What's the right way to harvest a primitive planet?

>all this killing people
Just pay them in something they want, partition off the places you want to extract from, or find somewhere else for them to live.

it's not about the moral consideration, it's about making someone else do work for you so you don't have to get your hands dirty. and besides, after the initial couple of years of nothing but paltry offerings of surface deposits they could get with their hands, they will very quickly prefer to be given powerful tools to extract the resource. in under five years I'd guarantee that the method I'd suggest would pretty much cause the entire native population to be on board with being allowed to mine out the resource in exchange for modern technology.

You don't. The galaxy is huge with literally billions of planets. Just find an uninhabited one. Assuming we can achieve FTL, there is literally no point in wars when you can just go somewhere else. There's even stars made out of fucking diamonds, nebulas of rare gasses and hydrocarbons, planetoids of water, vast asteroid fields of metals. No point to even land on a planet, let alone kill for the resources.

Yeah, but what if by some cosmic accident this resource only appears in sufficient quantities on this inhabited world, what then?

You certainly don't start a war between yourself and the natives when you're restricted to a single base with a small number of personnel - of which only a portion are trained soldiers - and your enemy not only outnumbers you but is led by one of your former underlings with knowledge of your incredibly limited capabilities. It'd also be incredibly stupid to do so when achieving your immediate goal would result in splitting your meager forces and creating a vulnerable shipping route. And it'd be downright retarded to try all this when you're looking at relief once every few months and zero chance of getting a dedicated military resupply while you have no ability to offer more than basic medical treatment. God forbid you're trying to do this on planet with a toxic atmosphere that requires breathing apparatuses whenever you're outside.

the resource is a plant what now?

1) get it from asteroids or comets
2) >object strenuously to your being there
Kill in self defense and claim the attackers land. Repeat.

Trade their stuff for useless shit.

Give them warm cozy housing with spacepox.

You offer them gold pressed latinum, they do not seem to understand what it is and attempt to eat it.

Use your advanced technology to pretend to be gods. Make them gather the resources you need.

So the locals have this tribal, stone age community, that nevertheless covers the entire fucking planet?

And we really can't find this resource anywhere else? Like on an asteroid in that system, where we also won't have to lift shit out of the planets gravity well?

All the resources spent on simply getting there and back, and we can't find a way to synthesise the fucking thing?

And these natives simply cannot be tempted into trade, there's absolutely nothing we've got from glass breads to interstellar cargo haulers that they want?

Yeah, I'm just gonna call bullshit on this horrendously contrived scenario. In Avatar at least you could just ignore it and look at the pretty scenery. Here the scenario is all we have, with the added misery of it this time being intended as the basis for a "modern+ military butchering primitive natives" wank fantasy.

Right because the alternative "primitivist fantasy wank" is so much better right?

>>there's absolutely nothing we've got from glass breads to interstellar cargo haulers that they want?
>Trying to deal with primitives who don't understand most of your technology and don't even understand they need it.
>Out of nowhere, one asks for an interstellar cargo hauler, but not any kind, he asks for a GR-75 medium transport from Gallofree Yards, specifically.

>The world is inhabited by violent, primitive, tribal, but technically sentient dumbfucks who would probably object strenuously to your being there.

>primative

Mine the planet using giant, well armored machinery.

Pretty much nothing they can do at that point.

Collect samples then grow it in an artificial environment. It's not only not damaging the life supporting planet, which is probably pretty rare on it's own, but you could almost certainly grow the plant in more ideal conditions than could be found in nature. It'd grow faster and with bigger yields. Fuck, if it's a specific naturally occurring chemical, you could probably even just synthesize it in a lab.

But how else would i masturbate to genocide?

>everything is one extreme or another, there's nothing in-between!

If you have the technology to travel stars, why the fuck would you want a bunch of primitives harvesting resources for you? It would be so horribly inefficient you would most likely never reach the quota you needed in the first place. And if you didn't need much, you wouldn't spend all this effort to travel to the planet in the first place.

We do not build machines to do our job, because there isn't enough people to do it, we do it because they are more efficient than the people could ever hope to be without them.

See the bit about ignoring the scenario and looking at the pretty jungle scenery isntead?

Still, it is better, since it does away with the glorification of colonialist aggression.

>glorification of colonialist aggression.
>implying implications
fucking liberal tumblr cucks what did you forget on my Veeky Forums

Trying to justify savaging a life giving world for no reason seems like just that though. Perhaps if the OP had framed the title as a the background for a villain, or maybe just remembered to apply Poe's Law, then people wouldn't be making these assertions.

Im pretty sure we could trade for it, and work with the locals in finding safe ways to harvest it also. We have nicer, shinier weapons and what not but these guys have been on this world for eons longer than us, to disreguard that experience would be dumb as hell.

This. You offer them shit that is cheap and plentiful to you, but rare and valuable to them. It should be easy enough to find something: iron tools, gunpowder weapons, canned hams, whatever.

Also, you divide and conquer. It's a stone age planet, right? Whatever tribes or political entities there are going to be pretty small scale, and they're each going to hate every other tribe like poison. Avatar has the bullshit planet-mind thing, so everybody lives in fantasy harmony, but barring that, the tribes would be at each others' throats. You find one that's willing to play ball and take your trinkets in exchange for their resources. It's all nice and legitimate for the PRfags. Access to superior goods and weapons is going to give your trading partners a huge advantage over the other primitives, so they'll be able to do your dirty work, conquer and exterminate the neighbors, and trade the neighbors' resources to you as well. If your chosen tribe starts getting too big for their britches, you cut them off and make a deal with someone else.

Limited culling of the population, via orbital strikes mocked up to look like asteroids. At best, the primitives think it's a bad omen, at worst they believe their gods are angry at them. At any rate they get the fuck out of dodge. This leaves uninhabited territory to set up numerous facilities.

Then, oneself the mining operation is fully set up, I would do what every successful colonial power has; Arm some of the local with advanced weaponry as "a gift" and then watch the savages slaughter one another.

Worst comes to worst and the savages band together against us. Throw a few more "asteroids at them

Have soldiers form a perimeter, it moves it dies.

Psychologically manipulate the primitives so that they support your presence.

next

But that's exactly what avatar was.

The jungle was pretty fucking boring mate, way too much CGI and aftereffects and occasional glowing neon shit to make you think "wow this sure is alien, just like those blue cat people".

Was it too much to ask for something a little more creative, like maybe a fungus jungle or something? I mean id you are going to go full CGI you may as well make something that at least isn't "Earth jungle with some palette swaps and ayy lamos".

OP here. I'm actually running an XCOM campaign and I wanted a better motivation for the invasion than fucking around with us for shits and giggles.

They came to steal our water and our women.

Jesus, man, are you HFYfags still mad about that shitty film?

Let it go. It's just Dances with Wolves in space.

They're not human, they're barely sentient. Why do we care about their lives, they stand in our way from the greatness that mankind can achieve. If they were worthy they would have pushed us back in our initial forays onto their world. And if we don't, look at what happened when we "brought up" Africa, all we have are tribal warlords with more advanced weaponry killing their enemies and civillianns alike without any remorse. There is no benefit to raising natives from the dirt, or enslaving them, or allowing them to live from economic, social, and threat reduction points of view. If anything we should literally burn them into oblivivion, after taking any artifacts we can, for collectors that are willing to pay.

What happens in 20,000 years when a bunch of those primitives develop ftl travel with help from one of your enemies?

> not having worked the xenos scum to death in 20,000 years
>not blockading an apparently vital strategic resource
>not having a genocidal response planned out in the event of mass revolt

It's like you want the xenos to thrive in your galaxy.

I never understood why they'd crack a planet like that when most of the good minerals are underneath the crust.

They also need quality top soil to grow stuff in space or elsewhere.

>Assume some shitheap of a world has some resource that your civilization vitally needs.

Given the ubiquity of mineral and chemical resources throughout the universe, I'm not sure what this could possibly be.

Water, for example, is pretty easy to find. Jupiter's moon Europa is just a giant ball of ice, and the majority of fragments in Saturn's rings are also made of ice. Any species that can traverse the interstellar void would have an easy time harvesting water from Saturn or Europa, without having to worry about ornery natives shooting back.

The only possible resource a habitable planet could offer is the planet itself, the mixture of breathable air and fertile soil and liquid water taken as a whole. Even then, for every planet were sapient life evolved, simple laws of statistics means that there should be dozens where sapient life didn't. Why set up shop on an already-inhabited world when just a few lightyears away there's another world, this one devoid of sapient life?

So the only thing worth having, then, will be some kind of luxury item, something that is a) indigenous to the planet, b) probably cultivated and made by the natives, and c) in high demand on the interstellar market for some reason.

It's going to be something like tea or silk or opium or tulips, is my point. An item that no one needs but everyone wants. However, being that it is made by the natives and only exists on this planet, it's just better and more economical to set up a trading post and give the natives whatever dumb shit they want for the luxury item.

You could go to war, but you'd have a hard time justifying a war for tea in this day and age, and there's no way it would be economical to do so, and would run the risk of damaging the luxury item you want in the first place.

Exactly. The Ferengi knows what's up.

>They're not human, they're barely sentient. Why do we care about their lives, they stand in our way from the greatness that mankind can achieve.

WARNING: THOUGHTCRIME DETECTED.

CITIZEN, YOU ARE HEREBY REQUIRED TO CEASE YOUR DISRUPTIZE ACTIONS AND THOUGHTS, AS THEY ARE DEEMED LIKELY TO RESULT IN:

UNNECESSARY DESTRUCTION;
GENOCIDE;
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THAT WOULD DO DAMAGE TO HUMANITY IN MATERIAL OR IN SPIRIT.

FURTHER INSTANCES OF THIS THOUGHTCRIME MAY RESULT IN NON-VOLUNTARY RE-EDUCATION, OR PERMANENT PURIFICATION.

THANK YOU FOR USING Humansafe(tm) CIVILIZATION SAFEGUARDS.

Solar systems are so rich in resources there is no point wasting time destroying some primitive life form.
The only good motivations would be purely ideological, eg if the advanced race considers the primitive one to be an affront to their way of life, or the primitives need to accept the 13 tenets of Hrgstalf to be accepted into the larger galactic community. Pure scavengers would simply choose an easier target, like a nice mineral rich inner planet.

If psychic powers are a thing, the aliens could be feeding off experiences and emotions of the more primitive race. You can get water or fuel anywhere, but there's only a handful of places to get quality suffering. The aliens could also be preventing the primitives from evolving mentally or empathically, which is another thing XCOMs have played around with.

Another thing to consider is that primitives might be sitting on ruins or artifacts more valuable than they realize. Artifacts may be combines with any of the above motives, and give you a nice X on the treasure map all sides can move towards.

Maybe the planet contains some sort of super rare stable-against-all-odds ultrasuperduperheavy element that can only be found here, or some sort of rare material that only comes to exist because of some near impossible cosmic event that's impossible to replicate in a lab, or has a fragment of a white hole, or fucking quantum time crystals, or the remnants of a precursor race's technology ect ect.

Resource doesn't just mean "simple elemental resource".

>Muh superscience

I can't imagine that being the case. The universe works according to certain basic physical laws that can't be broken. Remember, uranium is the heaviest natural element found in any meaningful quantity. Neptunium and plutonium are found only in trace amounts (and as a byproduct of uranium decay), and Americium (atomic number 95) and heavier elements aren't found naturally at all except in the most extraordinary of circumstances, and even then in minute amounts.

>Resource doesn't just mean "simple elemental resource".

No, it doesn't, which is why I came to the conclusion that the resource would by necessity have to be something a) biological and b) cultivated, since anything else could be found on other planets.

However, being both biological and cultivated means it's likely a luxury item, and therefore not something worth going to war over.

>You could also take some guys, paint injuries on them and send these photos to the internet and news media news, that shit will work wonders
What if they find out about this sometime down the line?

>Muh regular science
user, the very idea of living humans traveling to an exoplanet for resources is already far past the limits of reason, there's no good cause to dismiss further scientific improbabilities as the premise already relies on more than a few. In fact accepting an improbability like my "super science" actually makes the whole thing much more sensible as that might be something worth going to all the trouble for.

Go on /pol/?

>user, the very idea of living humans traveling to an exoplanet for resources is already far past the limits of reason

That's sort of my point, isn't it? A single star system contains more mineral and chemical resources than a species could ever consume in a million generations of first-world gluttony, so the needs of an interstellar civilization are going to be based on biological resources, i.e., food production, most likely. But simple laws of statistics means that habitable planets without sapient life will greatly outnumber habitable planets with sapient life, so that, too, is a need that should be easily met.

I've given this a lot of thought for my own sci-fi setting, and the only conclusion I've reached is that the only things worth trading on the interstellar market are going to be data (since you can't strap a warp drive to a radio wave) and luxury goods.

I don't necessarily object to superscience, but I want it to at least be logical, and make as few assumptions as possible. OP has to define what the "rare resource" (presumably mineral) is, why a species capable of superluminal travel can't synthesize it, and why we can't just use more commonly available mineral resources for a fraction of the material cost (given that there's no need to go to war over them) and none of the moral ones.

Well, you could make so the planet is some kind of alien megaestructure and data about it is the resource itself.

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT 24/7, send in soldiers armed with battle rifles and booty shorts and have them shoot literally anything that moves or looks like it might be able to move.

The whole film went down hill after the scene with the little helicopter lizards.

>>I'd guarantee

He says from his parents basement.

People who subscribe do the 'hurr durr avatar is dumb should just have napalm all blue people', are the worst. Either they are missing the point entirely, or they are pro-fossil global warming deniers.

The whole point of Avatar is that technology doesn't have to be guns and diesel. I dont get how somehow who wanks to the singularity can't see that the blue injuns had just that with their motherfucking tree. More than that, all things in their planet had a universal interface. The beasts were their war machines. They were all interconnected. The whole point is humans destroyed earth pretty badly and are now repeating the process.

And you dumbfucks just go all like "who can we be even more cucked by corps and more effectively destroy this planet?"

The average rank and file soldier of avatar setting lives in shit. The average human too. A minor corporative guys lives well while the species dies off. You aren't pro-humanity if you support those, you are pretty much against humanity.

You dont need to root for the blue injuns, but they had precious knowledge that was lost because some suit wanted to make a bigger deadline and a but of brainwashed 'muh humanity' bought their agenda or were too poor NOT to enlist in the army to go die lightyears away from earth in the name of profit.

No progress. Profit. No personal profit. Someone else's.

By that logic, 20% of humanity is anti-human and the other 80% are either irresponsible or deliberately self-destructive.
Still doesn't make it into a good movie, though.

Trade.
Specifically, trade the right to pay their workers to extract the resource you need for a bunch of crap you brought along just for that purpose, or can easily obtain. For example, electricity, which you need to process the ore anyways.
Your landing craft is nuclear-powered and can crack water into hydrogen and oxygen all day long. They have no electricity, so you sell them fuel cells, and keep selling them hydrogen for resources and labour. Sell the generators as a black box that fails when opened.

Once you're good and established, move in properly. Buy land off them that they don't even use, help them expand, tech them up, and bring them into your empire. Try and sort out the worst of their social inequality.

> It's a plant
Even easier. Have them cultivate it as a cash crop. Take samples, use local resources to build orbital farms to farm it in bulk. The natives just need to know about the new stars in the sky.

The british empire fucking worked until the world wars wiped out any ability to run it.
India and Pakistan are still miles ahead of their neighbours, culturally and technologically.

>Akchully The blue cat people were THE MOST advanced because of their weird head plug
>All this baseless speculation about corporation and how bad humans have
>Random "if you don't side with the bluberries you don't believe in global warming" and "the ayy lamos reached the singularity because of a tree" (lul wut)

Movie literally says "earth is a husk destroyed by corporations greed."

If you don't buy the movies premises, then we can't talk about it. But it's stated there.

They have a shit tier singularity if the result is rhinos as their apex combat unit.

A large portion of people actually are misantropists who don't give a shit to anyone but themselves, and another large part of people subscribe to agendas that will fuck them longterm. So...I don't think it's this far off.

You have a network that grants people immortality by storing their conscience and is even able to transfer it to other bodies. How do you want to call that?

The shittiest form of immortality with no space travel. Which is a pretty shit tier singularity.

Consciousness "transfer" is right up there with an ai replacement in absolute worst immortality types, and is right next to star trek teleporters in levels of death.

Well fine, you got me there. I repressed as much of that shitty movie from my mind as I could.

I stand by my other points though.

Firstly, you are thinking of transhumanism, not the singularity.

The singularity is basically technology getting better, which lets us make better technology, which makes us make even better technology, and so on and so forth at an increasing pace till we are fucking wizards of the universe who can create matter at will and upload our minds into the fundamental physical forces if we so wish.

Transhumanists are fuckboys who think the singularity is one way they can become "more than human" whatever that means, be it dumbass mind uploading schemes or becoming a hive entity or everything in between.

Anyways, the whole mind copy thing is pretty dumb, it's not immortality it's just a second stage of life for a hive organism that operates on principles more advanced than the insects of our world, but it's similar in the important ways.

Generally speaking, a world with living, sentient creatures on it has three types of unique resources: bionts, sapients, and organic waste products.

Everything else is minerals, volatiles, or radioactives, and you can get that shit anywhere else in the solar system.

So, the aliens are after either some living creature or plant, or want to harvest humanity for its sapience, or they would like to get genuine primitive butt-silk or something. Or maybe its a mix of the three.

Some aliens are here to save the whales, and are horribly misguided about how to do it. Some aliens are here because human brain-meats make the tastiest psi-slaves, and are trying to breed their chrysilids properly. The rest of the aliens are just trying to harvest the splanch-juice of these strange primitive animals, and have no idea where the damn thing is located, hence all the cattle mutilation and butt probing.

if theyre tribal, theyll could possibly think that were something superstitious, because i think that their scientific inadequacy would lead to a model of reality that could be easily changed, because we arrive with something they have never seen before and theyre dumb.

in short, we arrive and rule them as gods. during our occupation, we could understand them, teach them, get what we need, and either leave when were done, or continue to rule them and live alongside them as we propagate the resource in the special conditions of the planet, or until we can recreate the conditions in space, to propagate the resource that way.

>The british empire fucking worked until the world wars wiped out any ability to run it.
My only objection to this statement is that the world wars wiped out the desire for the british to run their empire, not their ability to do so.

Their ability was slowly crumbling before the social unrest of India, which needed to be divided into smaller, more competitive provinces to be anything other than a showpiece. The British just got tired of being all Imperial, and so they stopped, and gave everything away to the first batch of people to make governments for it once everyone started getting pissy.

Canada is still in denial.

Canadia turned out better than america, enough to be my backup plan.

Otherwise, paying for WW1 and 2 and rebuilding our own shit wiped out any ability to wage colonial defence wars elsewhere. The Falklands was a bodge job, and we won't be able to do it again until the JSF ships, which at this rate will be next fucking century.

>c
samefag:
*they could

also, so we dont fuck up their model of reality after we leave, we could tell them that we arent really gods, right before we leave, and we only came over to help them out. ;) i think this is the fastest way to get in and out without killing too many of them, depending on what the resource is.

we could try and trade with them, and make cash crops and stuff, but i think my solution would be better, if we were pressed for time. i also think that my solution would be better than scorched earth because we would get them to help us cultivate the resource instead of spending time exterminating the, depending on the resource, obviously.

Have...
have you never eaten gold-pressed latinum?
That shit's amazing.

Assuming that it is not a resource you'd be able to mine from another, uninhabited planet, it's probably a resource directly or indirectly related to that planet's life, so glassing a planet would destroy your only source of it.

You can do everything peacefully - the natives have your precious unobtainium, you have lots of cheap shit that can be useful to them, just trade.

1. Find the weaker tribe that wants to gain a position of power. If none exists, pull a Belgium and designate some sub group artificially.

2. Start arming them and providing "development assistance" in their conflicts with other groups. Help them start destructive wars so they and their rivals are all weakened. Don't let them get too strong, but don't let them get defeated either.

3. Step in to intervene anytime a group is on the verge of being wiped out, and make that new group your new puppet. Support them and build them up again.

4. Keep that process going as long as you can. Become the source of finished goods they depend on to acheive any level of power or security. If they get sufficiently weakened, move in your own settlers to help with "development" and extract resources directly.

5. Alternate between brutal, oppressive viceroys over them who will crush them, who you then remove and denounce, and replace with a more PR friendly oppressive viceroy who seems like a step up. Alternate back and forth between security-focused oppression and economic development focused oppression.

Keep that going for hundreds of years.

On a side note, why hasn't any sci fi novel ever used the British imperial model for an alien invasion?

I want to see a story where aliens show up, start trading, and then arming the small fringe groups in human society. Every minor oppressed nation, or secessionist culture with a grudge suddenly gets ahold of unstoppable alien weapons. North Korea, Basques, Quebecers, Georgians, confederates, Eritreans... Suddenly those are all the aliens best friends.

Because that would mean humanizing the aliens instead of making them faceless, ultrapowerful genocidal maniacs with unstoppable (until the Americans get involved, of course) weapons.

There are sci fi novels that don't suck out there.

Reminds me of the damned series.
Aliens hire human mercenaries with shiny baubles (pure gold) to fight their war.
I would say it is good, but I can't find any fucking copies to read.

unravel the past and craft the future. i like it

>send scout Schlomo Shekelberg to negotiate
>barbarian savages kill him
>send out press release claiming the barbarians said something anti-semitic as they killed him
>tell the U.N. the alien shamans have no record of a "holocaust"
>get mandate to kill the aliens for anti-semitism and holocaust denial
>survivors sent to education camps to learn about tolerance

Then you just show up and shove the yokels around. You don't need to do any bombing or shooting to get at something under their feet, and you might actually damage it in the process. Violence is almost always going to be one of the messiest and least efficient ways of moving people around.

first post, best post.

It would be the Spanish West Indies all over again, and include a PR campaign of our miners dropping medicine and humanitarian goods to the survivors to get karma points with friendly tribes.

Whatever you do, don't declare all-out war against the native populace. If you do that, then one of your soldiers is going to start sympathizing with the natives, see their culture as superior alternative to whatever flaws they perceive in yours, start an armed resistance against your armies, and either produce or become a hybrid with the native species who will lead them to victory against your armies.

Seriously, that happens pretty much every time.

In the case of Avatar.
1)Evacuate personnel.
2)Next ship to pandora releases kinetic energy projectile at halfway point.
3)Mine lifeless rock

You seem to be under the delusion that the point here is to get the resource, instead of using superior technology to murder natives.

Bullshit.
Their are a few key technologies we lack like fusion power and good superconductors, but no, slower than light interstellar travel is not total fantasy.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel#Proposed_methods

None of those methods are useful for interstellar trade.

Approach them as benefactors. Serve as mediators to negotiate peace treaties among the warring tribes, gift the signatories with advanced medical and agriculture technology as an incentive. Help them build planetary defence systems to protect against asteroids/other aliens.

Use gifted medical technology as a carrier to introduce genetic modification to the population; gradually ramp down fertility rates. Wait a few hundred years for the population to die out. Take what you want.

>Canada is still in denial.
Canada didn't put a reality TV star in charge of the government. Your move.

Is abandoning the government system to form the brotherhood of nod a valid move?

...

I do that then.
THE PROPHET NEVER DIES!
Now to work on making a scorpion tank.

>inefficient violence

>Getting to the point where you are destroying the valuable resource of a sustainable ecosystem for short term gain
Your civilization is shit and deserves to be thrown into the nearest sun. If you are at the point that you harvest entire planets but can't develop a method of self entertainment then you have failed and are just dragging everyone else down with you.

You either go with the "God Grift" and just get them to give you the shit in exchange for t-shirts and spam like those islanders back in WW2, or you just show up in your harvesting machines and take it, it would be easy what are they gonna do chuck spears at your armored environmentally sealed excavator

I wish I had a gif of spearchuckers killing a tank in civ

Nationally or racially charged conflicts are inherently inefficient, because too much of your goal is ephemeral as opposed to quantifiable. Its a stupid reason for war, and as a result any actions taken in the name of it are tainted by that stupidity.

That picture vastly underestimates the size of the planet crack. The Ishimura was huge in Dead Space and pulled chunks much bigger than that, and that was an old planet cracker.

Also they probably do it in stages, tearing off chunks until they get to the core where the real harvesting begins.