Original...

>original, interesting reasons for aliens who are evidently intelligent enough to invent FTL travel to not only want to invade Earth for whatever convoluted reason but also not curbstomp all the humans, without resorting to making them arbitrarily incompetent or idiotic or making the humans arbitrarily hypercompetent titans

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The plot for the movie "They Live"?

Same reasons human explorers and missionaries would go to a tiny jungle village full of savages.

They want to convert them, they're stopping for rest and supplies, they're looking for a great treasure hidden nearby, they want to rape some local women, etc.

Humans are cannon fodder, reproduction rates and wide spectrum of skills make for decent foot soldiers. Pepper in accelerated growth rate, with info being practically just plugged into them in the vats, possibly the ability to reverse the aging process in physical appearance and endurance but life span stays the same to bring more humans into the war.

They want us and see us as nothing more than meat shields to bolster their own ranks and keep more of their own people alive.

>original

It turns out FTL travel is really simple to invent and we could've had it 30 years ago, but currently human-undiscovered laws of physics make it only possible in deep space.
These aliens just got lucky doing a specific experiment several light-days away from a gravity well. Apart from FTL, their technology isn't all that impressive.

*Only in Hollywood can an alien armada cross the vastness of interstellar space in ships the size of mountains yet be dumb enough not to install anti-virus software*

youtube.com/watch?v=yXWe8g0zziw

It doesn't exist. Not in any fictions interested in telling a compelling story at least.

if you have competent aliens you won't see an alien invasion, you'll see all our stuff in orbit get shot down and watch in helpless horror as the aliens start dropping asteroids on us until we give into their demands or die because they wanted our clay/wipe us out

The aliens really really really like having sex with humans. It's like a drug to them. But the highest priced humans are Certified, Ethically raised.

So the aliens have to conquer earth, but can't avoid being too unethical about it. Instead, there is a DHR in their bureaucracy that controls every year how many humans may be hunted, and in what zones. This helps to keep the human population at healthy, stable levels, while also avoiding too much of the stress hormone interfering with human sexual development.

A porn comic did most of this already.

sauce?

If we're going by the "porn/simpsons can't have done it" definition of " originality, then we might as well lock the thread.

Humans being the warrior caste in a huge galactic empire sounds pretty fucking cool.

Why not Stellaris?

You can still have your conquering AI leaders out there wanting to paint the Galaxy map in their colors, but Earth is just another brick in the wall to achieve that.

Here, rate my idea for a YA novel I had:

Basically, you get a bunch of warships popping into the solar system, but they just annex the Earth. It's not like we can stop them, you don't fight Stellaris level aliumz with what we have now, and the stories are mostly about getting to know the individual, more militarily minded aliens and dealing with the fact we've been drafted into Space World War 1.

Also, in the game, crushing XCOM is treated as a very minor thing.

Look up xenobiology if I'm remembering the name correctly

>Thinking I was worried about originality

Don't worry everything's been done already as people are pointing out in this thread.

they're fans of 90s gangsta rap

I'd like to see a salarian battle Busta Rhymes

There's a novel series about that exact premise.

Humans were the only culture to not evolve past conflict. We breed faster, and apparently the gravity of earth is significantly stronger than any other life supporting planet, so we're stronger as a result. We were exposed to diverse environments throughout evolution, so we can handle any battlefield. So a space federation comes along and uplifts us to serve as troops in a hopeless war against mind control squids or something, because everyone else in the federation forgot how to war.

I can't remember the series name though.

It may have sounded like that at first, but then the wish-fulfillment HFY killed it.

Should also add I believe the artist is Incase, don't quote me on that though.

I'd like to read a "Man Who Would Be King" story with Earth as Kafiristan. That is, the invading aliens aren't the government or even a major organisation, just a few scoundrels with surplus weapons and crazy plans to set themselves up as rulers of this backwater.

Luxury Space Communists with a boner for "Uplifting" cultures. They have done it before and found the easiest and surprisingly least bloody way is to just conquer and be benevolent dictators.

Alternatively.

Sentient species are rare and slavery and capitalism both exist alongside alien super technology.

Everyone has robot servants but the really rich can pay for an alien slave.

So a company that can find a planet with a new sentient, trainable race? They got a gold mine, especially with all culture rights going to the conquerors.

You're right, though it's less aliens conquering, and more aliens starting a work-study program so they can fuck humans on the side.

You make it sound like some Japanese/Korean mango

>My Cram School teacher can't possibly be a hot alien from outer space!

That sounds painfully HFY.

We can survive in any environment... because our planet is so unthinkable as to have both hot places AND cold places? Yeah, tell me how that works out when we have to invade a planet where life evolved to be arsenic based.

And thats ignoring that the setting hinges on everyone else being smart enoughnto evolve 'past war', but apparently not smart enough to have figured out how to solve their problems without it.

It's HFY and not HFY at the same time. The rest of the galaxy is just using humanity because humanity is dumb. Humanity are the Chads of the Galaxy, only recruited because of the evil mind controlling squids.

Seems to me the most likely situation. Kinda like a version of the District 9 situation, I guess, where the aliens that happened upon Earth were a bunch of starved, near terminally ill equivalents of redneck prospectors rather than conquerors.

It might actually make a cool story. The alien equivalent of a bunch of hoodlums in a leaky boat with kalashnikovs show up to try and take on the entire Earth. If they nearly succeed, it add an element of almost cosmic horror due to how mindbogglingly terrifying a threat they could've been if their actual military decided to come over. If the humans defeat them handily, it curbs the HFY crowd because what exactly have we proven? That our entire race working together can defeat a bunch of bored alien teenagers looking for trouble?

Why would they not just use robots though?

It's mostly just a series of humans taking advantage of the fact that the main alien character is an incurable sex addict due to biochemistry.

The distinction between the original biology and 'robot' is very likely to be smeared out within a few generations of truly high tech.

Greg Stolze made a variant setting to REIGN with a similar premise. Turns out that the universal standard is for anything remotely resembling intelligence=psionic powers. By pure chance, humanity has somehow evolved without them (the reason nobody's made contacts with us yet is nobody even realized we were sentient, they'd assumed some kind of organic curiosity). While this means humans can't into psionics or FTL travel (it's only possible through psychic teleportation), it ALSO means we're immune to psychic attack and are the only species to have come up with guns and missiles. Throughout the entire history of the universe warfare just consisted of everyone squinting at each other until one side psionically dominates the other into killing themselves/becoming their slaves.

So humans do end up acting as interstellar mercenaries due to being such of an outside-context problem for almost everyone. HFY is averted because humanity can't actually ever "turn the tables" on the aliens and achieve a position of power: if they ever decided we're a threat, they could stop coming over and there's nothing we ever could do to prevent it since we can't "reverse engineer" their FTL drives or something. There aren't any.

It's also pointed out that except under the most unimaginably dire of circumstances (which haven't occurred yet) humans sent to other planets are never allowed to pack anything more destructive than an AK-47. For once, it does the job wonderfully since most aliens don't even know what a gun is, much less have defenses against bullets and second, if the aliens ever DID manage to reverse engineer one nobody'd have use for us.

They have heard American movies, and believe that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. They want to own America and to be Americans. They do not want to be guests. They want to both belong and own the nation. All fiction critical of America is heresy. All other nations can burn.

They are welcomed by half the country.

Close, but they are definitely alien looking and like said. Her biological all aliens of her species get turned on by humans, even the smell, hers is really strong and makes her a nympho that everyone uses.

Natural resources not commonly found throughout the universe is the obvious answer. If the species has a code of ethics centred on the preservation of life they would just bargain with us/take the shit and dip without bothering us more than necessary. I'm not sure what that would entail, of course. Shit we think of as rare is frequently quite common in space, like rare metals including iridium that can be found in abundance in asteroids. Water probably isn't actually that rare, given hydrogen and oxygen aren't and there's a lot of it just in our solar system, though I've seen liquid water as a motivator before I think.

Of course, this begs the question of what you mean by "invasion." If it's an act of war by a sufficiently advanced civ there's literally no reason unless there's some kind of larger imperial interstellar force that forbids it, like a galactic UN.

To me it just sounds like one of those (extremely rare) settings where the alien races are set up with RPGish pros and cons and humans actually fit in that somewhere instead of just being the blank slate that is average across the board, as if we would actually likely be average in every area in the grand scheme of things.

I think it would also be fun to, for example, have humans be mechanical savants and the only species that actually travels through space in vehicles armed with massive artillery, while everyone else uses some kind of bizarre teleportation technology to warp straight off of and onto planets. Clearly our technology would be archaic by comparison but that would be because normally more advanced technology is what it takes species to get off their planets in the first place, we just by some fluke evolved with brains geared to the idea of riding other things (maybe because earth had horses). Any species we'd actually interact with would therefore be those that figured out teleportation, giving us a distinct but not unfair advantage.

Humans as a species suck compared to damn near every other animal on the planet in terms of ability to not get eaten into extinction. The one thing that's kept us alive is our brains and our social structure. We'd make shitty foot soldiers, even from a meat shield perspective.

What we DO have is culture. I can definitely see aliens coming to Earth first as art snobs, checking out our paintings and music, then rapidly progressing to marveling at our cities, then enslaving us for avant garde social experiments on long forgotten planets.

Because they only found out about us via a long lost probe, and when we finally meet face to face; both sides realize war is mutually assured destruction.

>modern "artists" are actually protecting us from invasion by producing shitty art that will make alien species give up on us

I can see your point. Humans aren't exactly the most durable creatures. But hey that's what cybernetic implants and environment suits are for. Next you just promote a bushido/chivalry type of lifestyle and next thing you know you have a race of cyborg warrior-poets who will kick the shit out of any planet you drop them on. Sure they won't be great at shit like "science" or "zero-g combat", or even "not having rampant PTSD", but leave that to the other castes.

I always found it curious there's such massive overlap between the HFY and white supremacist crowds. Like, you jerk off to the idea of a technologically advanced species showing up somewhere filled with dumb natives and handily conquering them without problem... While also taking theoretical pride in the natives' ability to defeat the technologically advanced conquerors through "guts" or "initiative" or "warrior culture" if the situation is ever reversed?

The invaders aren't so much Invaders but more so visitors. They all have forsaken religion in search of a better way to control their normal violent nature, and having received transmissions from earth satellites and back tracking them, have come to earth. Now they meditate alongside buddhist monks, in search of spiritual enlightenment. Or they are just pacifist monk like aliens who require something only found on earth. Or are just really lonely, and wish to live alongside humans.

>What is Half Life

Seriously i was reading all these and the Combine pull this off fantastically well.

Invasion implies hostility though.
>they get mad because a monk tells them some hippie dippie spiritual bullshit and just murder the monastery

Oddly enough, the original War of the Worlds is probably the best reason. "Our planet is busted, inhabitable planet's are incredibly rare, so we want yours."

In my totally original donuts steal setting, an alien empire got their shit kicked in during a galactic war, so a refugee fleet invaded Earth to steal our food so they wouldn't starve to death.

>The Aliens view bad art as the triumph of spirit against reality
>They especially love furries
>They read the internets derision of furries as a genuine threat, and arrive to pacify the indolent and protect those who they see as unappreciated geniuses

It cannot happen. An intelligent invader with the level of technology required to have something like FTL drives, which defy our most basic understanding of the laws of physics, couldn't under any circumstances not curbstomp humanity. That would make for a story that's short, depressing and boring, though, so for the sake of stories aliens need to be made stupid. Either accept this or don't have alien invasion stories.

White peoples are the warrior/scientist combo. Most nations only get one archetype.

Hrm. What if they want us for our 'ability' to think in the short term and use strategies that are highly effective now but terrible in the long term?

Basically there's an interstellar WWI or economic stagnation or something that can't be solved by taking a long view. An advantage or change must be implemented /now/ on multiple small scales. Western civilization's capitalist environment makes humans especially suite to prioritize short-term profit in a way most other species either bred out intentionally or evolved past in favor of hyperaltruism. Conquering us would destroy the cultural context that makes us valuable.

I've never played Half Life and never intend to.

Only in your fantasies furfag go choke on a knot.

>Aliens arrive to destroy your shit taste.

Wasn't that how they saw the Japanese, Chinese and Russians at various points?

alternately
>they think the furries need saving and whisk them away while leaving the rest of us behind
pls be true

Because white people want to believe they're the weak underdogs, but not so weak that they'd ever suffer any meaningful loss.

I'm always amazed by how often everyone assumes the aliens would be both physically superior to us, and also capable of the use of projectile weapons. We evolved to use projectiles. A race that evolved claws and fangs and shit wouldn't have evolved to use projectiles. I always wanted to see one where that was our hat, instead of the bullshit we normally get stuck with by HFY types.

We would infact make fantastic soldiers, because presumably most species that evolved for physical dominance would not have the necessary mental adaptations to make use of firearms as proficiently as we do assuming they even developed them.

Oh. What if we're a religious macguffin? Sort of like how the American Evangelical Right sees Jews?

Stay with me here. Basically Sol happens to satify the conditions of a certain prophecy. Humans aren't gods but we have an important part to play in end-of-civilization level eschatology. There's probably also a throwaway line about god/the gods protecting 'The Allies of the Blue Planet' or something.

Earth becomes a site for pilgrimages and occasionally we'll get a monastary set up by some wacky alien cult. For the most part however we never become a player in world politics because no one gives us FTL.

We do get some planet busters we have no use for from Space America though. Just In Case.

>The aliens turn out to be human perverts altered by advanced technology and looking for revenge.

>I'm always amazed by how everyone assumes the humans would be both physically superior to us birdpeople, and also capable of the use of airplanes. We evolved to use wings. A race that evolved legs and toenails and shit wouldn't have evolved to use wings. I always wanted to see one where that was our hat, instead of the bullshit we normally get stuck with by BFY types.
>
> We would infact make fantastic soldiers, because presumably most species that evolved for land dominance would not have the necessary mental adaptations to make use of airplanes as proficiently as we do assuming they even developed them.

>There were never any aliens, just post-humans from the future with time travel technology who wanted to fuck with us

I actually read a pretty interesting book years ago (don't remember the name, it was interesting, not great) that suggests that's the reason for the American obsession with invasion movies. They haven't had a "good" military victory since WWII, everything since then was either not-quite-a-victory, or not really a fight in the first place. Basically, the Americans are desperate to reaffirm to themselves that if they wanted they COULD totally win a war even if they didn't have an overwhelming material, technological and firepower advantage, because if they can't, that might mean everything so far was a fluke and they're actually just the global equivalent of big bullies.

Well the Chinese were the first to invent and weaponize black powder, but wasn't it whites and Arabs that took it to the next level with firearm technology?

I take it you know nothing of how amazing it is that we are able to instinctively do the complex calculations necessary to hit a moving object with a projectile?

I'd like to see invasion by a blue-and-orange mentality race. For instance one utterly obsessed with dominating the third instance of everything -- not for religion, not for politics, but because it's REALLY REALLY IMPORTANT to their alien autism -- so they have to take over the Earth.

Humanity saves itself by knocking Mercury into the Sun, and the aliens move on to conquer Mars.

Funnily enough, Imperial China ultimately ended up being too good for its own good. After reaching the apex of civilization and realizing they've finally achieved the impossible dream of prosperous stability, they decided any further progress would just either cause trouble or be fixing stuff that isn't broken. So they stopped progressing.

It's telling that it actually took a good few centuries even so before the rest of the world finally overtook them.

I take it you know nothing of how amazing it is that we bird people are able to instinctively do the complex calculations necessary to let us soar through the air?

>USA
>Not being bullies

Please the UN uses us as their attack dog anytime someone doesn't do something they like. More people need to realize we are bullies and damn good at it most days.

Maybe FTL is actually hard - they're not all that much more advanced than we are, maybe a century or two ahead, and they only have one ship.

The problem is that first contact will almost certainly be via radio transmission interception or because the aliens being contacted by the spacefarer are tribal/metal age shmucks who don't even bother looking at the stars as more than a means to navigate the seas.

I suppose an alien race may want to colonize, and they might have a sort of white mans burden sort of situation. "We should help the humans civilize, and in the mean time they pay us back by working in our taco joints." But that's silly, because robotics almost certainly precedes FTL unless they went wildly off course science-wise.

Basically if an alien species shows up here the best thing to do is say hello and ask if they'd rather be friends and allies rather than master and servant, and hope they like us.

In all fairness, the guy has a point. It's actually theorized that humans got an edge over other hominids because of their ability to throw things.

Truly yours is a cutting wit. I've no need to argue with an idiot. I've said my piece.

Military tech gives increasingly diminishing returns past a certain point.

Oh yeah, totes agree with that. I just doubt that
> advantage over Neanderthal adapted to close combat
is likely to carry over to
> advantage as super-soldier in an FTL-level civilization

That guy.

FTL travel is actually an utterly average technology, but we've been looking at it in the wrong way for the entire time.
19th century aliens invade us, thinking we are stone-age primitives because we are non-FTL peasants. We rekt them. Still dunno how to FTL though

aliens read "oh my sweet alien" and thought it would work out like that.

It's possible that could be essentially alien ISIS. Some tribal group that was lucky enough to evolve on some planet where another interstellar race left their toys lying around.

It's hard to say. to use your bird analogy, it's not impossible that an avian race could have developed Wright Brothers-style gliders or ornithopters in their stone ages, but it took until long after their industrial revolution to conceive of something like a bow and arrow.

For a compromise, turns out FTL is super simple... but for whatever reason, humans can't do it. Ever. It's physically impossible for them. It requires some ability that aliens happen to have and humans happen not to.

So aliens arrive in their wooden FTL ships and we handily slaughter them all, but are still stuck with no "offensive" abilities since we can't retaliate. Eventually the aliens just give up because we keep blowing up all their ships soon as they appear.

FTL capable species are at war with each other for sectors of the galaxy. The locals noticed humans could be on the path to one day having their own FTL, so it's best to cull that shit early lest we challenge them like every other FTL species does.

If by some miracle humanity makes it out, perhaps because their aggressors were busy fighting multiple fronts against much more capable foes, they'll have stolen FTL level tech they don't understand at all, and may have just left a huge power bubble in the galaxy that their hungry or paranoid competitors are eyeing.

The invasion is actually a last resort attempt from the population of a dying world.
They're going all out, sending everything they have, fighting until the last of them. But they only have the resources of a planet that has been a death world for centuries. Their fleet is barely able to reach the nearest star, FTL is hard. They didn't even know what planet they were going for until they ended up here, and they have no fuel to go back.

>Also, in the game, crushing XCOM is treated as a very minor thing.

The fuckers actually blew up my observation station once

Granted I was in 2 wars at the same time with Fanatical Purifiers that controlled a quarter of the galaxy and a Spiritualist FE butthurt that I was plopping droids on Tomb Worlds and thus has been ignoring popups about Not!XCOM's shenanigans to focus on interstellar war. But still, dick move primitives.

COMMANDAH'ACKBAR!!
DEATH TO THOSE WHO DEAL WITH THE AYYLMAO!
IT IS WRITEN BY THE COUNCIL THAT KIAs WILL GET 72 TITTIED SNAKEWOMEN IN PARADISE!

>reproduction rates

Literally a fucking meme. Humans take over a decade to reach their sexual maturity. WE DON'T BREED QUICKLY.

You are absolutely right, we really don't, but whose to say the aliens breed any quicker?

We're getting invaded by an alien corporation that wants to set up the biggest fucking parking lot the galaxy has ever seen, and an alien walmart on the moon for good measure.
After they suffer enough financial loss they just loose interest and go for Mars instead, kicking out the american flag that we planted here in the process.

Earth is space Vietnam.
I mean they could curbstomp us but their soldiers are half-assing it and in the mean time protests are rising as alien hippies project their sympathy over us. Meanwhile we're doing our best to make their life as miserable as possible wholly knowing that we have no chance to crawl our way out of this shit. There might be an external alien force supporting us that makes things more complicated, too.
Somehow we win.

>Somehow we win.
They realize there's nothing here they actually want and we aren't worth their drones, and go away in embarrassment.

Vietnam wasn't that useless, we go to get some fine music:
youtube.com/watch?v=2Beda3kFNjo

What kind of music would alien hippies write?

You realize that the Combine only has humans as CPs because they don't give a shit, and their soldiers probably look like synth plus some alien shit we can't understand if the concept art and dialog in game was any indication.

Aliens want to cull the potential psychic population that may be developing on earth as psychics will reach a point that they will be powerful enough to cause mass genocide. They believe that the humane way of putting them to sleep forever will help us live on as a species. Though this doesnt go well with most people having their loved ones put down and earthly governments believe that they can use or do better than the aliens.

Thus the moghty hand of the xenos must come down before they have another galaxy and species lost to a psychic singularity.

Here are a few, not sure how original:
For sport. To impress their own alien overlords. Because they're stuck in a planet invasion pyramid scheme. Because humans look offensively ugly to them. Because humans objectively suck. Because of a typo in the initial peace treaty.

>Aliens are hyper advanced tech-wise, FTL to them is equivalent to automobiles for us
>They decide to conquer earth for those delicious resources
>Turns out that humans are absolutely terrifying to them
>Our spit burns through their flesh, our voices can burst their xeno-ear drums, and we're considered horribly ugly, almost deformed
>They high tail it after a few weeks of fighting, remove the Sol system from all their maps to prevent curious adventurers going back, and erase all history of us from their textbooks

This kinda makes us way too OP, honestly but I think it's neat

Huge asterisk there, some girls start their period as early as 8 afair, and there is at least one example of a sexually abused 5-year-old girl becoming pregnant.

The only problem with such things is that the younger they are, the lower the survival rate of both mother and infant.

Aliens are taking over human bodies. They are avoiding all out war because they don't want to lose any potential hosts.

Obviously humanity is protected.

Alien political climate warrants conquest, but not extermination. I mean, when they can't fight you, give them a reserve, why not.

The aliens are after our natural resources, just like every alien species ever, but as a capatalist organisation trying to make bucks selling what they can scrape off earth, not some species-wide superforce.

Practically speaking, this means that the aliens are super limited. This isn't some stone-age tribe resisting the entire US armed forces, it's a stone age tribe resisting Shell oil. Sure Shell oil belongs to a society that can make nuclear weapons, tanks, and fighter aircraft, but they don't actually have any of those things themselves. They can probably scrape together a few mercenaries with shotguns and jeeps at best.

Turns out that phlogiston and the aether were real all along, you just had to commit to it. Basically we only went half-retard while the aliens had no such reservations.

>Stone Age tribe vs Shell Oil
I want this

Tips fedora

A series called "the ember war" had a pretty decent premise to this. A massive fleet of nomad aliens wander around and consume all resources they can find. Another much more advanced alien race observes that Earth is in the way, and provides some minor technological guidance to give us a chance at not being extinct. Near extinction event occurs anyway, but a small fleet of humans are left. Queue vengeance pact

Banana Republic: Earth.

>The aliens are after our natural resources

This always struck me as ludicrous.
Earth holds no particular bounty of materials that can't be found in greater quantity even elsewhere in our solar system, let alone the greater galaxy.
Our system has two moons with at least as much water as Earth, and one of them most likely vastly more. Gold? It doesn't even originate on Earth, it's dust blown in from from Space, effectively.

We are just a small collection of organisms clinging to life on what is most likely an unexceptional ball of rock that's conveniently located the right distance from the Sun, but isn't particularly blessed with much in the way of exciting resources.

I think my favourite thing in Stellaris to do with messing with primitives is when you send in infiltrators there's a chance for an event chain where one of your agents goes native and helps them against your attempts to take over.

A valid point. The only thing I can think of that would be worth taking from earth would be life-based produce. Stuff like plants, animals, and fossil fuels are unique to Earth (probably).

If the aliens win then they'd probably just turn earth into a massive version of the carribean, growing high value export crops for cheap. Currently it's cheaper to farm pineapples in some 3rd world pineapple country than it is to build a greenhouse in the 1st world and farm it there, so it's not unreasonable to assume that the same would be the case for an alien race- slave labour is basically free as long as the slaves can farm for themselves.

Also, cultural products might be valuable, but this wouldn't take an invasion.

Honestly the most likely version of an alien invasion for resources would be earth ending up less of a blasted wasteland and more like a space version of colonial India.