spore is a reasonable option, so long as it is quick-acting, and cannot be carried by winds to inhabited areas.

  To deny a whole planet to anyone else out there, however, is a different type of problem. A disease will only affect types of life that are either native to the planet it came from, or that it has been engineered to attack. Since you do not necessarily know which other visitors will try to take the Earth, you will have to engineer something that responds to chemical elements in organic form, rather than to a specific type of cells from a single world. Making a bacterium that attacks a specific form of an element means that it will not only attack extraterrestrial visitors, but even their ships and equipment.

  Biological warfare involving bacteria and pathogens is one thing, but it is also worth considering the use of more complex life forms as weapons, especially with regard to the concept of area denial.

  Parasitic organisms are frequently considered to be good area denial weapons. For example, you can seed the planet with a genetically engineered pupal stage, which will hibernate until disturbed by the presence – chemical spoor, body heat, pheromones, for example – of a visitor. Your pupal life form can then attack a newcomer, convert the intruder biomass into a chrysalid stage for itself, and then emerge as a life form that can produce new pupal life forms to repeat the cycle. Insect societies are a good model for this, and your full adult parasite forms can be designed with appropriate weapons and reactions – claws, fangs, venom, acid, or whatever your preference.

  A lack of a human population may be suspicious to other species, perhaps even others than the one whom you are trying to prevent from taking over the Earth, especially if they have been conducting long-term reconnaissance of their own. It’s also possible that you may want to eliminate human life without getting into trouble with authorities elsewhere, who may be keeping an eye on things. Therefore, if you wish to turn the Earth into a human-free deathtrap it would be prudent to make everything seem as normal as possible on the planet.

  For this, you need a type of biological weapon that can pass for human. You need to infiltrate such weapons on to the planet, where they may begin to replicate and replace humans with more of themselves. The perfect example of such an organism would be the one known on Earth from John W. Campbell Jr’s Who Goes There?, best remembered in its screen incarnation as John Carpenter’s movie The Thing. This is the perfect biological weapon to act as both a destroyer and an area denial weapon. It exists purely to absorb, copy, and infect the cells of other life forms, replacing them with its own. A computer on screen in the film suggests that the entire population of the Earth would have been infected within 27,000 hours – about 3.08 years. Since the organism has been frozen in the ice for thousands of years and is still active, it would remain there once the Earth’s indigenous life forms (all mammals at least, as it impersonates both humans and canines during the film) were extinct. This would mean no one else dare land on the Earth, and the planet would remain a quarantined plague world, useless to anyone.

  Likewise, if you have an engineered weapon that simply absorbs and replicates the human form and memories, but does not need any inbuilt weapons or hostility, you need only make sure the organism is sterile, and cannot reproduce in human form or manner. Within the lifespan of the youngest human replaced, the planet would become a ghost world, no longer inhabited.

  The more hostile previous type of organism, however, would be the better bet for remaining viable as a trap or deterrent. So long as it can hibernate until disturbed, the whole cycle can begin again each time someone attempts to visit the infected planet.

  The greatest advantage to any form of engineered bioweapon which infects or absorbs those who come into contact with it is that every attacker or intruder who attempts to trespass within the denied area protected by such an organism will not only be prevented from doing so, but will actually add to the defences and make them stronger.

  GARRISONING THE PLANET

  Establishing a military garrison on the planet may be necessary, if you’re looking to prevent activity by other civilizations in the vicinity.

  It may not in fact be necessary to conquer the Earth in order to establish a garrison there. In fact, it may not even be desirable to do so. This is one of those situations in which simply making peaceful overtures to terrestrial authorities may well achieve the result you want.

  This is because, since humans are already quite preconditioned to accept the idea of hostile forces among the stars, it should be a relatively simple matter to establish that your enemies are bent on the conquest of the Earth. With careful manipulation of the collective psyche it should even be possible to persuade human forces to form the bulk of your garrison, risking their lives under your guidance so that your forces don’t have to. Aside from negating the need to conquer the Earth, this also has the advantage of sparing your forces for more important duties elsewhere.

  If you want to be sure of conducting your own security according to your own protocols and strictures, however, you can certainly conquer the Earth to establish a garrison. If you do, you will have to guard it against local resistance, and you will risk the chance of your rival conquerors allying themselves with the human population, who know the planet better than you do. If you follow this route, you will therefore have to choose between the potential options of using the human population as cannon-fodder or living shields and setting up your garrisons and launch sites as far from the local populace as possible, in order to avoid sabotage and resistance.

  Keeping other space travellers and would-be planetary conquerors away from the Earth is something you will have to think about even if you do not know of any enemy plans to exploit the planet.

  PROTECTING YOUR ILLGOTTEN GAINS

  In an ideal universe, once you’ve conquered the Earth, you’d happily build your palaces or garrisons, and wallow in piles of whatever your idea of treasure is, while humanity worships you as gods, and live (if you’re organic, and not a machine civilization) happily ever after.

  Nobody ever said this is an ideal universe. If you are out to conquer the Earth, it must be pretty likely that there are others who will also be doing likewise. That means that other species – who hopefully will also be referring to this guide – will be viewing you as the hapless defenders of the planet.

  DEFENDING THE EARTH

  It goes without saying that you don’t want this chapter to fall into human hands.

  You cannot rely on human detection or early warning systems or their defences. After all, they didn’t manage to stop you. There are early warning systems in place to detect Near-Earth Objects, natural bodies such as asteroids and comets, which may pose a threat to the planet. These systems have allegedly detected over 90% of the regular objects that come close to Earth, but are not so good at detecting individual rogue objects passing through the system just the once. In fact, those humans who run this detection programme have been known to acknowledge that there would be only two or three minutes’ warning of such a natural impactor. Obviously, the chances of detecting an incoming supraluminal object, such as a starship, are very much less than zero.

  In order to detect approaching vessels, you would be best to put your detection and early warning technologies in neighbouring star systems, always assuming you have the faster than light technology to allow the detection stations to alert you on Earth to anything they detect. There won’t be much point in noticing an invasion fleet passing by Proxima Centauri at several times light speed, if you won’t get the message for four years
.

  For those wondering, the ten closest stars to Earth are Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years), Alpha Centauri A and B (4.3 light years), Barnard’s Star (5.9 light years), Wolf 359 (7.7 light years, and reportedly a good spot to muster a fleet to defend Earth in the 24th Century), Lalande 21185 (8.26 light years), Sirius A and B (8.6 light years), Lutyen 726-8 A and B (8.73 light years), Ross 154 (9.94 light years), Ross 248 (10.32 light years) and Epsilon Eridani (10.5 light years), which is the closest known extra solar system with at least one planet.

  Closer to the Earth, you ought to seed the Oort cloud – the dust and gases remaining from the creation of the Solar system – with detectors, especially ones that will detect gravitational disturbances and variances in mass. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is deceptive, and would not make as good a setting for sensors as you might expect. This is because gravitational and centrifugal forces have caused it to form a relatively flat belt, as an orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, like the other planets. It would be better to distribute an array of sensors and detectors in a spherical formation around the solar system, since there is no guarantee – or even likelihood – that any space travellers would enter the system on the plane of the ecliptic, from outer planets to inner.

  After the problem of detecting approaching rivals or authorities, the next order of business will be for you to actually prevent your rivals from attacking or landing on your newly conquered Earth.

  Minefields might work against incoming starships, if the mines are close enough together to provide good coverage. Again, however, this would require englobing the entire planet, and at a distance further out from the surface than any effects from detonation could reach. That would require an incredible amount of mines, bearing in mind that you will need to put them around in all dimensions, not just a belt around the plane of the ecliptic, as most proposed minefields in terrestrial fiction would have it.

  The requirements could be worse, mind you. As you may have seen in the Blake’s 7 transmission Star One, the fictional Terran Federation in that series proposed having a minefield protecting the entire galaxy from incursion from the neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy. Disappointingly, this particular media entry seemed to believe that simply having a patch of mines at one spot at the edge of the galaxy would do the job, with no suggestion that the extragalactic invaders could simply go over, under, or around the field.

  This, in fact, doesn’t occur to the invaders either, indicating that they’re not really suited for the job.

  It’s also debatable whether minefields would be of any help against vessels jumping from one point in space-time to another through an intermediate alternate medium such as hyperspace. Obviously a minefield is no barrier to wormhole travel either, or any form of matter transmission. Nor are such types of travel likely to be detected by any sensor array in either the Solar or neighbouring systems.

  The best way to keep anyone from physically landing on the planet would be a force shield of some kind that completely englobes the planet – but it had better be damn strong, as mass-driven asteroids would make really good battering rams. Your other option is to use surface-based weaponry to try to destroy motherships in orbit, and shoot down invasion craft as they descend.

  To protect against incoming wormhole or matter transmission signals, you ought to be looking at that which would disrupt the signal. It is always possible to affect wormholes by the use of gravity, which is a useful way to sabotage attempts to send information, data, or physical reinforcements or equipment to Earth by such means. Likewise the wormholes would also affect gravity.

  Some physicists believe that a navigable wormhole would require asymptomatically ‘flat’ space for a huge distance around it, and thus mean that the entrances and exits would have to be situated far away from any noticeable gravity wells, and perhaps even outside the Roche limit of a star. (If you pick up some holiday reading on Earth, you’ll find this limitation in the works of Iain M. Banks.) Some have even suggested similar limits for being able to warp space around a ship, or access hyperspace.

  In terms of non-navigable wormholes which could carry data – or even the data required to reintegrate a teleported object – there are some more interesting developments to consider, in any defence against the like. For one thing, it is now known on Earth that there is a set of what NASA calls ‘X-points’ or ‘electron diffusion regions’ – essentially direct pathways – connecting the upper atmosphere of the planet with the surface of the Sun. These regions act as portals, giving uninterrupted links from one to the other, and causing heating and geomagnetic storms on Earth – but they surely also offer obvious possibilities as to diverting unwanted intruders who attempt to interfere with your conquest.

  Defending against temporal incursions is a trickier matter, as gravity strong enough to warp space-time will be at least as dangerous to the planet and your occupying forces as to any attempt to travel through time. This fact does offer a detection method, thankfully, and observation of local gravity fluctuations around the globe can be used as a handy indicator of where potential temporal fluctuations or incoming time-shifts may occur.

  Observation of the populace will be your other main way of spotting any time travellers, who may be equipped with temporally inappropriate clothing or technology. Even if they come from the future, inaccurate records may have led them to carry equipment from a slightly earlier period, or the wrong geographical context.

  A fetish for telephone booths is another indicator, and, as it happens, the most disturbing one. In the event of encountering such a traveller, run. Just run.

  Defending against visitors from parallel universes or alternate dimensions will be just as difficult, as they may be effectively indistinguishable from your own forces. In fact they may, from their point of view, be your forces. They may even be you!

  Such visitors are more likely to attempt to infiltrate your own operations by stealth, replacing your own versions of you. Depending upon your society’s collective psychology and motivation, this may not actually count as a counter-conquest, if you happen to share a common goal.

  The most practical problem will occur if you are visited by invaders from some kind of anti-matter dimension, in which case the problem will both announce itself, and almost certainly solve itself, by explosive means.

  DEFENSIVE WEAPONS

  As it stands, the Earth still has no effective defensive weapons to protect against spaceborne incursion or assault, therefore you will have to install your own that you have brought with you for the purpose, or, more sensibly, build them locally to a standard design.

  The simplest and quickest form of defensive weaponry you will be able to install is the missile, of course, and there are many suitable launch sites around the globe, which you can rebuild (having destroyed them during your attack). If you have conquered or gained influence by mind control, bribery, or alliance with human military organizations, you should be able to easily negotiate use of suitable launch sites and human support crews. Humanity has a great deal of experience in the use of ballistic and orbital rocket launches, and will require little if any retraining to perform these duties for you. If you have negotiated your rule, then treason and resistance should not be a serious problem either, though it always pays to be careful. If you have conquered the Earth by hostile means, you will be better off taking sole control of the launch sites, and maintaining high security around them so that resistance fighters don’t use them on your ships.

  Energy weapons of whatever variety are always a good idea, if you can target them quickly and accurately enough. This is more of a problem when using them from a surface position against the sky as a whole, because you are now aiming out away from an obvious focus point, while your attackers will be able to focus on your more limited position.

  On the positive side, most forms of energy beam, such as lasers, microwave beams, and so on, are not in the visible spectrum, especially in vacuum. (Humans may not realize this, as their visual depictions of such
weapons use artistic licence to make them colourful.) This means that attacking spacecraft will not be alerted to your shots until they actually hit something, while you, being based in an atmosphere, will have more chance of seeing where their shots are going, as they disrupt water vapour, and so on.

  As experienced planetary conquerors, you will doubtless by now be aware that the best place to defeat any attack on the planet is in orbit, or even beyond – basically, before the enemy can actually reach the surface of the planet.

  Mines in high orbit are a simplistic type of defensive weapon, but far better than mines are singularities, if they can be placed safely without threatening your own operations. Singularities, or some other form of gravitational attractor, will efficiently draw enemy ships off course, and potentially cause them to crash. Setting high-velocity debris into orbit around such an attractor – or indeed into any area of space that you expect to be interrupted by unwanted visitors – will add an effective disabling tool.

  As with letting gravity do the work in bombarding the Earth with meteors, you do not need to construct sophisticated and resource-intensive weapons and booby-traps to take out enemy ships when any old rubbish you don’t need any more, if it’s moving fast enough, will do at least as much damage.

  Put simply, though, the best way for you to defend your new world is to have your ships posted in a picket formation around the system, ready to engage any interlopers who come to try to steal your prize away from you.