We Will Destroy Your Planet Read online

  Between 1968 and the early 2000s there were several TV reports broadcast on Earth, and books written on the subject, which suggested that the UN did have intelligence-gathering taskforce and response units, based across several of the world’s regions, which was in fact instrumental in both investigating and dealing with both extraterrestrial and other scientific threats over many years.

  In the past decade or so, however, the UN has denied the veracity of any and all such stories and vehemently objected to being referred to as a facilitator for such a taskforce. Officially, all such reports are considered fabrications.

  MEN IN BLACK

  Despite propaganda to the contrary, there is no single agency which has as its operatives a force who wear black suits and drive old black sedans while investigating alien incursions. However, most of the world’s intelligence and counterespionage agencies have at some point had a department or office which covered this subject, and many of their operatives did wear black suits, etc.

  Such agencies include, but are not limited to, the following groups:

  THE FBI

  The Federal Bureau of Intelligence – the FBI – is the United States’ national crime fighting and counterespionage organization, which has spent a long time working against what it calls enemy aliens – though this most likely refers simply to humans from other areas (the word ‘alien’ itself comes from the ancient Latin language, and means ‘other’).

  Their two most famous modern-day agents, however, are a pair of unusual characters who devoted their service almost entirely to investigating reports of extraterrestrial activity. The Agency also, along with local law enforcement, receives many reports of alien activity from conscientious citizens every year.

  THE CIA

  The Central Intelligence Agency is the United States’ main overseas intelligence service, and one of their analysts will often turn up in any area where potential alien threats are being reported. Such agents may be put in charge of small military units of four to six troops, but these should pose little threat, as the troops will probably be more distrustful of the agent than alert to your activities.

  If you or your forces are equipped with adaptive camouflage, such units are no threat whatsoever.

  THE FSB

  Along with the Russian Air Force, the KGB has a long history of receiving and investigating reports of alien activity, especially around secret missile bases and launch sites.

  Now that they have been renamed the FSB, in the post-Communist version of Russia, they maintain the same old smiling service in both their investigations of crime, terrorism and espionage, as well as in being a repository for reports of alien activity.

  Those of you with telepathic or psychokinetic ability might be interested to know that, some decades ago, the then-KGB used to have a lab devoted to such abilities on the seventh floor of their headquarters at Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow. If the lab is still active, you may find it useful, or a threat to be eliminated first, depending on the context.

  DI55

  In Britain, reports of alien activity were traditionally handled not by spy agencies like MI5 or MI6, but by DI55, a branch of the Royal Air Force’s Air Technical Investigation Branch, which otherwise was more commonly used by the Ministry of Defence for investigating accidents and crashes of their planes.

  The Ministry had a UFO office in London, while DI55 itself investigated reports made by the military, and radar detections of alien activity, through their radar base at Rudloe Manor.

  The alien investigation branch has, of course, been shut down as part of an economic austerity programme, and should therefore pose no threat.

  STUDIOS

  Many people on Earth believe that the prevalence of fictional artworks involving alien invasions of Earth is a possible sign that the corporations creating these works know that the Earth is about to be invaded – or at least make contact with extraterrestrial life – and are using a sort of psychological programming to prepare the human population for the revelation of this fact.

  If this is true, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch from there to the idea that a studio corporation might itself be a cover for monitoring alien activity, so that the populace could be further educated or warned. This would at first make such studios a logical target, but see also the section on ‘Controlling Humans’.

  AMATEURS

  For all that there are various militaries, intelligence services, and law enforcement organizations who may all take an interest in your activities, you must not forget that not all resistance groups or threats to your operations will be governmental or official – or even professional.

  There will always be those – often younger humans who have yet to have the blinkers installed that will blind them to the universe around them and make them focus on what their leaders want them to do to maintain the status quo – who will take it upon themselves to notice and interfere in your activities.

  Some may do it because they wish to exploit your arrival to leave the planet themselves, while others are acting as some kind of vigilantes. Nevertheless, whether they are a group of friends travelling around in a van with their dog, or former government employees with nothing better to do because they live in Wales, these will be the most unpredictable attempts at defence.

  ATTACKING THE EARTH

  There are several different kinds of actions that come under the general meaning of ‘attacking’ the Earth – or any other planet, for that matter. The obvious inference is a straightforward invasion, to take over the planet in order to either rule it or exploit its resources.

  However, an attack could also be mounted with the intent of either wiping out civilizations or life forms existing there or even destroying the planet itself. The type of attack you intend to make will depend on your ultimate purpose in targeting the Earth. If you’re looking for a suitable environment in which to live and expand your influence, then invasion – or possibly terraforming – is your best bet. If you want to prevent others from exploiting the planet, then you may wish to destroy it entirely. This may also be the case if you consider the existence of the planet itself a danger to you, or if it is in the way of your logistical plans.

  There have been suggestions on Earth over the years that offworld civilizations might be sufficiently concerned at the development of such quaint technologies as nuclear weapons, as to decide that these weapons are a threat even over interstellar distances. A threat has to be eliminated, and if your species believes that the Earth is a direct threat, then you will want, rightly, to eliminate that threat. You will want to destroy the Earth and humanity.

  Who doesn’t, after all?

  THERE’S SUPPOSED TO BE A KABOOM!

  There is a temptation, when thinking of destroying a planet or its population, to design a weapon capable of not just eliminating the enemy life form(s), but of completely destroying the physical body of the planet itself. Blowing stuff up is always satisfying.

  The most famous example in terrestrial media is the Death Star in Star Wars, an armoured space station the size of a small moon, which is armed with a gigantic projected energy weapon capable of causing an entire planet to physically explode. (The means of this explosion is never quite explained, but may perhaps be the result of heating the interior core beyond the capacity of the rocky crust to contain the gases and pressures thus generated.)

  In other propaganda films made on Earth, a similar effect has been achieved by means of explosives introduced to the core via mining shafts, the use of the Illudium PU-36 explosive space modulator, by the sheer overwhelming firepower of massed fleets of capital ships’ weaponries, or by stellar construction equipment. This isn’t as daft as it sounds, when you consider that the gravity well of a planet or star system will affect the travel of particles and waves through it.

  In at least one piece of literature, an arrangement of black holes was said to have been used as a barrel to fire projectile suns and planets at target worlds, which is really taking things to unnecessary excess.<
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  Although this temptation for physical deconstruction is quite natural and exciting, your strategic planners and those who determine your military doctrine should be sure to consider all of the information available, before deciding upon the best means to eliminate a planet from the battlefield entirely, should it be necessary or desirable to do so. This is a big decision to make, not just ethically and morally, but in terms of the sheer amount of energy and action required to execute such a massive change to the local order of things.

  Assuming you have ascertained the desire and/or certainty to take the Earth out of the equation entirely, rather than to conquer it, you must decide whether to actually destroy its physical form, sterilize the planet so that whatever was problematic there no longer exists, or conduct the extinction of only selected life forms and/or civilizations.

  The use of so-called ‘berserker’ devices falls under this type of attack, and some thought has been given to the concept on Earth.

  A berserker would be an automated probe which sends out a signal to a planet it visits, to test whether life there has achieved a specific level of sentience and/or technological development. If the berserker device receives a reply (and, naturally, the signal should be offering something that the planetary population would want to reply to), it detonates, destroying the planet. Depending on the design, the berserker may destroy the planet by other means than self-destruction – perhaps returning to the Death Star/giant energy weapon, but the principle is the same.

  While it is certainly impressive, and a mark of your power and technological development and ingenuity, to physically reduce a planet to rubble, destroying the Earth completely will undoubtedly be beyond the technology of many spacefaring species.

  Planets are, to put it bluntly, built to last, and the Earth is no exception.

  To be completely blown apart, in the manner of a victim of the Death Star, or Vulcan in 2009’s Star Trek reboot, the Earth would have to suffer the release of an incredible amount of energy – basically equivalent to the amount of all the potential energy bound up within its atomic structure. For those with a numerical bent, this is something on the order of 2.25 x 10 to the power of 32 joules. That’s billions of times the amount of energy released in any nuclear explosion ever detonated on Earth. Specifically, it would take 50 billion times as much energy – and not a mere 20 nukes as Martha Jones seemed to think in the Dr Who episode ‘Journey’s End’.

  In fact, the energy requirement is equivalent to crashing a celestial body with at least 60% of the Earth’s mass into the planet, at a velocity at least equal to the Earth’s own escape velocity, which is roughly 23,500 miles per hour.

  That’s such a massive energy requirement that the Moon itself falling out of the sky and crashing into the Earth still wouldn’t be enough of an impact to do anything like the required amount of damage (as the mass of the Moon is only about 1/85th the mass of the Earth). The obvious thought would be that a larger impactor would be more likely to fulfil the requirements, and it’s natural to wonder if something closer to the size and mass of Mars would be good enough to do the job.

  It wouldn’t. In fact, not only will Mars falling into the Earth not create the required level of physical destruction – those energy requirements are, really, literally, astronomical – but, believe it or not, this has already happened, and the Earth is still here.

  Those of you with time travel capability can confirm or deny this for yourselves, but the Moon is now thought to have been created when an object the size of Mars, and with about 10% of the Earth’s mass, hit the still-forming Earth four and a half billion years ago and smashed it apart. Even this wasn’t enough energy to permanently sunder the planet, which reformed under its own gravitational influence over time.

  That said, if you could fire present-day Mars (which has a mass of 11% that of the Earth) into the Earth at a speed about six times greater than escape velocity – 140,000 miles per hour should be right – the velocity should make up for the difference in mass, and successfully destroy both planets.

  Venus, however, the next planet sunwards from Earth, has approximately 80% the mass of the Earth, and so absolutely would do the job of pulverizing the Earth to rubble, if crashed into the Earth even at escape velocity. So, what else can we use to blow up the Earth?

  Antimatter, and in particular antimatter bombs, are often considered a good option, as matter and antimatter brought into contact with each other will mutually annihilate, releasing almost 100% of the energy stored in the atomic structure of both.

  This efficiency of mass-energy conversion is usually focussed upon by people who think of it to the exclusion of how to actually achieve it, however. You may be wondering how much antimatter would be required to release the Earth’s 2.25x10 to the power of 32 of energy. It’s a lot. In fact, you would need 1,246,400,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. Well, actually, you’d need a lot more even than that, because a lot of that energy would be lost in heat and light and so on, rather than in true mass-energy conversion of planetary material. So you can consider the 1.244 trillion tons as the bare minimum, or a starting point.

  Letting loose a few anti-atoms, or even a handful of antimatter, is not going to get you your Earth-shattering kaboom.

  EXTERMINATE!

  Since physically destroying the entire structure of the Earth is such a wastefully resource-intensive business, and in fact unlikely to succeed anyway, sterilizing the planet of all life forms is a more practicable alternative in most cases (with the obvious exceptions of the planet being a physical obstruction of some kind, perhaps to the route of a hyperspatial bypass).

  There are many reasons why you may intend to completely sterilize the planet, but enabling the stripping of it for resources is perhaps the most likely. Native life forms have a tendency to get in the way of major planetary mining operations, and unless you have a particular need for the use of slave labourers to carry the rocks around, it’s generally more convenient to not have the risk of resistance.

  Unfortunately, wiping out absolutely all life on Earth – regardless of how fragile its position is, when placed in the context of the infinite void and darkness of space – is also actually a more difficult proposition than you might think. Terrestrial life has proven itself to be remarkably hardy at times. The Earth has suffered numerous large-scale natural extinction-level events over the span of its existence, and none have ever quite completely eliminated life from the planet.

  The most well known (to the dominant native life form) extinction event is the so-called K/T impact at the changeover between the Cretaceous and Tertiary geological eras, 65 million years ago. (No, Cretaceous doesn’t start with a K, despite the acronym.) This event wiped out around 70% of all species, of all types and forms of life, extant at the time. The most destructive extinction event in the planetary history was 251 million years ago, when the Permian–Triassic extinction eliminated a massive 95% of the species on the planet.

  The K/T impact is thought by many of Earth’s scientists to have been caused by an 8-mile wide (some say 6 miles, others 9) asteroid 65 million years ago, and left a crater 110 miles wide at what is Chicxulub, in the Yucatan Peninsula. Other scientists believe a structure called the Shiva crater, off the east coast of India, indicates a much larger impact, which could have caused this mass extinction. (The Shiva crater is 370 miles by 250, suggesting an impactor 25 miles wide. It’s possible that both impacts could have resulted from the break-up of a single larger body.)

  Not all Earth’s scientists agree that either of these was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Some believe that other factors, such as volcanic activity, climate change, or simple overpopulation leading to an inadequacy of food supplies were as much responsible. There is also much debate over whether the Shiva crater is in fact an impact crater, or a product of natural geomorphology.

  In any case, the use of such large impactors proves not to be as reliable as one might expect, when it comes to genocide. Altogether, 25% of species
did survive (including the likes of sharks, crocodilians, Coelacanths, and so on), and none of them had constructed reinforced underground bunkers, which some humans have done over the years as protection in the event of nuclear war.

  If the goal is to wipe out all terrestrial species, it would be more effective to alter the chemical makeup of the atmosphere and oceans, rendering them inimical to carbon-based life. This too may leave a certain amount of survivors, however, as there are various smaller single-cell life forms the likes of which are capable of surviving even in such altered circumstances. For example, there are water bears, and organisms that live around the vents of so-called ‘black smokers’ deep under the ocean, at crushing pressures and high temperatures.

  No such creatures are sophisticated or likely to offer resistance to invasion, of course, but there is always the theoretical chance that they could evolve to threaten you at some future date. And it’s frustrating to be unable to complete a set.

  To put this into perspective, 99.9% of all the species that have ever existed in Earth’s history are now extinct, and yet there are still literally millions of species, from sentient space travellers to single-celled virii, and from avian species that soar in the skies, to strange multi-cellular creatures that can only live in the areas around ocean-bottom vents that leak heat from the Earth’s core. Life on the planet is tenacious in the extreme, and some of it always survives somewhere, no matter what the extinction event.

  It would, therefore, be something of a challenge to destroy absolutely all life on the planet, as anything guaranteed to do so – and this would have to be on the order of a massive solar event, such as the Sun swelling into a red giant, and burning the planet to the extent of the sea and atmosphere burning off into space – would be likely to render the structure of the planet unsuitable for the acquisition of resources. If such a planet was ideal for your purposes, you perhaps would have been better off finding a world in such a position to begin with, rather than expending the energy required to have the Earth reach such a state.