We Will Destroy Your Planet (21 page)

To do this might require increasing the planetary mass to something like that of a neutron star or even a black hole, however, and no science as yet known could fulfil the task.

The other problem with shifting the planet slightly out of time is that the inability of anything to transition between the planet's time zone and the rest of the universe would extend to your own ships, so you would no longer be able to use it yourself, and any of your forces left there would be trapped. Nevertheless, if you simply want to get the Earth out of the way for your enemies, this would do it.

Whether you can render the Earth unusable for your enemies depends on what they might want to use it for. If they want organic resources on the surface, then a pathogen inimical to all carbon-based life should remove it nicely.

If they require the liquid water on the surface, that's a bigger deal. Heating the planet would create a more destructive cycle of weather and rain, but the water would still, overall, be there. The same would apply to extinction-level meteor bombardment.

To get rid of the Earth's water in all its forms – liquid, ice, and in the atmosphere – your best hope will be to blow up the Sun. Causing the Sun to reach the stage of its life and fusion processes in which it will expand into a red giant star will strip away the Earth's atmosphere and boil off the oceans. This will leave the planet as a sterile rock, and, if necessary, you can still mine or garrison that in order to be completely sure that no rivals will exploit your conquest.

If you have neither the technology nor the inclination to carry out such actions as moving the planet through time, or blowing up the Sun, then you will be looking at the matter of strategic area denial.

Area denial is a discipline on both strategic and tactical levels, which requires its own specialist weaponry and units. The aim of area denial is very simple – as the name implies, it means denying a particular area to others. This does not necessarily mean destroying the area. It can as easily mean making it less attractive to an enemy, or making it more trouble to gain than is worth the effort of doing so.

An area denial weapon is one designed to prevent others from entering, conquering, or acquiring a particular strategic or resource-rich environment. Obvious area denial weapons, for smaller areas on the surface, are things like land mines, or automated turret guns that fire upon anything that trips a built-in motion detector. These types of weapons are ideal for guarding limited areas such as military facilities, or landing areas – though turret guns have the problem of running through ammunition very quickly and then needing to be visited to be rearmed. As such they're actually better used as a kind of hostile alarm, more to alert your forces to respond, than simply as a defensive measure in their own right.

One simple way of making the planet less attractive to your enemies is just to get it yourself first. Your enemies will not come to Earth and try to strip it of resources if they know you have already shipped all that valuable booty back home. They will be less likely to try to moving in and colonizing if they know you are already in residence.

If you have no real interest in occupying the planet or using its resources for yourself, then the best way to make it less attractive or too much trouble to others is to make their operations impossible, due to local conditions. The second best way is to scare them off, so that they will not have the motive or willingness to approach the Earth. Rather conveniently, these two methods of discouragement can be combined with the application of a particular type of area denial weapon: Biowarfare.

Specifically, the creation and use of actual life forms as biological/area denial weapons.

Plague is the first choice for keeping a whole planet out of bounds. In essence, area denial weapons quarantine a region from approach by your enemies and rivals, or potential enemies and rivals. That word quarantine, however, can also imply cutting off a region to prevent disease from spreading into or out of it, and that's an obvious inspiration.

An area denial pathogen would of necessity be different than a pathogen designed for cleansing a smaller region of a range of native life forms. The latter type of biological agent ideally needs to be short-lived, requiring incubation in the cells of the target species to survive. Once the targeted life forms are dead, such a virus or bacterium should die out, allowing your forces to take over the cleansed area with impunity.

If, however, you want to make an area inhospitable, and tainted with a pathogen that will affect any visitors at any point over an unknown length of time, then you need a longer-lasting biological weapon. This can be in the form of bacterial or viral spores capable of returning to viability from dormancy after long periods. If you are merely denying one area on an otherwise occupied Earth – say you want to keep a particular island free of life, but with native life remaining in other locales – then such a disease spore is a reasonable option, so long as it is quick-acting, and cannot be carried by winds to inhabited areas.

To deny a whole planet to anyone else out there, however, is a different type of problem. A disease will only affect types of life that are either native to the planet it came from, or that it has been engineered to attack. Since you do not necessarily know which other visitors will try to take the Earth, you will have to engineer something that responds to chemical elements in organic form, rather than to a specific type of cells from a single world. Making a bacterium that attacks a specific form of an element means that it will not only attack extraterrestrial visitors, but even their ships and equipment.

Biological warfare involving bacteria and pathogens is one thing, but it is also worth considering the use of more complex life forms as weapons, especially with regard to the concept of area denial.

Parasitic organisms are frequently considered to be good area denial weapons. For example, you can seed the planet with a genetically engineered pupal stage, which will hibernate until disturbed by the presence – chemical spoor, body heat, pheromones, for example – of a visitor. Your pupal life form can then attack a newcomer, convert the intruder biomass into a chrysalid stage for itself, and then emerge as a life form that can produce new pupal life forms to repeat the cycle. Insect societies are a good model for this, and your full adult parasite forms can be designed with appropriate weapons and reactions – claws, fangs, venom, acid, or whatever your preference.

A lack of a human population may be suspicious to other species, perhaps even others than the one whom you are trying to prevent from taking over the Earth, especially if they have been conducting long-term reconnaissance of their own. It's also possible that you may want to eliminate human life without getting into trouble with authorities elsewhere, who may be keeping an eye on things. Therefore, if you wish to turn the Earth into a human-free deathtrap it would be prudent to make everything seem as normal as possible on the planet.

For this, you need a type of biological weapon that can pass for human. You need to infiltrate such weapons on to the planet, where they may begin to replicate and replace humans with more of themselves. The perfect example of such an organism would be the one known on Earth from John W. Campbell Jr's
Who Goes There?
, best remembered in its screen incarnation as John Carpenter's movie
The Thing.
This is the perfect biological weapon to act as both a destroyer and an area denial weapon. It exists purely to absorb, copy, and infect the cells of other life forms, replacing them with its own. A computer on screen in the film suggests that the entire population of the Earth would have been infected within 27,000 hours – about 3.08 years. Since the organism has been frozen in the ice for thousands of years and is still active, it would remain there once the Earth's indigenous life forms (all mammals at least, as it impersonates both humans and canines during the film) were extinct. This would mean no one else dare land on the Earth, and the planet would remain a quarantined plague world, useless to anyone.

Likewise, if you have an engineered weapon that simply absorbs and replicates the human form and memories, but does not need any inbuilt weapons or hostility, you need only make sure the organism is sterile, and cannot reproduce in human form or manner. Within the lifespan of the youngest human replaced, the planet would become a ghost world, no longer inhabited.

The more hostile previous type of organism, however, would be the better bet for remaining viable as a trap or deterrent. So long as it can hibernate until disturbed, the whole cycle can begin again each time someone attempts to visit the infected planet.

The greatest advantage to any form of engineered bioweapon which infects or absorbs those who come into contact with it is that every attacker or intruder who attempts to trespass within the denied area protected by such an organism will not only be prevented from doing so, but will actually add to the defences and make them stronger.

Establishing a military garrison on the planet may be necessary, if you're looking to prevent activity by other civilizations in the vicinity.

It may not in fact be necessary to conquer the Earth in order to establish a garrison there. In fact, it may not even be desirable to do so. This is one of those situations in which simply making peaceful overtures to terrestrial authorities may well achieve the result you want.

This is because, since humans are already quite preconditioned to accept the idea of hostile forces among the stars, it should be a relatively simple matter to establish that your enemies are bent on the conquest of the Earth. With careful manipulation of the collective psyche it should even be possible to persuade human forces to form the bulk of your garrison, risking their lives under your guidance so that your forces don't have to. Aside from negating the need to conquer the Earth, this also has the advantage of sparing your forces for more important duties elsewhere.

If you want to be sure of conducting your own security according to your own protocols and strictures, however, you can certainly conquer the Earth to establish a garrison. If you do, you will have to guard it against local resistance, and you will risk the chance of your rival conquerors allying themselves with the human population, who know the planet better than you do. If you follow this route, you will therefore have to choose between the potential options of using the human population as cannon-fodder or living shields and setting up your garrisons and launch sites as far from the local populace as possible, in order to avoid sabotage and resistance.

Keeping other space travellers and would-be planetary conquerors away from the Earth is something you will have to think about even if you do not know of any enemy plans to exploit the planet.

In an ideal universe, once you've conquered the Earth, you'd happily build your palaces or garrisons, and wallow in piles of whatever your idea of treasure is, while humanity worships you as gods, and live (if you're organic, and not a machine civilization) happily ever after.

Nobody ever said this is an ideal universe. If
you
are out to conquer the Earth, it must be pretty likely that there are others who will also be doing likewise. That means that other species – who hopefully will also be referring to this guide – will be viewing
you
as the hapless defenders of the planet.

It goes without saying that you don't want this chapter to fall into human hands.

You cannot rely on human detection or early warning systems or their defences. After all, they didn't manage to stop you. There are early warning systems in place to detect Near-Earth Objects, natural bodies such as asteroids and comets, which may pose a threat to the planet. These systems have allegedly detected over 90% of the regular objects that come close to Earth, but are not so good at detecting individual rogue objects passing through the system just the once. In fact, those humans who run this detection programme have been known to acknowledge that there would be only two or three minutes' warning of such a natural impactor. Obviously, the chances of detecting an incoming supraluminal object, such as a starship, are very much less than zero.

In order to detect approaching vessels, you would be best to put your detection and early warning technologies in neighbouring star systems, always assuming you have the faster than light technology to allow the detection stations to alert you on Earth to anything they detect. There won't be much point in noticing an invasion fleet passing by Proxima Centauri at several times light speed, if you won't get the message for four years.

For those wondering, the ten closest stars to Earth are Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years), Alpha Centauri A and B (4.3 light years), Barnard's Star (5.9 light years), Wolf 359 (7.7 light years, and reportedly a good spot to muster a fleet to defend Earth in the 24th Century), Lalande 21185 (8.26 light years), Sirius A and B (8.6 light years), Lutyen 726-8 A and B (8.73 light years), Ross 154 (9.94 light years), Ross 248 (10.32 light years) and Epsilon Eridani (10.5 light years), which is the closest known extra solar system with at least one planet.