The chtorr

Would there be any way Earth could survive against a Chtorran invasion, Veeky Forums? Or would it be doomed?

Chtorrans would be fucked.

In the book, the author goes to great lengths to imply how the Chtorr have introduced the diseases that eradicated 60% of the human population, but the xenos arrive and everything is sunshine and roses for them, no illness or disease. I'm fairly sure the Chtorr would be beaten down by Terran-borne fungus or small parasites. I don't care how amazingly advanced your gut system is, if you are consuming every animal and plant species you encounter, you are going to end up with a pretty amazing selection of protozoans and helminths. The big fat worms would spend half their day just shitting out Terran worms they had unwittingly consumed, and the worms that were not pooped out would be using valuable resources.

But this is entirely discounting defensive measures enacted by humans. The U.S. does not "officially" hold any chemical or biological agents due to the Warsaw Pact and Geneva Protocol, but retains the capabilities to begin producing massive quantities of bio-toxins and chemical weapons at any time. If there was a real threat to Terra, I'm sure every nation with the capability would start churning out these weapons. The Chtorrans would have no response for these weapons, and would perish accordingly.

The author understood a little bit about military response to a threat like this, but doesn't seem to know how good our tech is. He didn't seem to understand the concept of combined arms, and how advanced our robots are. The robots we have now are like proto - Men of Iron. Just because they don't look like the Terminator doesn't mean they aren't fantastically capable.

And those bio-toxins and chemical weapons I discussed above? Just because some Eurofags told us not to develop or produce them, doesn't mean we stopped. We just stopped being noisy about it, so it's a certainty we will have some pretty spectacular gear to show off for the xeno freaks when they try to invade.

>In the book, the author goes to great lengths to imply how the Chtorr have introduced the diseases that eradicated 60% of the human population, but the xenos arrive and everything is sunshine and roses for them, no illness or disease. I'm fairly sure the Chtorr would be beaten down by Terran-borne fungus or small parasites. I don't care how amazingly advanced your gut system is, if you are consuming every animal and plant species you encounter, you are going to end up with a pretty amazing selection of protozoans and helminths. The big fat worms would spend half their day just shitting out Terran worms they had unwittingly consumed, and the worms that were not pooped out would be using valuable resources.

It is implied they are biologically engineered, any form of terran bacteria would be ineffective.

>But this is entirely discounting defensive measures enacted by humans. The U.S. does not "officially" hold any chemical or biological agents due to the Warsaw Pact and Geneva Protocol, but retains the capabilities to begin producing massive quantities of bio-toxins and chemical weapons at any time. If there was a real threat to Terra, I'm sure every nation with the capability would start churning out these weapons. The Chtorrans would have no response for these weapons, and would perish accordingly.

due to the way the Chtorran ecology works, if you got rid of them temporally, 10 more pockets would appear in its place due to the way they spread through pods or whatever.

>The author understood a little bit about military response to a threat like this, but doesn't seem to know how good our tech is.

This makes me wonder how bad the ecology can get and what kind of horrible things the ecology will start making next.

The Wikipedia article mentions "god-bees" as the next stage of invaders. I wonder what those could be?

>Chtorrans would be fucked.
Highly unlikely.

To defeat the Chtorrans, you need to strengthen the natural Terran ecosystems.

Problem, we've been weakening the natural ecosystems for the last 200,000 years.

Taking over the ecosystem for the Chtorrans will be like a cold virus killing someone with terminal AIDS or cancer. Easy.

>the chtorrans

What do you exactly mean by the Chtorrans?

What will the end stages of the invasion look like? What is the "intelligence" behind the invasion?

The Chtorrans are an ecosystem that are dumped on Earth. Kind of like what the whities did with Australia when they dumped a truckload of camels, rabbits, rats, mice and bullfrogs on Australia.

They're aliens. Our parasites and whatever are evolved to exist within very specific ecosystems, eg: the gut of a specific mollusc. Expecting them to be able to feed on or disrupt an alien lifeform is akin to expecting bacteria to slow down a bulldozer

Further expecting humanity to bring our best tech to bear or the full force of combined arms is a fantasy when 60%+ of the population is dead. High tech is a luxury we earned by having an enormous economy underneath it. You can't produce war robots when you can't afford to produce silicon chips, or when your national infrastructure has collapsed or when the only people who really understand robot tech have to be conscripted to go keep the one functioning iron mine and port from imploding.

And that's without even getting into what ridiculous idea 'war robots' currently is

So what is the end goal of the Chtorr? What does it want specifically out of Earth? Did it select Earth specifically or randomly?

Who knows? Author will never finish it. Last book was published in the late 90s, even though there's supposed to be 3 more books left.

No one knows. It's likely the Chtorr ecosystem is a custom-designed bioweapon used against Earth by unknown unseen aliens. Or an unseen alien.

Maybe it's just a 4-year old alien boy who decided to test his science-fair project on an unwitting inhabited planet.

I don't think it's as simple as that, the protagonist has some pretty weird experiences with the ecology whenever he gets near it. He is able to see memories from thousands of years ago, and gets a feeling for some kind of being, or being(s) that are much more complicated than himself when he gets near the ecology.

also, what's up with all the human followers of it that start popping up in books 3 and 4? Why are there renegades for something that is completely harmful to their being?

IIRC it has to do with some kind of psychic hivemind thing?

are they friendly?

Can't really tell since the series misses like 3 books and the writer is dead?

If you ask me, the story is heading towards some Civilization: Beyond Earth/Alpha Centauri Harmony/Planetary Hivemind ending where a new hybrid Chtorr/Terran ecosystem created by the protagonist kills off the humans and the pure-strain Chtorr.

Not like the pure humans were worth saving anyway, they are probably the biggest douchebags in the entire story.

So what do you think this hybrid ecosystem would be like hypothetically?

I dunno man. I'm not the writer of the series. If I was, I'd be dead.

>we're going to attack your ecosystem with another ecosystem
Who cares, we're going to fuck earth over and become spacenoids anyway

If they wiped out a large chunk of the population with engineered diseases, like they did in the books, we'd be fucked.

If they don't, napalm and flame throwers and shit did a pretty good job of clearing infestations. I sort of got the implications that the failure was largely due to lack of manpower.

You're implying humanity would be self regulating enough to harmoniously live in a restricted system.

once FTL is on, we're going to be space locusts

That's what I remember.
People are sort of controlled by the cthorr mind meld consciousness thing, with heaping doses of brain washing techniques.

Kinda got a different implication. The Chtorr ecosystem was turning humans into chtorr-animals to fit it's existing system.

I think the author probably would have ended with a sort of nhilistic impending doom, and the protagonist and some survivors just nuke the planet as a fuck you to the chtorr.

what part of becoming spacenoids implies self regulation?

>People are sort of controlled by the cthorr mind meld consciousness thing

the what?

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There are parasites that leap across entire kingdoms of life with ease, and infectious agents like prions attack the most basic units of life and are indestructible so your unique genes don't even matter to them. Saying their alien and therefor they can't be infected because pathogens are too tailored is fucking stupid because if defeating pathogens was that easy every parasitic lifeform would have died out after one minor mutation in early lifeforms. Look at tomato stunt virus for Christ's sake, it can leap across plant families and wipe out half of a region's crops in only a few fucking months, and there are hundreds of species of virus that have even greater ease recombining and attacking a new host. Hell bacteria have an easier time mutating and becoming perfectly adapted to a harsh environment because they can link together and collectively search for the best genes so the second Chtorr-strain e-coli pops up they're fucked.

Oh one more thing, there are bacteria that eat metal so it's not unreasonable to say a bacteria could stop a bulldozer.

>Kinda got a different implication. The Chtorr ecosystem was turning humans into chtorr-animals to fit it's existing system.

What's so special about Humanity that it can't get from another planet?

I've never read this series.

The OP image shows a caterpillar that looks both menacing and extremely friendly, is this a motif throughout it? Why?

The Chtorran worm is the most recurring type of Chtorran creature featured throughout the books, mainly because they're the closest thing to fully sapient fauna the Chtorran ecology has. They build villages, have communities, and seem to be connected to some kind of local hive mind. Which most likely has something to do with all their hairs being symbiotic creatures acting as the worm's nerve endings or something.

Do you think the ecology has anything sapient behind it? Are the caterpillars themselves sentient or is it just pro-programmed behavior?