Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine you're the leader of an intelligent alien species. Like all civilizations, you have your share of pros (for example, your society is at peace and everyone's immortal) and cons (every single member of your race is Count Dracula). Now imagine that you, World President Dracula, have sent a team of brave (and entirely identical) Dracunauts from Planet Transylvania on a mission to our Solar System in a Space Coffin with no windows. (Okay, this hypothetical's flown off the rails; please picture yourself as a regular boring-ass alien now.) You, Regular Boring-Ass Alien King, have sent a UFO to Earth for a mission of scientific inquiry and friendship. What will Earth look like to you, a benevolent extraterrestrial emperor?
The answer is "A planet full of Darth Vaders hopped up on bath salts." That's because ...
6
Earth's Space Wars Are Right Around The Corner
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Let's return to the scenario in which you're the alien leader. You've emerged from hyperspace, warped in, or puckered out from some wormhole in the vicinity of Earth's orbit. But instead of preparing a team to take samples and probe a hillbilly or two, the first thing you're compelled to do is order all hands on deck to man the battle stations, because holy shit, this blue-green marble is completely surrounded by hostile space droids.
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Hopefully, they came equipped with some sort of gigantic interstellar can of Raid.
We're not talking about the accumulating space debris situation, which is rapidly getting out of hand and could easily be mistaken for the aftermath of some kind of cataclysmic robot war. It's the fact that war in space is quickly becoming a reality. And orbital conflicts won't feature plucky farmhands behind the controls of agile starfighters -- it will involve unmanned craft firing missiles and unleashing laser and/or microwave arrays on each other.
Some even more unsettling scenarios could see space ships sneaking up on satellites to spray paint over their optics systems, or physically wrestling them into submission like a T-800 left unsupervised around a naive "I just want to be friends" Johnny Five.
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Johnny Five was technically never "alive," but he's sure as shit dead now.
In a surprise twist to exactly no one, China and Russia are apparently at the forefront of "counterspace" technology. And that fancy word is simply a less terrifying way of saying that they're spending a fortune on hardware that's specifically designed with the intention of "destroying, damaging, and interfering with the enemy's reconnaissance ... and communications satellites," and to "blind and deafen the enemy." And in case you're confused, the "enemy" they're referencing is "all you guys in the Uncle Sam Fan Club."
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Cons: All that. Pros: No more talk radio.
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