The aliens come from Proxima or Tau Ceti. I realize it's unlikely, but Turtledove, Niven and Philip K Dick got away with it. Aliens have no need to migrate to Earth nor they do they want to at least not en masse. Their purpose in coming to Earth was to warn us AND make sure that we heed their warning. In the setting of the story, a few years after the arrival of the alien flotilla, their PD can be overwhelmed by Earth's orbital batteries, but would survive for long enough to send crippling amounts of firepower to the surface.Patrick Degan wrote:The scenario starts out hard-SF (or at least not squishy-soft SF, anyway) but starts to go off the rails with the appearance of the aliens. Given how lack of FTL means that any real effort at star travel will most likely be a mass-migration and require centuries if not millenia in the journey depending on distance, it is not likely that such effort will be expended on simply delivering a warning message and asking for new recruits for some political movement. Assuming that such travelers would even find Earth in the first place.
I think the AI disaster with the aliens is more interesting than the usual neo-luddite group, because they have a very plausible motivation for wanting Earth to freeze AI development, and there is the possibility that their AI disaster was a lie or that they are tools of an AI.It would better to dispose of the aliens altogether and make the other faction a Neo-Luddite movement. Parallel it to the fundamentalist and ecoterrorist strains in current day Earth society and have them as a group, maybe even a large one, who believe everybody should go back to the Earth and starve, to return to the Natural Way™.
I don't want to have them think EXACTLY the same as humans, but they should have the basic Darwinian imperatives imprinted on their psyche.hongi wrote:I can understand a humanoid-shaped alien, given the unlikely circumstance that they evolved under similar environmental conditions as our ape ancestors. But a human-looking and human-thinking alien just stretches the suspension of disbelief.The aliens are almost anti-climatically similar to us, possessing a distinctly humanoid form with few substantial anatomical or mental differences. They are ruled by a small number of independent nations, usually governed by enlightened despots, an oligarchy or a very restrictive republic.