We Will Destroy Your Planet Page 2

  Depending on how many ships you have brought, and their size and mass, it may be necessary to station some of them offworld, either as a relay point, command and control centre, observation post, or simply because they are too large to land safely. The best locations in which to station such vessels out of the line of fire from Earth are either on the dark side of the Moon – which has the advantage of allowing a surface landing – or at one of the Lagrange points in either the Solar-Earth or Earth-Moon orbital relationships.

  The Lagrange points are five points around the orbits of a related pair of astronomical bodies, one of which orbits the other. In these five locations, a small body can maintain a stable position relative to both. In the case of the Earth, there are two relevant relationships to consider: The Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Each of these orbital relationships has its own set of Lagrange points.

  Three of the points require effort to maintain that stable position. The L1 point is close to the orbiting body (the Earth in the Sun-Earth relationship, and the Moon in the Earth-Moon one), where its gravitational field balances out the gravitational pull of the larger body. Here the orbiting body’s gravity increases the orbital period of a smaller body – such as a ship – to the point where said ship will have the same orbital period as that body. Where the Sun-Earth relationship is concerned, this point is about one million miles sunwards of the Earth.

  The L2 point is directly opposite L1 but on the other side of the orbiting body – or a million miles outward from the Earth. L3 is in the same position as the orbiting body, but directly opposite on the far side of the parent body – i.e. 93 million miles from the opposite side of the Sun.

  Of these three Sun-Earth points, L3 is particularly unstable, partly because the Earth’s orbit is elliptical rather than circular, and partly because the gravitational effects of the other planets, especially Venus, affect it. Before these facts were confirmed, human storytellers liked to imagine there could be some kind of alternate Earth at the Sun-Earth L3 position, however this is neither the case nor even possible. The L1, 2 and 3 points in the Earth-Moon system are unstable and move around, as the Moon is also in an elliptical orbit. Your navigators should be able to work out the relevant positions.

  Anything parked in the Earth-Moon L1 or L3 points would be highly detectable from Earth, and neither are strategically wise choices, for that reason. There is also usually a space observatory maintained by humanity at the Lunar L1 position, whose absence or damage would be noticed, as would a neighbour. The Lunar L2 position is a better option, as it is on the far side of the Moon, but simply landing on the dark side of the Moon would be more energy efficient.

  The best positions, however, in which to park your ships are the two so-called Trojan points, at L4 and L5: 60 degrees of arc ahead of and behind the Earth’s orbit, and the same position in the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Small bodies can maintain stable position at either of these positions, and the positions are far more fixed and stable than any of the other three.

  Obviously, positioning ships at the Earth-Moon L4 and L5 positions, with a base on the Moon itself, gives a good range of coverage relatively close to the Earth, with low energy requirements for station-keeping. These positions may, however, be within missile range of Earth’s defences. The Sun-Earth L4 and L5 positions would certainly be safer, but have the disadvantage of being much further away.

  Ultimately, the choice is yours.

  FROM A PARALLEL DIMENSION

  If you are coming from a parallel universe or dimension, it is unlikely that you will need to consider planetary defences, as you will be able to materialize on the surface, in the ocean, or within the atmosphere. Depending on your type of species, you will need to establish by testing with scouts or reconnaissance drones exactly where and in what environment you will arrive. You may have to cross from a specific area or set of circumstances in your home dimension, or you may not.

  If your species is not human, but either a different terrestrial species that gained dominant sentience ahead of humans, or some form of supernatural entity, you will have to be extra careful about being detected upon arrival, lest you alert human security forces, or, indeed, find yourself a subject for study and experimentation.

  In particular, if your species relies on innate abilities that humans could take for supernatural powers, you may not need traditional technology to move between dimensions, though it is always possible that establishing some form of mental link with humans on the target side of a dimensional bridge may help form a bridgehead. If nothing else, playing the part of a deity or similar entity will help smooth the process of intelligence gathering about your target area.

  It is possible for time travel to result in the creation of parallel worlds, or at least the branching off of parallel timelines. If this is the case between your home dimension and the current Earth, you may be able to effect a transition from one timeline to the other by travelling in time and undoing the event that created the parallel timeline.

  This is a dangerous route to take, however, due to the risk of paradox, potentially resulting in either you never having existed, or creating a closed loop in which your actions are what created the timeline you originated from. This has especially been seen to happen when time travellers from the future attempt to change a past or present effect, where the unpleasant timeline is the result of violence in the target time zone.

  FROM THE PAST

  This is possibly the simplest journey, unless you actually want to make a return trip after acquiring modern or future resources. Simply wait. Or, if you won’t live long enough, build a suspended animation facility and ensure that you and your armed forces are preserved in a safe location – ideally in sealed caves, an underwater city, or an orbiting or Lunar facility – to be awakened at the appropriate time.

  You can either set some kind of timing mechanism to awaken you after a set geological age, or program your computers to awaken you when a specific set of circumstances has been achieved. Please be aware that if you are from the far distant past of the Earth, the climate will certainly have changed, and possibly the actual biosphere as a whole. In particular, the levels of oxygen are presently very different today than in the past, with the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere having peaked 300 million years ago at 36%, almost double its present concentration.

  Therefore, just because you are also native to the Earth at a point in its history, this does not mean that you will not necessarily need life-support apparatus, or a plan to re-engineer the atmosphere.

  Alternatively, and if you are not an Earth native species, you could skip ahead through time on your journey by skimming close enough to the event horizon of a black hole. As all spacefaring races know, black holes are created when supermassive stars, hundreds of times the size and mass of Earth’s parent star, collapse under their own gravity. Such a star collapses so far, in fact, that it is compressed into a singularity, a mathematical point with infinite mass and no physical dimensions to speak of. This mass also curves space-time infinitely, basically punching a hole in the fabric of space-time itself, with a deep gravity well surrounding it.

  Gravity wells curve time as well as space. Basically, gravity makes time slow down. If the crew of a ship outside a black hole’s gravity well could see into a ship that was falling into the hole, they would see everything in that other ship slowing down. By the time it passed over the event horizon, and reached the singularity, time would have stopped for the crew of that ship.

  To the crew of the falling ship, everything would have seemed normal, with the outside universe suddenly speeding up and winking out. Assuming, that is, that they weren’t killed by the extreme radiation, and the tidal forces even at the subatomic level.

  If you hope to return to your native time in the past afterwards, then simply consult the following section on travelling from the future. Do bear in mind, though, that if you succeed in travelling both ways, you may well find that the fu
ture you travelled into now won’t actually happen.

  FROM THE FUTURE

  If you are attempting to invade the Earth from the future, whether it be from a future Earth or some other planet, you will find that your best chance of moving to the 21st century (or any other point in Earth’s history) will be by utilizing the effects of dense mass to bend space. Since space-time is curved, bending space also bends time.

  In order to bend space-time far enough to carry vessels safely through time into the past (the future is less of a problem, as everything is already travelling that way), you will require astronomically massive objects to exploit. Black holes and singularities are often considered popular choices, especially if they are rotating, but you really would be better off with a Kerr Ring – this would be a super-dense ring made from a neutron star – the size of an asteroid, but with the mass of a star. It is possible that a sufficiently fast-rotating object of this nature would be unable to form a true singularity, but instead become a ring, due to centrifugal force counteracting just enough of the gravity. In theory, this could then be flown through, and some believe that you could come out in the past or future. As yet no Kerr Rings are known, but please feel free to supply appropriate navigational charts if you find one on your journey.

  The same effect is more likely to occur with a rotating black hole. Since pretty much all astronomical bodies rotate, it is reasonable to expect that the objects they might collapse into will continue to do so.

  Another option is the creation of a Tipler Cylinder, or sometimes called a Kerr-Tipler mechanism. For this you will need a cylinder of infinite length, made of something very dense and massive, such as material from a neutron star, whose gravity well would curve space-time along its axis, essentially making a road back through time. Since an infinite length is impractical for construction, it has been suggested that when the cylinder is spun around its longitudinal axis fast enough, it should generate a closed timelike curve within the cylinder’s gravity well, enabling a vessel to travel back in time along the curve.

  Wormholes are also a potential means of time travel, since if they connect two regions of space-time together, then that may well be two times as well as, or instead of, two spatial regions. In essence this would form a time tunnel, or a time corridor, and in fact is the closest approximation to what some with a vested interest in time travel call the time vortex.

  It’s entirely likely, however, that you have your own technological means of travelling through time; the important thing is the destination, and to that end, this guide is geared towards Earth in the early 21st century, by the standard calendar (one of many) used on the planet.

  The most important thing to remember is to make sure not to encounter your own selves, especially if you are only travelling within your own lifetime, or have made the time journey more than once. This can be a big problem, not just for the creation of paradoxes, and potentially alternate timelines, but also because of the danger of shorting out the kinetic energy stored in temporal distances between yourselves.

  Or, to put it the Australian way, zap.

  DEFENCES

  DEFENCES OF THE EARTH AGAINST SPACEBORNE ASSAULT

  None. Zero. Zip. Nada.

  Yes, you read that right. Amazingly, the planet has no energy shielding, no starships, no minefield, and no detection or early warning grid for vessels entering the system. What little – and it is very little – planetary early warning and defence planning programmes the Earth has are geared solely to the problem of near-Earth asteroids, which could easily prove a danger to cities, nations, and ultimately native life itself.

  This is another reason why the Earth makes such a tempting target; Although the dominant species is known to be aggressive and stubborn, they have no defences against incursion either from other spatial locations, alternate dimensions, or different eras. The doctrinal requirement for surprise is therefore a relatively easy one to fulfil.

  It is true that humanity has missiles capable of being fired at targets in space, and these missiles are the limit of Earth’s technology in this regard. While it is certainly true that Earth’s forces have quite perfected the reliability of missiles for use against land, sea, and atmospheric vehicles, and have expanded into the matter of orbital rockets and even anti-satellite weapons, their missiles are all powered by chemical motors of one kind or another.

  Whether liquid fuelled or solid fuelled, rockets all depend upon burning chemical compounds to institute a Newtonian reaction, forcing exhaust out the back in order to propel the missile forward. Although ion engines have been built on Earth, they are used only for manoeuvring of satellites, and not for main propulsion, because they simply are not fast enough. Even the rockets, however, do not have sufficient speed and manoeuvrability to be a significant threat to navigable spacecraft. Any rockets or missiles thus launched at your ships or landing craft will be seen coming, if you’re paying attention, and easily destroyed or avoided.

  Experiments with energy weapons, such as X-ray lasers, are currently at a very early stage of development, and very much confined to static installations. They are not manoeuvrable, and are of no threat to your forces.

  All that said, the Earth does in fact have one effective, if entirely accidental and coincidental, defensive barrier that your starship navigators must be aware of: space junk.

  The planet is surrounded, in bands at various heights and orbits, by clouds of debris left by previous space missions and satellite collisions, which have formed into belts of dangerous metal, plastic, and ceramics. The Earth’s spaceflight authorities admit that there may be tens of millions of pieces of debris in orbit, ranging from dead satellites and rocket fuel tanks weighing several tons, down to fragments of solar panels and foil insulation, and even paint flecks, just millimetres across. Even human space travellers have discovered that all these fragments, regardless of size, are dangerous. A couple of decades ago, human space vessels could simply move out of the way of approaching debris, but now there is so much of it, in some orbits, that this is not always possible, and the occupants of manned ships and stations sometimes have to literally take shelter and just hope and pray that nothing that is about to hit them kills them.

  A fleck of paint smaller than the size of the word ‘paint’ on this page, travelling at 24,750 miles per hour, has been known to take out a vessel’s window panel that was designed to withstand the heat and stresses of re-entry through the atmosphere from orbit. These bands of debris are potentially dangerous, and must be taken into account if you are going to attempt any form of landing from space.

  Invading and subduing or destroying Earth and its people will not be a matter of fighting your way to the homeworld of the civilization, and then trying to establish a foothold there. There is no resistance to any approach to the planet, and so any operation to capture or destroy it will only be a matter of consolidating a successful arrival.

  That said, there are some military groups and organizations who will certainly be the first ones to take an interest in your arrival. There are few, if any, terrestrial military or intelligence organizations devoted to protecting the Earth from assault from offworld, although rumours and stories of such secret units have persisted for several decades at least. However, there are some militaries and governments whose mandate does – or at least may – specifically cover eventualities such as alien invasion.

  THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE

  The United States Air Force (USAF) is the most advanced military aviation service on the planet, though not the largest, which is the Chinese Air Force. The USAF is tied very closely with America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which has mounted the most successful space missions from the Earth to other planets in the Solar system. For many years, most of NASA’s space travellers and test pilots were assigned from the USAF, though this policy has been relaxed, with people from other services and even civilians allowed to participate in offworld missions.

  The USAF was instrumental in
developing air-launched anti-satellite weapons, which could be adapted to attack descending ships on attack missions, or even spacecraft in close orbit of the planet. Along with the US Navy, they have tested laser weapons, though these have so far been clumsy and not suited to tracking manoeuvrable vessels.

  Some decades ago, the USAF conducted Project Blue Book, a study into UFO sightings and reports of alien incursions.

  The USAF is also the parent organization of the US Space Command. As the name implies, this group deals with both military applications in space, and threats from space. Ordinarily this means natural bodies such as asteroids and meteors, and ballistic projectiles launched into orbit from other terrestrial nations. Nevertheless, this means they are the military service most likely to detect and attempt to intervene with your approach.

  This is especially the case if you attempt to visit Earth by means of a pre-existing network of wormholes.

  THE BRITISH ARMY

  Although Britain is a small island whose empire has fallen, and whose power has waned, the British Army has extensive experience in successful defences against invasion by the rest of the planet, and in conducting its own successful colonizations.

  Since the 1950s, the Army has been shown to have been involved in dealing with several possible extraterrestrial incursions, from defending the historic Westminster Cathedral to the notorious Hobbs Lane incident.

  THE UNITED NATIONS

  Although it is not strictly a military organization, the UN does sometimes provide an umbrella banner for military peacekeeping operations in various nations. These forces are drawn from different national militaries across the globe. It is therefore quite possible that, in response to your campaign of conquest, the UN could arrange for the alliances of multiple national militaries against you.