Why do aliens hate us?

[Bandobras]

Wow, that's pretty original.

[Rei]

I'd vote against any idea in which the aliens are "evil".  I want them to have realistic motives, please.  

A realistic motive for genocide attempts against  humanity could, for example revolve around them truly believing that humanity is a growing threat to them -- for example, human tech research is damaging/destroying their homeworld.  Or perhaps they've done/are doing something that they have good cause to believe will make humanity want to kill them all (whether or not they're repentant for it, whether it was an accident, whether it was something bad done by a small group, or whether something bad done by their society in general that they felt was essential to continue their way of life or their species itself.  

Whatever the reason, they have to have good reason to believe "it's either us or them, and it's not going to be us!"

If they've messed up a planet and are moving on, deparately seeking a new world, please don't pull the silly Independence Day thing and have them be a race that goes around destroying planet after planet.  One time, it's an accident and a learning experience.  Multiple times, it's just stupidity.  With all the matter and dead worlds in the universe, there's no reason for such a technologically advanced species to mess up the few habitable worlds one after another.

I proposed a possible intro/backstory in the "Design" forum.

[killerdeath]

What if they think we are at a point in our eveolution that we could be a big threat to the aliens and they want to stop us from being a threat to them in the future.

[ironmonkey]

I definitely like the idea that there are factions to the aliens as well as different races within their army. Unless they live within a very strictly enforced totalitarian oligarchy there will be differing opinions of what to do with the 'new found vermin' or whatever is decided that the aliens see us as being.
This can provide for a lot of extra storyline options: if somebody is dangerously behind on research, a 'defecting' alien could come forth and give us some technology in exchange for 'sanctuary' from their own gevernment! Or perhaps the undefeated races of aliens out there can try to contact the 'defense force' (whatever we are calling them now) to try and assist us in fighting them here rather than on whatever homeworld they come from (there are many examples of this in human history, 'We'll give you money and guns if you fight the british over there instead of here in europe; all of our theory of communist border nation fighting i.e. fight them in all the countries they try to take over, but give the guns to the locals so our soldiers don't have to die)
Unless they are all in some sort of hive mind, the likelyhood that none of the invading aliens wouldn't try to do something other than kill us all,  harvest us all, and/or enslave us to work in their factories and mines (robots can't do all the work!) is shortsighted.
Genocide is silly from multiple angles, the only one that makes sense is the idea that someday the children of these oppressed peoples will try to revolt; and if they think we are truly insignificant they won't believe that until it happens (which is a great lead in to why the aliens are so easy to beat in the beginning, they are simply underestimating us while using their worst soldiers and scientist in this backwoods hellhole; maybe this assignment was a punishment for the aliens!!)
Anyway, rarely does anyone want to waste the resources involved in simply killing off all of anything... even if they truly believe we are polluting this planet into an unusable mess, they would only try to kill off enough to drive us underground, not try to kill every last specimen of alien (to them) genetics and possible research monkeys/test subjects.

Any race smart enough to get that far away from its homeworld and at the same time dumb enough to use force to achieve their goals isn't Machiavelian enough to win, but they will take a huge chunk of our resources to put them down before the big guns show up... so we need to be ready for when the real soldiers and officers show up to pound our butts!


 :twisted:

[Winter]

Yeah, umm . . . We've already worked all this stuff out. The broad-strokes plot is finished from beginning to end. BTAxis and I are working on implementing everything we can for the v2.1 version.

Regards,
Winter

[Taku]

They don't hate us per se they loved us, at least as long as we were polluting the world, it turned the place into the perfect holiday spot for them. You know acid rain, sulfur high atmosphere all that stuff and all this. They have already started to build some hotels in some nice (highly polluted) places.

And then the environmentalists came...

They really hate them, now they hunt them and torture them and well do all to make sure no environment protection takes place.

[LordHavoc]

I think the most desirable thing about Earth to them would be that it is habitable to lifeforms like themselves, unfortunately it has seemingly-hostile primitive inhabitants already that are in the way, so with their meager forces they secretly begin building underground and underwater alien bases on the planet, cloning troops and building equipment, and we only notice their scout forces initially, while their later waves of troops are still maturing in cloning tubes.

Consequently, destroying each base puts an end to a lot of unmature aliens, and we can study their cloning technology once a base is captured...  Not using it to clone humans but to modify humans to become supersoldiers, which will be absolutely necessary to fight the later waves of aliens.

Sound good?

Of course this can have a 'happy ending', where some alien colonies surrender once their commanders have mostly been defeated, and become peaceful members of earth's population.

[hajma]

They do not hate us. They use earth as a test environment for their weapons industry. Also because humans are very similar to them and some of their enemies. So basically, they do not want to destroy earth/humans immediately, but when the day comes and they will need to test _the_ultimate_weapon_ ...

[jhcook1999]

Now, I thought of alot of this before I read these messages, however after reading some of them, I merged it a bit.

The human race can be seen as both an oddity, and a threat to the alien species.  For instance, within the last couple of hundred or so years we've gone from flapping our arms and pretending to fly, to using machines to take us off of the ground, and out of the atmosphere.  Our thirst for our own destruction, and the destruction of others has given the alien race cause to kill all/most humans.  Fearing that we will soon unlock the secrets of the universe the aliens have come and destroy our civilizations once again, which explains why there are so many ruins of ancient civilizations, but no remains of the ancients (ie, why many ancient races disappeared without a trace).  The aliens both use us for experiments, and food using horrific methods and displaying them to as many as possible in an attempt to make us so afraid that we will not put up a fight.  Also by doing reasearch on us, they can discover why we learn things so much faster than they do .  As luck would have it, this time they have underestimated our abilities to adapt, learn and regrow, and have only sent small numbers to Earth giving us the opportunity to rise to the challenge and defeat the aliens.  A slim chance, but it's better than a horrific annilation.

I would like to help with making the UFOpedia work properly, I found it really disapointing to open it up and everything was blank.  And after looking at what I wrote again, it's timeline is all screwed up, but it's just my two cents.

[xarvh]

Borrowed from Asimov (i'm not that smart):

Humans are, without even knowing, host for the immature stage of a race of incorporeal interplanetary parasite, which is killing a fair amount of population of the sentient races around the galaxy/universe.
Kill the humans, the parasites won't be able to reproduce anymore.
This justifies different alien races and research on humans.

Variations are easy.

[Irinami]

Blah blah humans are terrible let's make sociological commentary blah blah no thanks. It's been done, and poorly.

I like Wh1sper's idea, personally. Short version at the very bottom:

Maybe they're actually us, from the future. Our genome experiments have allowed us to explore the depths of the universe, to brave the rigors of space travel--rigors involving forces we can only begin to comprehend right now.

Well, some of us. In fact a rather small portion of our trillions upon trillions of humans throughout the galaxies. The side-effect is that the treatments to these rigors make those explorers less and less human each time. Meanwhile the majority of humanity lives relatively unchanged, their lives enhanced by genome therapy.

Except that at some point, an error occurs. A problem of some sort; something was overlooked in the intervening centuries, maybe it was a step discarded as "irrelevant" and yet was crucial to keeping a particular balance in the species. The misshapen human space explorers return to their planets to find worlds of dead bodies. The explorers have a rather limited fertility, and they were explorers--not genetic therapists. So this tiny percentage of future-humanity gets together and develops a last-ditch plan to save humanity: They need to go back in time and stop us from developing this terrible genome therapy.

Unfortunately the journey through a black hole's event horizon or some other such psuedo-scientific explanation of how they got back in time only exacerbates their already daunting problem. They arrive around 1800, and begin reconnaisance and experimentation. Perhaps their medics and science-officers can find something in "pure humans" to revert their problems? Sadly, language and communication has changed so much that these "aliens" don't really even think on the same level as us. They're also hideous to us, and not likely to be believed. Plus, they know that if they just stop in to say "Hi, we're you, and you need to not experiment in genome therapy," we would just reply with "Hi, please stay still while we experiment on you for our genome therapy projects."

Eventually these explorers/future humans begin dying from their time journey. They invade because it's their last chance: Force a paradox that at least allows humanity to survive.

So that's it in a nutshell: They're future humans, come back to keep us from doing something that seems like a fantastic idea at the time.

[papabob]

They grew and evolve in a very very very different world than our, with different enviroment and different worries. Their society is as different with the human's one as comparing an ant colony with a panda bear.

So, why should we be able to understand their motivations? They're simply here and want to kill us (maybe not, maybe they're here for other reason and we are only collateral damages), and the unknown factor gives the terror and hysteria to the situation; and allows the doubts of the goverments (if our leaders knew for sure that it is a only-one-winner war, they didn't complaint with funds, they'll give us everything we can need)

[HCLivess]

You have fawl imagination. There is no reason for aliens to hate us. They actually love us... It was during the beginning of th cold war, I can still remember. I used to be working as a high officer in one of the naval bases near Texas... There was a deal at that time to be kept between the USA government and the aliens. The first contact was made a decade backwards, just before the WWII started. What we needed was technology to gain dominance in the economy on the wide scale. This would mean allies the upcoming European conflict. Deal with the aliens would grant us a peaceful future even if it ought to have been reached by force among the earthly nations. There was something they requested in return-DNA.

Aliens found out that any further technological advances could have been made only with the new DNA molecules, obtained from our blue world, taken through billion years of evolution. Of course they could have taken it themselves, but no technology was invented by the yet to pass through our atmosphere. It was on the communication base so far. So we exchanged. Aliens adapted our DNA during 27 years. Then they started producing those green Mutons... their "grey" project obviosly did not bring the expected fruit - a weak, fragile, vulnerable body. And it was by that time that things started to turn bad.

The CIA soon found out, that the alien advancement is moving on comparably quickly in comparison to the human experiments with the alien technologies (UFO crashes, sightings). They soon started to produce plan B. The CIA was convinced that too much of the alien advancement would leed them to intentions of mastering the Earth and slavering the human race (just an ordinary US precaution, aliens were peaceful, I had one of them even for my friend). By this time, there were already frequent visits of aliens with the altered DNA. Breathing air, quite resistant to our climates. The communication was on the high level, too.
Until 1984. It came up that a secret military project conducted by the United States and other European superpowers lost cover.

Then somebody sent missiles to destroy one of the vessels on the orbit. the order was directed by the highest officials as far as I can remember.   I was sitting in the headuarters of the CIA... Squads broke in and shot every alien in less then two minutes. You may think you understand, but we lost everything. Hope for the future and our friends. Both civilisations broke apart raging a race war. Aliens againts humans. Them vs. us...

[Irinami]

Hey, that's pretty slick! Although it makes me think of a "Aliens in 'Nam!" kinda' thing. Maybe even hippie aliens. Wouldn't that be scary!