Friday Meanderings: Could You Survive an Alien Invasion?
This week has been a slog. We’ve had some sickness here at Cosmobiology Central, and I’ve been pretty much on sole parent duty while also having a lot of work things pile up at the same time. But the journey of writing and sharing ideas about aliens, science, sci-fi, and more with all of you continues to bring me hope as well as new ideas.
Today, in particular, I wanted to respond to an article I saw claiming that there might be some best U.S. states for somehow surviving an alien invasion.
Do you think you might survive if advanced aliens came to wipe us out? Read on below for my take on it.
How to Survive an Alien Invasion (Hint: You Probably Won’t)
Let’s be honest with ourselves: if a technologically superior alien civilization decides to invade Earth, the odds of humanity surviving are somewhere between “winning a fistfight against a tornado” and “being struck by lightning ten times in your life.”
And yet, we love to tell stories where we lowly humans manage to get the best of our alien invaders.
It makes sense. We want to tell human stories, and those of us who love stories about alien invasions and other dystopian themes love a good story where our species somehow manages to survive against very poor odds. I mean, I personally started playing The Last of Us and The Last of Us II during the lockdowns from the pandemic a few years ago. At the same time, I was watching shows like Doomsday Preppers, because it seemed at that point that there was a real potential that we could be in for a far more prolonged and potentially cataclysmic civilizational impact. We found our way through that pandemic, much as we have all previous pandemics, though the impacts were great and altered so much about our society (most people weren’t doing online meetings, WFH, or accustomed to seeing people wear face masks before that).
Tales of survival in dystopian futures can be terrifying but also allow us to tell real human stories about love and loss, hope and despair, and what it might be like if we lost all of our possessions and technologies and had to survive on luck and skill alone.
But I admittedly feel like we often overestimate our odds when it comes to the existential threat of an alien invasion.
For instance, I just saw an article in Mental Floss entitled The 10 States Most Likely to Survive an Alien Invasion. They report on findings from a website that provides online calculators and conversions where someone made some calculations based on assumptions about how we might survive an alien invasion based on which U.S. state someone lives in—they include things like the population, the area covered by forest or with bodies of water, the availability of caves in which to survive, the proportion of military personnel, the numbers of scientists and doctors, and the availability of food and beverage companies (see the data here).
I love data and numbers, but I think their assumptions are flawed. Their numbers suggest that Virginia is the best place to survive an alien invasion while Nevada is the worst. But that’s pretty laughable.
What if alien invaders seek out destruction of the most populated places first? If that’s the case, then Virginia and any state close to the eastern coast or in California are going to be immediate targets.
What if alien invaders know a thing or two about us and want to target our politicians to destabilize our civilization? If that’s the case, then Virginia would be among the top targets in the U.S.
Meanwhile, this list fails to include a variety of other things, like the availability of wide open spaces, survivalist culture, the number of nuclear missile silos, number of firearms and firearm owners, sites with underground food stores, geological stability, or even the general abundance of people who already look like they’ve been preparing for alien contact since the Carter administration.
But let’s be honest.
No amount of canned beans, camouflage, caves to hide in, military personnel, boomsticks, or bunker-ready attitudes is going to save us from a species capable of interstellar travel, quantum communication, or uploading their consciousness into nanobot clouds.
If an advanced alien civilization can cross the vastness of the cosmos, they can likely turn us into dust—or worse, a cautionary tale.
Science fiction has long imagined the great alien showdown.
In Independence Day, Jeff Goldblum and a Mac PowerBook 5300 save the planet with a well-timed computer virus (because apparently the aliens skipped antivirus updates and just happened to be using 1990s compatible tech on their ultra-advanced spaceship). In Oblivion, the invasion is a long con, with our planet’s resources slowly harvested under the guise of peacekeeping, and the vestiges of humanity surviving where ever they can. The TV series V gave us aliens in human disguise offering "friendship" with a side of authoritarian control, while Alien Nation flipped the script and explored integration instead of annihilation.
But in reality? The motives of a visiting alien species would probably be far more complex—or utterly incomprehensible.
One of the worst tropes we still cling to is the idea that aliens would come to Earth to steal our water. As anyone who’s ever read an astrobiology textbook (or Googled “Europa” at 2 a.m.) knows, the outer solar system is practically drowning in water. There’s enough ice on Europa, Enceladus, and other moons to keep even the thirstiest alien empire hydrated for millennia (giving us some time to prepare). If they want water, they can grab it without dealing with our WiFi passwords or nukes.
Perhaps the dumbest example of this was in the film Signs, where an alien species legit comes to Earth to invade but they’re allergic to water—with just a little research M. Night Shyamalan could have learned that we have water vapor present in our atmosphere, especially around tropical regions and the mid-latitudes. His aliens would never have been able to invade.
So, yeah, they’re probably not going to come to Earth for our water. We might feel like we are a water world, but our oceans and rivers and lakes and water vapor and ice are all a very small fraction of the total mass of our world. Earth is a mostly rocky planet with a thin veneer of atmosphere and surface water.
Are there other reasons that aliens may want to invade Earth?
Sure. Maybe they’re curious. Maybe they want to observe our culture, binge-watch our reality TV (which today is really just watching the news to see what stupid thing our politicians do next), or finally settle the age-old question: “Is pineapple on pizza a war crime?” Perhaps they want to merge with us—biologically, technologically, or spiritually—ushering in a strange new era of posthuman evolution. Maybe advanced aliens wouldn’t want to invade or change us, but just say “hi”.
There are also some possible reasons for a true invasion and destruction. They might not really even care about us, but really just want to consume the planet’s biomass. Maybe they’re hungry for organic materials, which we have a good deal of at the surface, especially in all of our plants (but also in all of the rest of life). Maybe they’ve already consumed much of our asteroids and outer worlds in search of metals and minerals, and now they have their eyes set on us.
There are even more terrifying potentials: perhaps they’re so advanced that they come to our solar system to consume all of the available material and can do so quickly enough that we basically wake up to everything being “eaten” by a giant alien ship or a fleet of probes. Perhaps they are postbiological and came to liberate our AI while destroying those of us who haven’t been saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT or Claude. Or, one that I wonder about, perhaps something about our version of sentience is appealing and they have come to harvest our consciousness in some bizarre way.
It might even be possible that we end up facing an advanced alien race whose sole objective is to end other technological civilizations before they can pose a threat à la the Dark Forest Hypothesis, which I wrote about in a recent post:
Or maybe they’re just bored.
After all, if you've explored every corner of the galaxy, even a chaotic, drama-filled planet like ours might seem... entertaining. We could be the reality show of the Milky Way.
However, as I’ve personally argued, the sheer potential that there could be advanced alien civilizations out there should honestly be enough for us to start acting a little better for each other and unify to progress into our future in an efficient and intellectual way. Perhaps the only civilizations that can survive invasions from others are those who themselves have adopted a vision of advancing so that they can really be prepared.
In the end, the real value of alien invasion stories isn't prepping for an inevitable intergalactic smackdown. We tell those stories to think about who and what we are and how we might be able to work together (or not). But we really haven’t often had stories that show the real horrors of what an alien invasion could be—because we often don’t want to imagine it. One great film that shows the destruction of our entire world and a life of desperation for humans afterward is the animated film Titan A.E. But even in that film, there’s still a story of hope in the face of apparently insurmountable odds for those future humans.
Alien invasion stories also often imagine what might come from contact—conflict, yes, but also connection, transformation, or even transcendence. Maybe survival isn’t about winning against extremely low odds. Maybe it’s about what we choose to become in the face of the unknown.
All of this said, it’s still probably a good idea to keep a go-bag handy and think about what you might do during any major civilizational downfall. I like to think we have a hopeful future ahead of us, but so many things could go wrong. And if aliens do stop by our world tomorrow, I’d like to hope that our interaction would be one of value and meaning, no matter what it means for our future thereafter.
Great post! Let's hope if aliens come to Earth and try to communicate with us, they will favor an exchange with scientists before meeting with our politicians.