Surprising Ways Aliens Could Invade Earth | Unveiled

The Surprising Ways Aliens Could Invade Earth

In the movies, humans watch on in fear as massive motherships fly over the planet and shoot down beams of destruction. But would an alien invasion really play out that way? Regardless of how technologically advanced an extraterrestrial race was, would it really need an entire army to storm another planet?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re uncovering the extraordinary and ways that aliens could invade Earth.

Our particular star system is relatively young compared to others like it, and yet we obviously know that life has already thrived within it. For a hypothetical alien race looking for signs of life elsewhere, then, we perhaps shouldn’t go unnoticed for long. And yet, in reality there’s no conclusive, irrefutable evidence that an extraterrestrial anything has ever made contact with us. That could be because they don’t exist, or they don’t know that we exist… but could it also be because they’re purposefully avoiding detection; because they’re planning an invasion?

Naturally, today’s video is purely a thought experiment. Scientifically speaking, aliens could well exist - in fact, there’s growing consensus that they must - but the idea that they’d be hell bent (or even capable) of destroying Earth and enslaving mankind is very much the stuff of science fiction. When we think of discovering aliens ourselves, or when the likes of NASA carry out their “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, thoughts of invading and conquering whatever we find aren’t usually front and centre. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a range of cool ways in which an alien force could go about it.

While most sci-fi says they’d come in “all guns blazing”, an alien race intelligent enough to locate us would probably also be efficient enough not to risk their own fleet or army on the ground. Instead, the invasion would start with “first contact”, and a malicious virus built into their first message to humanity. For our society which increasingly depends on the “internet of things” - the idea that all of our digital devices are becoming more and more linked - anything to disrupt that reliance on smart technology would instantly weaken us. With things like our communications down, our energy supplies failing and our militaries uncoordinated (not to mention the daily lives of almost everybody thrown into turmoil), our planet would be so much more vulnerable. And, theoretically, it could all happen within seconds… One moment you’re sat at your desk contemplating what to have for lunch; the next you’re privy to an alien higher power and you can’t even check your phone for news updates!

Next comes the physical raid but, again, an alien army advanced enough to be invading us in the first place probably isn’t about to put itself in potential danger. Rather than sending any living, organic bodies into the fight, we’d most likely be descended on by robots. A robot army doesn’t die. Its soldiers are repairable or replaceable, they can be controlled from afar, and they can also be enhanced so that they perform at the highest possible standards. Even here on regular planet Earth there’s a reported rise in artificial “super soldiers” being used in warzones - but these would be alien bots built by a society much more technologically advanced than our own. If nothing else, then the sight of a killer robot cavalry appearing from the sky would cause mass panic. We’d suddenly find ourselves in the midst of something like the “Terminator” movies.

But maybe it doesn’t need to be quite as “blockbuster” as all that, with the “slow invasion” being another viable option. The threat of “alien abduction” is another constant in sci-fi, but if anything like one occurred in real life then what would be its purpose? One possibility is that alien invaders would be studying our genetic code - turning Earth into a supersized lab, and Earthly life including humans into the lab rats. Over time, we could find our DNA distorted and weakened, leaving us especially susceptible to any kind of alien pathogen - a highly contagious, airborne disease fed into the atmosphere that eventually spreads all over the world. In this case, it’d be an alien invasion via deliberate contamination; a tactic which would clear our particular planet of life, leaving only its resources behind for mining.

Failing a gradual infestation, though, an alien race’s best bet for quick and complete domination is arguably outright biological warfare. Cover bits of space rock in a similarly lethal pathogen and then rain them down into Earth’s atmosphere under the disguise of a meteor shower, and with one event an intelligent enough alien race could wipe out most of the population. We’ve seen in human history just how quickly a community can be killed off by a foreign disease - Smallpox brought from Europe devastated the Native Americans, for example - but this would be a germ capable of ending the entire human species. Again, we needn’t even be made aware that the reason everyone suddenly feels ill is because of an alien plague unleashed to make way for an extraterrestrial arrival… from our perspective, we’d simply struggle toward an unexpected and inexplicable extinction, before the Earth would be left devoid of life and therefore safe to approach.

But, failing all of that, then there’s cold, hard alien tech and weapons to worry about. Again, this boils down to the fact that if they’re advanced enough to get here or target us from a distance, then we can assume that they’ve got “bigger guns”, too. Or other kinds of weapons to make anything we currently wield seem primitive. Forget meteor showers laced with alien germs, perhaps they’d more simply redirect whole asteroids toward us - using high-power lasers or artificial gravity to send world-ending rocks from the edges of the solar system (from the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud) hurtling toward the inner planets. If not asteroids, then perhaps they’d have climbed the civilization-ranking Kardashev Scale far enough to control natural disasters, as well… concocting anything from storms to sea surges in a bid to blindside us on our own turf.

In truth, there are a number of ways in which an aggressive alien race could invade us. Some we’d be able to identify (like a mechanised army of robots); others we’d remain oblivious too until it was too late (like a slow exposure to a foreign illness); and then there could be others where we’d recognise their nature, but not the unseen foe behind them (like a redirected asteroid). The iconic sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”… But, in terms of invasion, for any sufficiently advanced civilization, it needn’t draw too much attention to itself, either. If hypothetical aliens were ever smart enough to discover us and travel all the way here, then the chances are they’d be smart enough to keep quiet about it, too. They could infiltrate us without ever revealing themselves, and without us ever really knowing about it. And those are some of the more surprising ways that aliens could invade Earth.