Alienophobia

Fear of Aliens and Alien Invasions

The fear that people feel, who suffer from this affliction, is based on a need to be in complete control of their lives. They don’t want their current life changed or controlled in any way. The idea of an alien invasion fills them with dread.

Of course, with the number of rules and regulations in our lives, the cultural norms we’re expected to follow, the clothes we need to wear, the behaviour we need to display, and the connections with certain types of people we need to make, we really have no control over anything anywhere ever anyway. We just flit from place to place, swapping one net of standards for another, believing that we have some semblance of control. Try to control when the sun comes up, or the weather, or even the time that your train arrives, and you’ll realize how little control you really have. Not to mention that no one can yet make a light saber fly across the room and into their hand.

So, control is already lost anyway. We’d be just passing what we don’t have to someone else.

Invaded thousands of years ago

Some more esoteric texts and fringe beliefs have explored the possibility that we have had an alien invasion in the past. The series Ancient Aliens, alien channelers, and new age belief systems take this as truth.

Ancient Babylonian texts talk of our previous species being visited by a race of aliens called the Annunaki, an alien splinter group intent on taking gold and other minerals from our planet. They reengineered the human race (then homo habilis) to enable them to work better in the mines, and they subjugated us, had children with us, and then were removed from the planet by their own race, who were horrified at what this fringe group had done to the peace-loving homo habilis.

If this is true, then we’ve already been invaded and we are now the invaders, the descendants of the original invaders 500,000 years ago.

So, the invasion has already happened. Nothing more to worry about!

Original humans

(According to some, the original human species, the original custodians of planet Earth, have already advanced to the point of no longer needing to exist in this reality, and flit in and out of our dimension from time to time just for fun. If we ever saw them, we’d recognize them as sasquatch, big foot or yeti.)

As we cannot yet prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt, let’s leave that in the background and move onto the likelihood of a future alien invasion.

Is it worth getting stressed over?

Future Alien Invasions

Firstly, any aliens capable of travelling the galaxy by avoiding the speed of light limitation must be so incredibly advanced to either a) not need our planet or b) be able to invade and take over in moments. There are planets out there, thousands of times larger than ours. If they were full of trillions of aliens bent on control, and physically strong enough to withstand the higher gravity or a larger planet, of course ours would be invaded in moments.

So, if we are going to be invaded, it won’t be the fear-filled, fight-to-the-last-man or woman style alien invasion that the movies portray. It would be simply billions of ships the size of cars landing everywhere, freezing everyone in force fields and subjugating us, probably within about one hour. So, no stress, and we would then humbly greet our new overlords.

Humans wouldn’t be needed

Of course, if an alien wanted Earth and had all the materials it needed to get what it wanted, what would it need humans for? A simple and quick reengineering of the Ebola virus seeded into every cloud would wipe out the entire human race within days. Or perhaps a spray stimulating anaphylactic shock, ending the human race in hours. Or something more dramatic but slow acting like an asteroid. An alien could even easily detect life signs and send out a pulse that disrupted the electrical signals of living creatures. Then use another device to suck them all up and send them into the sun. Really, if they had wanted to do that, it would have happened a long time ago.

We’re still pretty defenseless. Anything from a major solar flare to a large mass passing by would wipe us out, and hyper-advanced aliens have an endless list of extinction events they could draw on. I think a one hour invasion would be too long.

Aliens that want to mine Earth

Why? Hyper-advanced aliens could recombine atoms to create the matter they needed. If there was a rare element that was difficult to make, and I was just looking for planets full of minerals to mine, I’d build another spherical device that was 100 times the size of the one I planned to mine, full of mining equipment, and simply get it to suck in whole planets, extract what I needed and spit out the useless dust. I wouldn’t even think about considering the life signs on the planet. Douglas Adams explored this concept in the story ‘The Pirate Planet‘ in the TV series Doctor Who. Why would you bother with an invasion? Just suck the planet into your mining system, process it, and compress what remained.

No invasion needed.

Alien Tourists

In conclusion, if you are worrying about an alien invasion, I hope these few points might help you to overcome the fear and push forward with enjoying your life. Live in the moment, and don’t get caught up in something that, if it could have happened, would have already happened. It is either highly unlikely to happen or, even if it did, be over in an hour.

Having said that, my personal belief is that any aliens planning to come to Earth will be friendly, peaceful and want to learn more about us. Much like human tourists today.