Re: War of the Worlds in DS2

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan White" <jonw@nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2003 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: War of the Worlds in DS2

> On Thursday, July 17, 2003, at 09:01 PM, B Lin wrote:
> > Weaponized Anthrax is the perfect weapon to use.  Especially if you
> > know you're going to use it.  You simply hand out anti-biotics a few
> > days before spraying the whole area.

> This is all very well presuming you have two days notice that a bunch
of
> aliens in tripods are going to show up and start trashing the place.
> Most SF invasion movie aliens don't show up with banners saying 'We're
> psychotic alien killers. See you next week' :). OK, except maybe Mars
> Attacks. The original Wells story suggests they manage to achieve a
high
> level of surprise and disruption - he pretty much describes the
> breakdown of society almost immediately the pods pop open. If we
gained
> some level of warning I'd agree with you, that would give us many more
> options.

Well, when the options are "saturate the area with weaponized anthrax
and
evacuate/innoculate as many people as we can along the way" or "let the
aliens eat everyone", I don't know if the natives are going to worry
that
much.  For that matter, for a number of human nations around the world,
using biological weapons when conventional ones don't seem to work is
going
to be one of their first choices, and the damage to their own people be
damned.

B's point is fairly well taken though.

> But that still doesn't get around the point that we know now
> (and didn't then) that you can seal a vehicle against intrusion by
> chemical and biological agents.

Well, granted.	If the argument is that an alien invader that can shield
itself from nuclear strikes can also seal its vehicles against
biological
assault, then the point is granted.  It's not difficult to conceive of
that
at all... nor of an alien race that could basically resist every single
sort
of weapon that humanity could throw at it.

The problem is in leaving a vulnerability to a naturally-occuring
process
and still asserting that humanity's weapons won't do the job. 
Vulnerability
to just about any sort of radiation that we don't worry about is going
to
get covered, in spades, by almost any form of nuclear device.  ("Anybody
not
wearing three million sunblock is going to have a REALLY.  BAD.  DAY. 
Get
it?")  Vulnerability to just about any kind of chemical or
micro-organism
is, again, going to get covered by our other forms of WMD.  H.G. Wells'
blanket declaration that nature (hence, God) will always protect us
better
than our own weapons can is, on its face, flawed.  There aren't any
conceivable natural events left that are both deadlier in some way to a
theoretically alien race, aren't something our own weapons can reproduce
in
a far deadlier fashion, and still leave us alive after it's done with
them.
Sure, truly planet-shattering phenomena like an asteroid collision are
things that our weapons can't currently reproduce (although I wouldn't
be
surprised if we could put a pretty serious dent in it within my
lifetime),
but it's not something we're going to survive ourselves, either.

E
(aka StiltMan)