Defence of the Earth

[RC]

The second part makes more sense if you go to the site and read the whole thing.

Engineers write defence against aliens manual
A group of American aerospace engineers have written a book on how to defend the earth against alien invasion.

Travis Shane Taylor, Bob Boan, Charles Anding and T Conley Powell hold a variety of PhDs and other degrees in hard sciences and technology. All have worked on weapons and aerospace programmes for defence contractors, NASA and various parts of the US forces. Taylor and Boan also claim expertise in various kinds of technical military intelligence-gathering.

Their book An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion is out now in paperback, and getting a fair bit of play in the media.

John Ringo, who has written many bestselling sci-fi books on the theme of alien invasions, said in his New York Times review:

"Whatever your beliefs on the subject, and despite many of my own popular novels I am agnostic at best, the book also serves as an important primer on the potential future of warfare . . . It is tightly grounded in current day realities of war and extrapolates thoughtfully but closely about future potentials. It should be on the reading list of anyone who is serious about national security and the future of war."

There seem reasonable grounds for a bit of agnosticism around the possibility of alien invasion - during the accurately-foreseeable technological future, anyway. The authors are tangling with Fermi's paradox (if the aliens are coming, surely it's a bit odd they aren't yet here?) and the late Carl Sagan's belief that any species advanced enough to master star travel will have evolved beyond war.

But Taylor, Boan et al aren't worried. On page 54, Sagan is characterised as a "total jerk," which takes care of him.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/27/sixth_column_recycle/

* * * * * * * * *

Irate New Mexican workers ward off alien attack
Tell me, sparky, if some alien species has managed to find a way to span the distance between the stars in measures of time that are manageable and reasonable, directly suggesting a far superior technology, and they came all this way to finally encounter something else which likes to think of itself as 'intelligent' , how do you propose to fight them should they be of a mind to attack us with their far superior technologies?

<SNIP>

It's nitwits and assclowns like this that make our life such a misery with their smart ideas. The aliens destroy our communications and ruin us for the cost of shooting ball bearings at terminal velocity at satellites.


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/04/0405_letters/

A good read.

[cooolandrew]

1. Never mind extra terrestial beings it's the human beings that worry me more.

[Jack_DeLeon]

2. Cool, I'll have to check out that book.