Lore
Advanced aliens didn't invent/discover this one basic thing.
The Santi, from The Three Body Problem, are masters of dimensional engineering. They can build an AI computer the size of a planet, and fold it into the size of a photon.
But they never invented the concept of lying.
The Asgard, from Stargate, are an advanced civilization with FTL travel capable of spanning different galaxies. But they need the help of humans to fight their enemies the replicators, a mechanical lifeform comprised of replicating lego blocks, because human guns can blow the blocks apart, while Asgard energy weapons are just absorbed.
The Asgard say the idea to use chemical reactions to launch a blunt object at high velocity never occured to them.
Despite having the ability to build a simulated beach, complete with simulated earth atmosphere, The Eridians didn't discover relativity and radiation.
The aliens from War of the worlds just lick everything, clearly having no concepts of germs. Which is what kills them in the end.
Despite having FTL travel, the Havesters from Independence day, never invented network security, as they are hacked by a human macbook.
It’s not so much that the Santi didn’t “invent” lying as it is that it just doesn’t work in their society where everyone shares thoughts essentially telepathically
Sorry I haven't read the book yet but at least in the TV series the woman that called Santi got a warning from one of the Santi telling her to stop transmitting or their species will come. It kinda seemed to me that if not lying, that one specific Santi was capable of hiding information from others?
Tbf if I remember correctly, in the books the trisolaran that was contacted initially and told them to stop transmitting was something of an activist on their planet and didn’t agree with invading earth. I also recall him being punished for it.
Edit: as others have pointed out, the trisolaran wasn’t able to lie to his superiors. As soon as someone relieved him at his outpost they immediately knew what he did, which is why the next batch of messages were so drastically different. But it did show that the trisolarans weren’t a hive mind and that they were capable of compassion, which becomes more evident in the 3rd book.
One major plot point issue I had was the part where the entire threat of the droplet and the Trisolarians was essentially hand waved away with the 4d pocket of space they discovered. It was a cool concept but I felt like it sort of sucked the wind out of my sails for the tension he was building. I liked a lot of those ideas but it really felt Deus ex machina.
Eh id have to disagree. A discovery on that scale was their biggest worry hence the sophon blockade. Applications of that discovery definitely fall under the axiom of Technological Explosion. There's a lot of these little implications of grander plans if you stop and think some of the mind game stuff through.
Like The Wallfacer Plan, Stating there are only 3 people allowed to lie in order to strive for a strategic victory is in itself a strategic deception. We get multiple POV characters that arent wallfacers, yet try to see their secret plans through to fruition.
There are a lot of flaws and some tough spots that you have to tough out, but it is an absolutely amazing series that I'm constantly trying to get my friends to get into.
I read the first book and found it too inconsistent to read the other books. Some really, really great moments strung together with difficult pacing and characters.
Wasn't it more that the one alien decided that he would rather let his own species go extinct than doom another, and so told the humans not to send another signal because the time delay between multiple messages could be used to pinpoint the distance between them?
I mean to be fair their question does have weight unless, there is a mistranslation between Chinese to English I definitely took it as one Santi warning humanity. I just assumed the author didn't necessarily have the race exactly fleshed out yet.
That’s basically how I hand wave it. You have the whole thing where you get a POV on their society with different politicians arguing over shit and essentially behaving like humans and clearly the author decided that he didn’t like that, because it never happens again
There was a single line in the book about this. I don't remember the words, but basically a Santi could act as a spy in Santi society up until somebody asked them if they were a spy, whereupon they'd just answer 'yes'. They never withheld information, they were just able to not volunteer information freely.
Currently reading the book again actually. It's not so much being asked, it's that as soon as another focuses on them and becomes aware of their mind, they know the truth.
So basically you can "spy" on them from a distance, like a scout looking for a camp or something, but you'd never have James Bond
the guy was forced to dehydrate and burned in the book, he basically sacrificed himself.
also the san-ti can technically hide information from one another by simply not meeting or not communicating other san-ti, it is said that they share their whole knowledge automatically with each other every time they meet.
In the books he was forced to remain alive, not dehydrated. His punishment was to survive until Earth was conquered and he could see it himself, witnessing his failure to stop it
You know when you're about to do something you know is a bad choice, and you have that little voice in your head telling you "hey let's step back real quick and think about this" but you do it anyway?
That one santi might be like that little voice. It's there, and the collective knows it's there, but that one dissenting voice is overridden by the rest of the collective.
I also believe they can learn how to do the basics. I don't think it's impossible for them to do with remote communication, but they realise we do it all the time. We are constantly doing it and engaging in advanced levels of subterfuge and strategic bluffing. They would seem like children lieing to us and could never hope to match our best.
Our ability to deceive is as far ahead of them as their ability to do physics. It's a tool of unknown strength.
In fairness to ID the movie basically hints that the computer boom is a direct result of reverse engineering the ship from the 50s. So theoretically it's less that they don't have network security and more that it never occurred to them that we could build hardware from their scout ships.
Right, I think there's a deleted scene that better explains how they can interface with the aliens' computers and bypass their security. But it just kills the pacing at that point in the story and it got dropped.
They specifically state that a significant portion of modern human technology is derived from the crashed space ship at Area 51. I figured it was less a random occurrence and more that they were do similar anyway that we could just adjust to their anti virus software.
I think it’s like how serial ports were the standard and are non existent now, but a lot is still built on it, so something like a lightning to serial adapter would give you access to things like the chip that actually controls the usb port on a phone
Aren't the aliens also a hive mind, so they never even considered hackers because there's really no one else in their society, or am I thinking of something else?
They are described as a locust style race and their mother ship controls all other ships, much like the bugs in Enders Game. So never directly confirmed as hive mind but seems very likely.
Man, this makes it make so much more sense. It's not rock solid or anything, but being based on the same technology at least puts it in the realm of possibility
I can't remember the name, but there's a short story where antigrav and FTL tech are actually super simple, but humanity by chance just happened to miss it, so our tech developed as we see it. Other aliens did discover this tech, so they end up building interstellar empires but with otherwise Napoleonic at best tech and tactics. I'm talking black powder muskets, wooden hulls, and no electricity. So when they try to attack earth they get steamrolled and hand us the FTL on a silver platter, the implications of which scares the shit out of one of the captured alien scientists
It makes sense to me. People love Human Fuck Yeah stories. Ones that portray humans as both underdogs and yet the most special and unique species in the galaxy that are widely respected for something (tech or anger or love or ambition etc.) is a very loved trope.
I remember the bit about the captured aliens talking. Humans had told them about nukes and one alien didn't believe a single bomb could wipe out a city. The other alien said "when they talked about it, the humans sounded...scared."
There's definitely a bit with a human scientist talking to a General and the scientist is like "oh this is great, all the wonderful things we can share with them!" and the General laughs at her naivety and says it's going to be the same type of sharing that Europe did with the Native Americans, that the Human race is fundamentally about to look at the entire known universe and go "look, free real estate with built in slaves"
But because the full advantage is technological, if some people could spread the tech to other species the disadvantage has a chance of being closed. Much better than if the advantage was somehow a biological capability like needed resources or telepathic ability.
The road not taken. Featuring teddy bear aliens discovering that they are, in fact, not that technologically advanced, and the Earthlings learn that they missed a really obvious way to get FTL travel, but because they missed it they are now technologically dominant to pretty much everyone in the known universe. The story ends on a melancholy note for the teddy bears.
As I recall, the human scientist working on their tech also realizes that from this point forward innovation in all other technology will grind to a halt and human domination of the universe will only continue until humans meet a more technologically advanced species that also didn't discover FTL.
What it does mention is trying to explain how the FTL drive works without modern understanding of physics effectively shuts out discovering modern physics, such as atoms, computers etc.
If you enjoyed that, look up Turtledove’s “Worldwar” series. The premise is that a conquering alien race shows up during WWII. They’re significantly more advanced than us, but culturally evolve very slowly, and so have the other races they’ve conquered, so they expect us to also adapt slowly. They’d sent a probe 800 years ago, and were still expecting to be facing knights on horseback 800 years later.
Everyone is surprised
There’s a reason Turtledove is a grandmaster of science fiction
Pretty sure that it's explained in War of the Worlds that the aliens never invented the Wheel.
That's where I thought you were going with that.
Anyway, the Arachnids of Children of Time communicated primarily through sensing rhythmic tapping vibrations through webs and through the ground. As such, they couldn't fathom that humans were trying to communicate to them vocally, using their mouth-holes.
There is something similar in Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga; The Primes are essentially an immobile brain that controls millions of drones. They never have to make noise to communicate, but essentially transmit their thoughts via radio waves.
They captured some humans and wondered why they were making so much noise.... and why they leaked red stuff when poked.
They also never invented internal combustion or plastics as Kirn's world lacks any natural petroleum deposits. Ie. that scene were Portia launches a satellite into space using giant balloons and chemical reactions and says that she wishes there wan easier way to do that.
The other issue is that Kern's World has a very high oxygen atmosphere so any technology relying on combustion is extra extra dangerous, which discouraged the various species on it from experimenting much in that direction.
That's actually kind of the same premise as what kickstarts the war that causes the events in Ender's Game.
The Formics are like a hyper advanced ant colony insomuch as they are a hive mind conglomeration of insectoid creatures. When they make first contact with a human vessel, they kill the whole crew, which causes the war the book is about. Anyway, it's later realized by Ender, the protagonist, that the Formics assumed humanity was a hive mind as well and that they were just doing the equivalent of poking someone to get their attention by killing a few scout drones. This epiphany was made short after Ender had finished effectively wiping the Formics from existence.
So effectively what happened was, from humanity's pov there was an unambiguous hostile declaration of war, and from the Formics pov they tapped humanity on the shoulder and Humanity turned to them, screamed, "You just killed 50 of my skin cells!" And shot them in the head. All because the Formics never stopped to think that another alien species might not also be a hive mind.
The aliens from Signs can travel the galaxy but they haven’t invented clothing to protect them from a crippling weakness to water. And then they travel to a planet 80% covered in water where water falls from the sky regularly.
Isn't there another popular theory that they're not actually alien, but demonic (in line with the other religious/spiritual themes throughout the film), and that they're weak to water because of the "baptismal" cleansing properties of it?
There was also something about the Middle East region easily repelling the invasion, though no specifics are given, its coincidentally the area that the core Abrahamic religions spread from.
Though to be fair, as far as I remember that theory doesn't explain the poor birds flying into the cloaked ships in the sky...
Satan has cloaked ships, it’s in the Bible or something. Like Jesus says to his followers at one point like “hey watch out for cloaked ships that Satan has, dudes”
Thats sounds like the nudists I've known, "Go hiking nude, we promise you won't get any more thorns in your balls than you do when you hike with pants. " All lies.
I still remember seeing a video where some guy was discussing it. The guy just sounded so pissed off.
“Oh, and the big twist, the aliens are weak to water, it’s like acid to them. Probably should have thought of that before coming to a planet MOSTLY COVERED IN WATER”
That's how Daniel and O'niell phrase it, Thor was much more diplomatic about it when he asked. Effectively complimenting humans for thinking of a solution they wouldn't. He properly deduced that the Asgard method of trying to out-tech an enemy that straight up feeds on tech was a losing battle...but Earth who was advanced enough to put up a fight yet primitive enough that the tech disparity didn't work against them were perfect solutions to direct combat with replicators.
I think it was also an elegant way of handling an existential threat without resorting to power-creeping the 'protagonists' - there's many stories that introduce ever increasing threats that the heroes need to power up their arsenal to defeat... SG-1 went the other way and said that any sufficiently advanced entity would have lost the ability to defend itself against primitive attacks; like ramming a space ship into the enemy ship because defensive shielding resulted in less reinforcement of hull plating.
A key point that ties this together and makes it more plausible - the Asgards main enemy, the Replicators, has captured enough of Asgard tech that they have learned ALLLLL of the Asgard info on strategy and tactics. Every single good idea they have ever had about combat, their enemies know. So every bit of combat is like trying to play chess against a robot who has been trained reading every book you've ever read on chess.
Add in that the Asgard use cloning to extend their lives to the point that they lost the ability to reproduce, and you have a serious problem. They haven't had a single unique idea that the enemy doesn't already know in a very long time.
I got the impression that if they could still have kids, they might not be so screwed, because someone who wasn't so so very old, someone who was learning strategy and tactics, might have new ideas the Replicators never heard of before.
It isn't just that Asgard don't think that dumb anymore, they don't think outside the box anymore. They are too old to consider leaving the box of "these are good ideas" they formed some time ago. Meanwhile, to humans any idea that keeps you alive could be called a good idea, and the ideas SG1 usually suggests are only good ideas if your priority is "fight another day". Otherwise, they are expensive and shitty ideas that lose Asgard some key equipment and risk all kinds of consequences.
It's a nice "humans are space orcs" situation because humanity went so so fast from first air flight to first space flight, and we can think flexibly.
Didn't Carter convinve Thor to use their most advanced ship, named after O'Neil, as bait and self-destructed it in FTL so the resulting shrapnel would take out the 3 Replicator ships in pursuit?
yeah, if i remember right, Thor was aghast at the idea of it, but basically went: "well that's the kind of idea an asgard wouldn't use, so it's better to do it than not try anything at all."
Yep and it's a good example - because Thor and the rest of the Asgard are so old, so set in their ways, and so used to being the top dog in every situation.
They defined any plan that resulted in the loss of the best ship as a "bad" plan, but Carter was going by the rules of "but you survive to fight another day" and thought outside their box and yeah. Losing the best ship isn't the worst idea, losing all your people would be the worst idea.
I mean guns are just the best way we have figured out to hit each other with rocks. Almost all of human warfare so far has been refining the process of making a rock collide with the enemy in the most effective ways we can manage.
"This, recruits, is a 20-kilo ferrous slug. Feel the weight! Every five seconds, the main gun of an Everest-class Dreadnought accelerates one to 1.3 percent of light speed. It impacts with the force of a 38-kiloton bomb. That is three times the yield of the city buster dropped on Hiroshima back on Earth. That means: Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space! (...) I dare to assume you ignorant jackasses know that space is empty! Once you fire this hunk of metal, it keeps going 'till it hits something! That can be a ship, or the planet behind that ship. It might go off into deep space and hit somebody else in ten thousand years. If you pull the trigger on this, you are ruining someone's day, somewhere and sometime!"
I love this moment because its literally some nameless background NPCs doing flavour text, but it also perfectly illustrates the way you need to get some dumb boot to understand relativistic kinetics in warfare.
Or in other words, to them uising something like a gun is the equivalent of trying to beat another guy to death via headbutts. It's just too dumb and they default to something else without even considering the idea..
And we see this when a high ranking black belt initially has trouble dealing with an attack by a random schmo sometimes.
Against a triple spinning flying kick, they're trained for it.
Some guy throwing huge haymakers and weird off-angle shin kicks and who tries to headbutt you and bite your collar bone... what's even going on right now?
They were however smart and wise enough to realize the simple solutions can yield results so they outright and directly ask Earth for help because while Asgard aren't capable of thinking that way their human friends are. How many advanced alien races in fiction need their noses rubbed in it before they wise up and swallow their pride?
I love how Ax thought books were better than the internet, because you can flip through the pages and the text is already there. It didn't need to be loaded.
That reminds me of a scene from SG1. They are working with a Goa'uld, secretly a collaborator for the Ori, who is something of a glutton. They bring him all sort of food, and he is astounded by the concept of seedless grapes. And chicken.
Also for Rocky's species in Project Hail Mary, the author said fire is something Eridians would only have discovered in a lab setting and it would be incredibly dangerous. Meridians finding out cave humans used fire would be like us discovering Mantis Shrimp split the atom when they punch shit.
Fire wouldn't have been that dangerous to them in their environment, since the moment it was exposed to their atmosphere, it would go out... However, when Eridians enter an environment with oxygen, their internal temperatures are high enough that they ignite their insides. Not fun.
Right. In the book its not the fire that Rocky is shocked by, its the fact that Grace breathes oxygen which to Rocky seems extremely dangerous because of how reactive oxygen is.
To them, living in an oxygen rich environment is as foolish as building your house out of enriched uranium. It's so easy for a random temperature fluctuation to start a massive chain reaction.
The Eridians in general are hard to strictly call 'more advanced' since they're absolute god tier engineers but pretty middling scientists and theoreticians. There's a lot more than just relativity and radiation they're missing out on. Both species look at each other and just think "how the FUCK did they do that/figure that out?!"
When it comes to computing in particular they are stumped, because to them it's closer to biology than it is physics and mathematics, and finding out an alien species basically built an artificial brain is very surprising to them.
Yeah, their unique brains with perfect recall and lightning fast mathematics make simple computers pointless (who needs a big calculator when you can calculate interstellar travel in your head) so they never got to advanced computers.
Also they had to fast jump ahead to interstellar travel due to the whole Astrophage crisis. Due to being blind and how dense their atmosphere is, they hadn't discovered that there were other planets out there until their planet started to get colder, and they built a space elevator to go up and try to figure out what was going on. So they jumped past probably centuries of progress of flight, physics, etc, so that they could get to Tau Ceti and figure out what was going on.
It's interesting to think about what types of senses lifeforms could rely on and develop a civilization with that may introduce them to the concept of space at different times or never at all.
In the book it is implied that earth's AC/DC electricity was childishly simple and Rocky couldn't even begin to explain to Grace Eridian electrical engineering.
Well, technically, it was the Astrophage that blocked the radiation; it wasn't purposefully set up to block radiation, it just happened to without them knowing. It was really a fluke that Rocky survived.
I've always found it funny that humans are technically more advanced than eridians (IIRC Grace compares them to cosmonauts in the book) but only because they're so smart they've never really needed to invent computers
Eridians in the book live under an enourmous gas blanket that protects them from all radiation (and also all light, hence the lack of eyes.) They originally don't know their stars are dimming because they originally don't know about stars. When the temperature of their world starts changing, they start probing their cloud blanket the way we might dig down into the earth's mantel. Since they don't have eyesight and sense by echo-location, a star-filled outerspace is not this intuitive concept.
As a technological civilisation they had the concept of a large source of heat in the sky (their sun) from what I remember, but indeed, night sky distant stars are a very new concept which they only discovered a few decades ago when they figured out their sun was dimming (heat input for the planet was lowering). So they had to had-hoc engineer a space program ASAP, they did not have, like we did, decades or more to ponder why can't we measure a different speed of light when we measure it in different directions (since the Earth moves quite fast around the Sun, the Sun moves even faster in the galaxy), why is Mercury's orbit a bit off, etc. which eventually lead us to Relativity.
Throughout the film, it’s unclear just what the alien’s true goal is, with him only mentioning that he’s after a precious Earth resource. We eventually find out that it’s…bubble tea. Apparently, Earth is the only planet in the universe to have invented boba.
Reminds me of the Mighty Max episode where alien beetles animate a beetle-shaped warship to conquer the Earth and ravage its resources. Max and his guardians fail to defeat the warship's defenses, so Max just tries to negotiate and ask what they want.
They eat nuclear waste and realized Earth was full of the stuff. Max "surrenders" Earth's nuclear waste in exchange for them leaving Earth alone.
Funny thing is loony tunes probably got it the closest to reality when it comes to what aliens would want from earth. Tapioca (or any organic chemical) is infinitely more rare then any other resources we consider precious on a universal level
Planets that rain diamonds, entire nebulas of alcohol, any rare mineral or element, easy, but behold, the most precious resource known to the universe. Wood.
do NOT exchange your grandma's leather top French ebony desk for a tungsten cube. Tungsten is not that rare at all, aliens will LIE to you. Google will HEAR the conversation and offer you THE EXACT SAME cube in an ad from EBAY
The Aliens in Mass Effect have huge armies with powerful Space Fleets and warships. Surprisingly though before Humans came along none of them had a dedicated fighter carrier type ship or aircraft carrier, something that quickly changed once they saw Humans using them.
The idea here is that starship cannons are so advanced that their projectiles travel at a near instantaneous speed, and are supported by perfectly precise and immediately-generated targeting solutions.
Peak physics and computing.
So it makes no senses to deploy small, easy to pick-off fighters when damage can't be evaded.
You have no choice but to tank, using kinetic shields and advanced hulls.
But the Reapers are counting on this, since they secretly seeded their technology throughout the Milky Way, for everyone to find and adopt.
And in a direct battle, the Reapers are ALWAYS winning.
Humans are newcomers to the galactic stage, and have not yet standardized their military technology with the other, more powerful species.
So their aircraft carriers, initially seen as vestigial, quickly become unconventionally useful during the Reaper War.
Humans also have a totally different concept for defense. IIRC, the human military's defense is based on smaller garrisons with a much larger rapid reaction force deployed from the Navy, which is why the First Contact War put them on the map, effectively punching above their weight class against the Turians.
ETA: As a signatory of the Treaty of Firaxen (a requirement for any race that wishes to open an embassy on the Citadel and become a member of the galactic community), humans are restricted on the number of dreadnoughts they can build (the ratio is 5:3:1, that is for every 5 Turian dreadnoughts humans, asari, and salarians can build three, and everyone else can build 1.) Carriers are a convenient loophole because their primary armament is fighters and interceptors, not cannons meant for engaging other vessels or for orbital bombardments (and post ME-2, the Thanix Cannon developed by the Turians means they can mount a weapon as strong as a cruiser's main armament on vessels as small as frigates and fighters, improving the viability of a carrier based doctrine).
Iirc they station Fleets and subfleets and space stations right on mass relays, rarely moving them unless they're actually fighting or doing patrols or exercises. That way, the entire fleet can mobilize at once to just put the entire hammer down on whatever it is they're fighting.
"He who defends everything defends nothing." Human colonies have what other Council and Citadel races would consider token garrisons on their world, meant for fighting off raiders, slavers, brigands, and criminals while a distress call is sent out and the fleets arrive in overwhelming force to hit them hard and fast (which is what routed the Turians at Shanxi during the First Contact War).
Not really on topic but humans invented a very useful substance called medigel because since they only joined the galactic community recently they didnt realize the way it worked violated a galactic law of some kind, but it was too useful for the galactic community to ban so they just kinda ignored that fact.
The carriers are a similar thing, humanity started building them because there is a hard limit on how many capital ships each species is allowed to have in service but the language of the treaty that governs that is about the length of the main gun, carriers don't have main guns so it doesn't apply to them.
Their workaround for carriers being kinda terrible is to use a lot of VI controlled drones in combination with fighters, a level of automation every other species is uncomfortable with that also might be illegal but which the alliance loves. From small drones that support individual squads to satellites you drop into low orbit to provide air support they have zero qualms in deploying fully automated technology at every opportunity.
It's such a stupid loophole too. If I recall, a ship thar has a main gun 800 meters or more in length is a dreadnought. So you build a ship that has a gun 700 meters in length, but also has the drive core of an actual dreadnought, meaning you can fire it faster. Better yet, you build the ship with multiple 700 meter guns and an oversized core. Prepare each gun and fire it in sequence. It will punch way above its weight class due to the rapid landing of shots.
Mass Effect ships are almost entirely dependant on kinetic barriers for defense. The armor on them is pathetically weak. Breaking through the barrier with a rapid series of hits will let follow up shots still penetrate and destroy the hulls.
Bringing a 6-shooter tk a gunfight with someone who has to reload after every shot. Even if if enemy has better range, the 6-shooter is gonna win that more often than not.
The Asgard and the Humans being perfect partners because Humans are comparatively stupid and thus think on a much less complex level cracks me up to this day
War of the worlds makes sense, as they're from Mars apparently. The martian surface is bathed in UV radiation and will quickly kill any bacteria. The Martians must live underground in quasi-sterile environments with bacteria that was never a threat to them biologically. Pretty much everything in their cave, home, or tripod would be in a symbiotic relationship to survive in that environment.
Come to Earth, our fuzzy wet rock and pretty much every square inch has another colony of completely novel bacteria to them. It makes sense they never thought about bacteria being hostile.
Yeah, and I believe it was explained that the Martians knew what bacteria was, but on their homeworld had eradicated illness so long ago that they basically didn't even have immune systems anymore. the concept of Earth being not just covered in bacteria, but the bacteria also being capable of killing people was foreign to them and something they never thought of.
They were technically Vax-maxxing but it went full circle as they eliminated their problems and genuinely forgot that bacteria could even be a problem.
Similar to the three body problem, the Ariekei from Embassy Town do not comprehend lying.
Their language differs from most human languages in two major ways
Firstly they posses two mouths, and every word in their language is composed of two separate sounds, spoken at once. Translaters must work together to speak in sync as the Ariekei don't recognize it as speech if it's one part human, one part recording (though two people recorded at the same time seems to work)
Secondly, the word and the concept the word represents are truly one and the same. To say the sky is red is the same as turning the sky red. Because of this, lying is impossible
After being introduced to humans, the concept of lying is not only fascinating, but literally intoxicating, putting them in a trance like state
In the short story The Road Not Taken by Harry Turtledove, it turns out that 90's humanity is the most technologically advanced race in the galaxy. Why? Because apparently FTL travel is incredibly easy to discover(we just missed it somehow), and as soon as any species discovers it, they immediately drop everything to begin conquering space.
How does humanity find this out? Because the Roxolani invade Earth with black powder muskets, firefly lanterns, and clay jar powder bombs. Their first wave is wiped out by, I believe, local police armed with carbine. Their second ship draws the attention of a military response and is annihilated by an artillery barrage.
would be terrifying for the aliens, imagine you think you're the pinacle of evolution, and you go and invade a "primative" planet, you get there, all your guys get mowed down by a gun a couple hundred years more advanced than anything you can make, and now the "Primative" hairless apes with machine guns just stole your FTL capable ship, and are pissed you just tried to invade their home turf, and know wher you live, why isn't this a movie yet?
She easily strips an AI down and steals several features. She even mentions that some of the code looks familiar, but I don't know if it ever came back up. She also gained the ability to copy herself. I don't know if she loses that ability before she goes rampant.
The code “looking familier” is definitely a nod to the forerunner origins of the covenant’s technology. Initially the forerunners were supposed to just be an earlier evolution of the human race before a change was made when halo 2 was split into two games.
Stretching a bit the concept, but the aliens from The Arrival seem to also don't understand the concept of relativity (As they suppose other species also see everything at the same time as they do), and while not necessarily talking about what they know/what they don't; for a weird alien that future, present, and past, don't matter, coming to sell guns and buy guns is a pretty mundane trope.
Well I think the point is that maybe relativity doesn’t even apply to them. They see and experience time in a fundamentally very different way.
In the movie they’re lowering themselves to our level, as it were, but it was always a given. We help Abbott and Costello now and they help us, cause we help them thousands of years from now.
In Valve’s Half-Life games, after experiments go wrong at a research lab, one thing leads to another and an intergalactic alien empire called the “Combine” conquer earth after a pathetically short seven hours of warfare.
It’s implied that although the Combine have tech well-beyond humanity in almost every other aspect (including an energy field that can stop sexual reproduction, hover-tech, body-horror cybernetics, directed energy weapons, etc.), they actually don’t have good transportation capabilities. They essentially brute-forced their way onto our world by following through a portal created by the aforementioned experiments gone-wrong. When the protagonists of the games shut down the portal, the Combine garrison on earth is completely cut off from the rest of their empire, allowing the human resistance to begin fighting openly and taking the planet back.
By contrast to the Combine, the humans actually figured out advanced teleportation tech fairly early after the war, using it to outmaneuver their enemy at several key points despite being otherwise terribly overmatched. (I guess that might be basic by some sci-fi standards and not others).
also more of a headcanon but i think the combine also have little to none space tech. but that is mainly based on them draining the ocean for it's water.
water is incredibly common in the universe, and any civilization that can conquer a completely alien world in a few hours should have enough ressources to send out spaceships to land on the closest ice moon.
if they just set up shop on europa they would already have more than double the water earth has to offer. not to mention that it is surrounded by other moons with comparable amounts
I think part of the reason they have difficulty with local teleportation is because they are from a different universe where things are similar enough that a lot of their technology works, but things that reach a level like teleportation breaks apart. In the games you can hear characters talking about "their" calculations and they seem capable of communicating with their home world, but had to blow up the reactor at City 17 to create one single unstable portal to their home world.
The Combine know how to travel between dimensions, but they have no local teleport - once they're there, they're gonna leg it manually. Black Mesa (and also Aperture Science) invented a way to teleport around Earth using Xen as a median world. Breen promised access to this technology in exchange for sparing humanity and letting them to be elevated to immortality, ending the 7 Hours War.
To be fair to the Asgard, "too smart to think of low tech solutions" is kind of their whole thing. And the reason why they brought in humans to help from time to time, to think of stupid ideas
Which given that the replicators deal was adapting to and getting more powerful the higher tech is thrown at them, they really should have done more. Don't try time manipulation on the "species" that gets exponentially stronger when exposed to high tech, it doesn't end well for anyone
I’m sure there’s an actual name for it, but it’s very similar to the thing in any high level of competition where a move is so basic/ below the top level strategy that no on expects it because it’s just too dumb/simple.
Also at one point in Star Wars lore the Mandalorians regressed their weapons to specifically fight the Jedi who could deflect blaster beams. Good luck blocking a slug thrower, because now you’ve created hot molten slag coming at you. Pretty hard to deflect a flame thrower or a missile too.
The example for the Eridians doesn’t make sense. You don’t need understanding of advanced physics to create a zoo. A “simulated beach” and “simulated Earth atmosphere” is basically just describing a zoo (or in this case, more like an aquarium).
A better example (from the book) would have been that they built a goddamn SPACE ELEVATOR before discovering radiation and relativity.
Ki sensing in dragon ball, Frieza's empire and other aliens in dragon ball rely overly on scouters to estimate the power level of their opponents, while scouter's are useful they have way too many limitations such aa
-they can be easily fooled by anyone skilled enough to know how to lower their power level
-they can explode when a power level spikes way too quickly, also they have a upper limit to how much power they can read
Meanwhile ki sensing let's you sense the position, power, intention and life force of your enemies a technique that's in general superior to scouters as a whole.
Ki Sensing comes really late in Dragonball. Goku stares off into the distance from the top of Korin's Tower (before he finds out that isn't the true top of the tower) and says he can sense Piccolo out there somewhere, he can feel the power of Piccolo's spirit. And Korin is shocked, he says "Could it be? Is Goku really The One?" As if the ability to sense ki is some fabled power that only the chosen one would have.
Similarly flight is extremely shocking the first time they see Chiatzu using it and most characters barely do more than a high jump and the occasional hover until the very end of Dragonball with Piccolo Jr.
In the Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier, a race of aliens called the Dancers are extremely advanced, and helped out humanity a fair bit. When asked if there was anything they want, the Dancers said a 'universal fixing substance'. Something humanity was quite sure we didn't have, until a recording surfaced that showed something of ours helping bind wounds closed, fix machinery, and so much more. What was it?
I will never forget the episode Remembrance of the Daleks (Sylvester McCoy) where the Doctor straight up runs up a flight of stairs to escape a Dalek, and the mortified look on his face when, for the first time ever, it generates a hover field and starts flying up after him.
The Thermians in Galaxy Quest also didn't invent the concept of lying. In fact, the concept of saying anything that wasn't the truth was so foreign to them, they mistook the in-universe equivalent of Star Trek for historical documents and recruited the actors that starred in it to fight a war for them.
In the book, it was explained that Erid's magnetic field (significantly stronger than Earth's) shielded them from cosmic radiation, so it just didn't occur to them. And as for relativity, they just knew very little about the electromagnetic spectrum in general.
They book presents it much less as Eridians being more advanced but missing basic stuff, and more like Humans and Eridians are over all equally advanced, but have different areas where they're more technologically advanced than the other.
The reason the Asgard in SG1 didn't think to use mechanical weapons is because they were still mostly useless for the replicators the asgard faced.
Replicators that built themselves from Asgard materials are different from replicators that are built from regular earth tech or even goa'uld materials.
The Asgard replicators could and did reassemble themselves after being shot by the teams guns. That means the replicator was only stopped for a few seconds before it pulls itself back together. We don't see other replicators do this, so it's pretty safe to say that whatever material science that the asgard was using was also able to allow those replicators to do this.
That was still useful, don't get me wrong. It let the team shoot the replicators and then run away. But it did not stop them at all, what actually stopped them was the entire ship burning up in the atmosphere in an uncontrolled reentry.
As for independence day, it's more that they are a unified species with just one faction. They have no need for opsec because the would never run into it. So when humans created computers, using the alien crashed ship's technology as their base, it made it easy for the human computers to network with the aliens and introduce a virus. They didn't expect humans to have computers that were designed from the bottom up based on the aliens own computers.
The "formics" from War Queen have not invented tools. They are an intelligent eusocial species but they tend to make do with specialized castes and sheer man(bug?)power. When presented with the idea of tools they are terrefyingly quick to catch up and speedrun a few tens of thousands of years of human development in a few months (which unsettles some of the humans as they worry the bad guys are going to doom humanity by unleashing something they can't control).
A different alien race also called Formics from Enders Game. They haven't invented radio communications because they have a telepathic hive mind with no restrictions on distance or light speed. So when humans tried to communicate with them they couldn't receive any signals and didn't think to look for any kind of incoming signals.
Also because the hives function on mindless drones being ordered to act by sentient queens, they assumed all species would work like this. They met a few human ships and destroyed them with no ethical concerns because who cares about mindless drones. Later they found out that ALL humans are sentient and destroying those ships killed hundreds of sentient beings and the Formic queens were horrified at the massacre they had committed by mistake.
In the original War of the Worlds story, the Martians are said to not have discovered the wheel. In the movie version listed, they are fascinated by a bike wheel during the sneaking scene in the basement
Tbf to War of the Worlds, the book does explain why. Martian medical technology was so advanced that they had wiped out all harmful microorganisms on their own planet thousands of years ago. The martians invading earth were all of a generation that had never encountered disease before and didn't take that into consideration.
In Animorphs, the "good guy" aliens, the Andalites apparently invented computers before books. As in, physical books thay can store information on paper, and you can refresh your interface with a turn of the page.
They had hands and eyes. But came up with computers first???
They were also terrified that humans went from the Wright brothers to Apollo 11 in 60 years.
Its explained in the book that the Eridians and humans are at a relatively similar technological level. The only place we're shown where Eridians significantly outpace us is in material science and fabrication. Other than that, the Eridians hadn't even been to their moon before sending Rocky and his crew to Tau Seti. They also never invented computers, and If it's true that Eridians had no knowledge of radiation, they may not even have radio. Like the Eridians are a society capable of sending a ship with two dozen aboard to another solar system (with the help of astrophage) but for all we know they might still be communicating via telegram.
Also, I always thought the reason they never discovered radiation or relativity was fascinating. Like, when you realize it, its like "duh, of course". Eridians can't see light. They navigate entirely using sound and echolocation. Radiation from their star hardly reaches the surface of their world because of the dense gasses in the atmosphere. When would Eridians ever even have the chance to discover light exists? would they think to look for it at all? For all we know, Grace explaining light and radiation to Rocky might have been the first he heard of it. Although, since the Eridians had the ability to detect the Petrova Line and Rocky had to have some way of detecting things outside his ship, this is unlikely.
Still, its fun to imagine Grace explaining to Rocky "Yeah, there's these secret high energy particles that also sometimes behave as waves that fly around everywhere and my species has a special organ that can sense them. This organ is sensitive enough that it can pick up emissions from thousands of lightyears away" and I imagine it took a while for Rocky to believe him.
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u/Meme_Pope 28d ago
It’s not so much that the Santi didn’t “invent” lying as it is that it just doesn’t work in their society where everyone shares thoughts essentially telepathically