How do Aliens Kill??

[Sonny2]

I need help for a project - I need to know all the various methods aliens use to kill people and animals (or subdue or mess with their minds) here on Planet Earth. Please spare me any gory details as I'm kinda squeamish, I just need to know alien methodologies (I know, it's hard to talk about such when there are aliens out there who are cruel and think about killing like you and I think about going fishing).

Any help at all is appreciated, and I'm most interested in aliens who come to earth on mysterious craft propelled by means we can't figure...I think I saw one the other day, kind of looked like what you'd see if you put three drumsticks together into a tripod thingy with the feet part pointing downwards.

OK, thanks in advance for any help.

[truethat]

I guess you've never watched Predator huh?

[Sonny2]

No, I'm kind of handicaped here in that I don't own a TV nor go to movies. Too squeamish. Please explain Predator...

[madurobob]

Lets just say "anal probes" and leave it at that...

[Sonny2]

OK, thanks, I think.

Now, let's go for some less squeamish methods...

[HighRiser]

I've always been a big fan of The Blob's method. Even though it came to Earth in a meteorite.

[MG1962]

Magnetic fields - turns a brain to runny eggs in seconds

[Sonny2]

Very cool. That one goes on the list. Thanks. How would one prove it was done that way, though? Do the eggy brains respond to a magnet or something, like iron filings would?

And how did the Blob do it? Kill, I mean.

[Biscuit]

kindness.

[madurobob]

So, you want a kinder and gently death?

And, bTW, what do you mean by "aliens"? Do you mean bacteria or other microbes that have hitched a ride on a piece of space debris, or something more complex?

And, while we're inventing these critters, what do they look like? Whats their back story? That motivation will help up decide how they engage indigenous populations.

[Sonny2]

Best one yet (kindness). Thanks. My style completely, I would LOVE to kill with kindness, but it hasn't worked yet, people just take advantage of me.

Hows about we have aliens that humans can see and identify with cause they're scary? I dunno about a backstory, that would help a lot to have one, though...

[truethat]

In Alien it kills by jumping on the face via facehugger and then inserting an egg in the human body host which then bursts out of their stomach killing them.

Most of the times stabbing and shooting and mangling etc.

This clip explains the details

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMMQg...eature=related

[Sonny2]

Oh man, that one reminds me too much of Darwin's waspy thingies, you know, the ones that made him become a closet athiest. But thanks.

[madurobob]

So, you have the harvesting backstory - there you either have aliens killing rampantly, but cleanly to take their prey back to be processed as food, or you have the aliens persuading their prey to go willingly under a guise such as relocation to a better world. Then, they are frozen on placed in some suspended animation until needed as food.

Then again, there is a more subtle sort of harvesting that involves plugging all the sentient beings into a central computer that generates a virtual world for them. Thn, their emotions and angst are harvested psychically

But, I still favor the "large middle finger and studying proctology" line of thought.

[Jono]

Or... it replicates other humans all while turning itself into a wide assortment of teethy, tentacly manifestations (check out "The Thing").

[madurobob]

Then, of course, there is the "destroy the planet and everything on it to make room for a galactic super highway" sort of thing. There, its really just death by massive explosion. And, rather a bit impersonal for my tastes.

ETA: and I hear the poetry sucks.

[Sonny2]

Well, I was thinking more of how they did it in Buckaroo Bonzai, this spider like thingy that grabbed onto you and that was that, kaboom and woila, dead. No gore or blood, just lots of writhing around so the imagination could kick in and provide all the details.

I like the super highway idea, it could accomodate killing lots of developers in a twist of irony.

[Gr8wight]

Originally Posted by Sonny2

I need help for a project - I need to know all the various methods aliens use to kill people and animals (or subdue or mess with their minds) here on Planet Earth. Please spare me any gory details as I'm kinda squeamish, I just need to know alien methodologies (I know, it's hard to talk about such when there are aliens out there who are cruel and think about killing like you and I think about going fishing).

Any help at all is appreciated, and I'm most interested in aliens who come to earth on mysterious craft propelled by means we can't figure...I think I saw one the other day, kind of looked like what you'd see if you put three drumsticks together into a tripod thingy with the feet part pointing downwards.

OK, thanks in advance for any help.

Maybe I'm missing the point of your question, but after several minutes of careful thought, the best answer I can come up with is, "there aren't any."

[truethat]

Originally Posted by Sonny2

Oh man, that one reminds me too much of Darwin's waspy thingies, you know, the ones that made him become a closet athiest. But thanks.

No, not sure. Waspie things sound creepy. What are they?


I see that you are looking for less violent ways, so Invasion of the Body Snatchers, once you fall asleep these "Pods" grow another version of you and suck away your life force somehow and you turn into a clone of yourself but an alien clone. No violence.

[Dinwar]

Since we don't have any aliens, we have to speculate. However, there are a number of life-forms on Earth that can help us with that.

Most obviously, there's what we do to each other. They can hit us real hard. Or stab us with something. Or shoot us with small hard things. Or with energy. They can, in short, use weapons or physical strength to kill us, just as we do to each other.

There are a lot of more subtle ways they can kill us, however. Several species of animal on Earth use electrical impulses to shock their prey. The most famous is the electric eel, but others use this trick as well. Aliens could well do the same to us. Our nerves work via electricity, after all, and shutting that off could shut US off, permanently.

They could also cause our immune systems to go haywire. Anyone with seasonal allergies or pet allergies experiences this to a small degree, and extreme allergy attacks can be fatal. Given that these aliens will almost certainly have a novel biochemistry, this is a serious posibility.

They may also expell waste products that are detrimental to us. Believe it or not, oxygen was once poison--the Oxygen Revolution was the equivalent of putting so much cyanide gas into the atmosphere that life nearly dies. Again, given that aliens likely will have a novel biochemistry it's almost certain that at least some of their waste products could be harmful, if not leathal to us. Even if they're not instantly deadly they could shut down our mitochondria, or inhibit certain enzymes necessary for DNA transcription, or any of a number of other fun things that interfear with our ability to turn inorganic stuff into us.

Then there are diseases. Not necessarily THEIR diseases (we'd be more likely to catch a disease from a grapefruit than from an alien), but things that they live with that act as germs to us. There are more bacteria cells in you than YOUR cells in you, and maintaining your bacteria is actually surprisingly necessary for health. Aliens will almost certainly be similar (bacteria are extremely simple, after all). What they consider normal, and even healthy, may in fact be detrimental to us.

Then there are accidents, like crash-landing a spaceship or weapon/engine malfunctions. Anything powerful enough to travel between stars is powerful enough to cause serious damage.

Unfortunately, there's no non-gag-enducing way to discuss any of this in any detail. We're talking about ways to end human life, which we're biologically programmed to find disgusting. The best is the electroshock method--you simply turn off and die. After that, it gets gross.

[madurobob]

Originally Posted by Sonny2

Well, I was thinking more of how they did it in Buckaroo Bonzai, this spider like thingy that grabbed onto you and that was that, kaboom and woila, dead. No gore or blood, just lots of writhing around so the imagination could kick in and provide all the details.

I like the super highway idea, it could accomodate killing lots of developers in a twist of irony.

I saw a movie a couple of decades ago where the aliens were all very hot, scantily clad females who sucked the life force out of human males... in a rather interesting way.

I mean, if aliens are gonna kill you anyway, that wouldn't be the worst way to go.

[Sonny2]

Dinwar, can I hand this project over to you?

As for the waspy thingies, surely there's someone out there who can explain better than I can, but isn't there a species of wasp that lays its eggs in the host and said eggs then hatch and eat said host alive? Bummer, dude, if you're said host.

And Madurobob, wasn't that idea lifted from an old Abbot and Costello movie, one without explicit adult content, though, but implied?

[I Ratant]

Originally Posted by truethat

No, not sure. Waspie things sound creepy. What are they?

...

.
Ichneumon wasps, Tarantula Hawk wasps.. paralyze living caterpillars, then insert their eggs. The eggs hatch, and the larva eat their way out of the living caterpillar. Which never becomes a beautiful butterfly.
The lord works in mysterious ways.

[Hecubas]

Well for one thing, they need to be discreet with this business. Take the recent unfortunate highway accident in Montana for example. I suspect when they finished probing their victim, they suited him up in a bigfoot costume and beamed him onto the road as a car approached. Not only did they prevent the man from ever speaking on late night talk radio of his experience on-board the alien craft, they created a diversion in the form of additional conspiracy for the bigfoot hunters.

[Sonny2]

The lord works in mysterious ways.

Amen, Ratant, as do aliens. Which Hecubas proves in the post above.

[madurobob]

Originally Posted by Sonny2

Dinwar, can I hand this project over to you?

As for the waspy thingies, surely there's someone out there who can explain better than I can, but isn't there a species of wasp that lays its eggs in the host and said eggs then hatch and eat said host alive? Bummer, dude, if you're said host.

Thats common for a several types of wasps. Here in NC we have Mud Daubers that catch spiders for the host. They sting them to paralyze, lay an egg on them, then pack them in a mud nest for the larvae to feed on. There are smaller wasps that lay their eggs on caterpillars with similar results.

This is exactly the same idea behind the Alien movies.

[AvalonXQ]

In They Live, the aliens kill us gradually by stealing our world's resources and destroying our environment.

[Sonny2]

So, Avalon, that means we are all aliens??? Dang, that's a new twist in things.

[joesixpack]

I thought they used dis-integrator rays. When did that stop? Then there was that one Star Trek episode where they turned people into styrofoam dodecahedrans.

[Dinwar]

Originally Posted by Sonny2

Dinwar, can I hand this project over to you?

Sorry. Too much on my plate already.

Quote:

As for the waspy thingies, surely there's someone out there who can explain better than I can, but isn't there a species of wasp that lays its eggs in the host and said eggs then hatch and eat said host alive? Bummer, dude, if you're said host.

You don't want the more disgusting things, so I avoided that whole suite of issues. There are parasites (worms, fungus, etc) that take over the brains of the hosts. Typically these are ants, though there's been some speculation that one worm can do the same (to a lesser extent) to humans. That's why pregnant women aren't supposed to clean cat litter boxes. If the alien consisted of a mold that either was intelligent or became intelligent when it infected a sentient being that'd be a way for aliens to kill us.

There are also parasites that infect crabs. When males are infected, they gain female secondary sexual characteristics (the tail gets wider, for example) and lose their gonads. The females become basically constantly pregnant, and each offspring is infested with this parasite--and since they're clones, they're all female. It's not exactly killing humans, but it'd have some pretty profound impacts. Some populations of those crabs have 95% or greater infestation rates--meaning that whole species consist of nearly nothing but infected females.

Originally Posted by I Ratant

Ichneumon wasps, Tarantula Hawk wasps.. paralyze living caterpillars, then insert their eggs. The eggs hatch, and the larva eat their way out of the living caterpillar.

"Engineers of Ringworld" talks about an alien that reproduces that way, called Puppetiers.

[Sonny2]

Ahhh, dis-integrator rays, we have a winner! I like that one, no gore and yet poof, gone, just like when you spontaneously combust, eh?

Too bad, Dinwar, I had my hopes up. You would've added a lot to things with your vast knowledge of ways to destroy other living creatures.

[The Fallen Serpent]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

In They Live, the aliens kill us gradually by stealing our world's resources and destroying our environment.

You, you're okay. This one: real ****in' ugly.

[truethat]

Oh I know those wasps I just didn't know Darwin had such a response.

[Sonny2]

Well, I didn't know him personally to verify that (obviously), but that's the word in the geology circles, which I sometimes frequent.

And Gr8wight, let's just hypothesize here for a bit and say there are. How would they kill you? Ever thought about it (bet you haven't)?

[Kilaak Kommander]

In Japan the aliens kill by sending giant monsters to do battle with the Earth monsters and/or large humanoids in shiny suits. It is not known why this doesn't happen in other parts of the Earth.

[Sledge]

Heat Ray and Black Smoke. Heat Ray is self-explanatory, the Black Smoke is a heavier-than-air poisonous substance fatal to humans.

[I Ratant]

Originally Posted by AvalonXQ

In They Live, the aliens kill us gradually by stealing our world's resources and destroying our environment.

.
And their name shall be ...Reptilican!

[MG1962]

Originally Posted by joesixpack

I thought they used dis-integrator rays. When did that stop? Then there was that one Star Trek episode where they turned people into styrofoam dodecahedrans.

EPA regulations

[I Ratant]

It's all in the communication.. notice how the mouths move, but the words don't fit the mouths in those documentaries from Japan.
When the mouths and the words coincide, bye-bye alien hordes!

[MG1962]

Originally Posted by Kilaak Kommander

In Japan the aliens kill by sending giant monsters to do battle with the Earth monsters and/or large humanoids in shiny suits. It is not known why this doesn't happen in other parts of the Earth.

It does

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla:_Final_Wars