The Aliens That Failed at Life

The other day I went to the local movie theater and saw the new movie Battle Los Angeles.  It was a really great movie, and really depicted the guts, bravado, and chutzpah of our nation's soldiers.  There is just one little thing I need to criticize, however.

The aliens in the movie absolutely fail at life.  Before you read any further, be warned that this will contain spoilers.

I can soundly make this argument based on several reasons:

1. The aliens ignored the first rule of planetary invasion: analyze the target before commencing the attack.  They  had the ability to detect and trace our radio signals, for crying out loud.  They should have taken some time to sit back and study the history of our race, specifically that of to what level of technology we have, what degree of adaptability is inherent in our species, and how we react to foreign invaders.  Now, of course they probably just sent in a small task force ahead of the entire galactic armada to study how we would react to a direct hostile attack, but there are obviously better ways of performing this analysis without the waste of so many resources.  They made the dire mistake of underestimating humans.

2.  The aliens entire air support was completely composed of drones.  Big mistake.  All the humans had to do was destroy a command center to completely disable the air drones in that region (and that's exactly what they did).  

Ya, kinda like that.

Having unmanned aircraft like this can only possibly have one advantage: cannon fodder.  They can be used to scout unexplored areas, they can be sent in as distractions to run down the opponent's ammo and resources, and they can even be used to intercept missiles.  Basically, good only for distraction and defense.  Not at all good for the brunt offensive, such as the aliens were doing in the movie.  What they should have done was have the offensive portion of their air support consist of manned aircraft, having intelligence and on the spot tactics in each individual ship, while the drones would be used for what they're supposed to be used for.

At least the aliens were still living, which brings us to reason number 3 for why the aliens fail at life.

3. The ground troops were, thankfully, not drones.  However, they were oddly susceptible to our own full metal jacket rounds and explosives.  They had this awesome metalloid armor that, for some strange reason, could be punctured quite easily.  So let's think about this for a minute.  This sentient race, originating probably millions upon millions of light years away, have developed the technology to travel through space and time, through the void, in order to invade our own little blue planet, and to have awesome and superior weaponry, and yet they weren't able to develop armor that could render primitive weapons such as the ones we have useless?  Are the aliens unable to adapt properly, or have they only encountered other sentient races inferior and far more primitive than our own?  On top of this, the technology that the aliens implemented was faulty.  One of the weapons they used was this big cannon manned by one alien that charged up and fired several homing missiles at once.  It was easily transported because its construction consisted of giant legs that allowed it to be moved over many types of terrain.  What makes it faulty, however, is the fact that our bullets were able to penetrate the machine and take out one of the joints on one of the legs, making it fall over.  Sure, the aliens quickly repaired the thing, but this should never have happened in the first place.  The list goes on and on, but I don't have much space.  I'll let you figure the rest out for yourself.

4. Why were the aliens relying on ground troops in the first place?  Seriously, they were bent on destroying any and all resistance, and they only attacked the planet for one apparent reason (which we will get to later).  Since they weren't concerned about preserving the ecosystem of the planet, they could have saved a lot of time and resources by commencing a planetary bombardment from the earth's atmosphere.  They need not destroy the planet, for that would just be counter productive, but they only had to bombard the land masses in order to eliminate any and all life on the surface.

5.  Possibly the biggest reason that the aliens fail at life is that they attacked Earth in the first place.  What was their reason for doing this?  Water.  They need water in its liquid form in order to sustain life and run their machinery.  As if it's not available anywhere else in the galaxy.  Take for example a water giant.  These water-worlds can have oceans that are hundreds of times bigger than that of the earth's and about 10 times deeper.  One can't forget about Europa, Jupiter's icy moon.  The aliens have the technology to hurl massive fireballs at unsuspecting races, you'd think they'd have the ability to melt water in its solid state.  There is also the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of ice bodies just outside of Neptune's orbit.  Most of the solar system's water and organic compounds are located in this area.

Again, why did they choose Earth?  Is it because it's a nice little resort planet?  Or are the aliens just sadistic jerks who enjoy playing the bully on the anthill with the magnifying glass?  Either way, they obviously can't stack up to the might of their buddies from ID4.

The look of shame in its eyes is just so painful.

6. The aliens in Battle Los Angeles were just way too easy for us to beat (it took a staff sergeant and a veterinarian about 5 minutes to dissect a specimen and figure out how to kill them).  Sure, we took a good beating from them, but it lasted only for so long.  Their physical anatomy didn't make much sense either, but I'm not going to go into details there.  Also, they apparently weren't very adaptable over long terms, otherwise they would have developed their technology better.

Despite all this being said, Battle Los Angeles was a great action movie nonetheless, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  However, I think it would have been more appropriate if LA's aggressors were a foreign country rather than aliens, as far as defeatability goes.

New Discovery In Health Science

I was sitting on my couch just watching commercials, because that's all that real Americans do, right?  They watch commercials and pointless reality shows.  But I regress.

Anyway, a very interesting commercial came on.  I'm pretty sure you've all heard of it, but it's the all-amazing, apparently proven miracle drug known as Lipozene.

Calling you fat since 2005.

It seemed perfectly normal for a Lipozene commercial at first, calling everybody fat and blaming it on our glycemic indexes and what not, with a pencil thin woman providing information and random people who somehow lost weight by taking in 1500 mg of glucosamine three times a day.  That was, until they started talking about the pill itself. I quote this directly from the commercial: "Scientists have discovered a capsule..."

Hold on for a daggum minute!  You're meaning to tell me that this magical diet pill, apparently used by the ancient Mayans (which explains how they were so thin), has been sitting in a crumbling, booby-trap laden temple on some remote island in the middle of nowhere just waiting to be discovered by our swashbuckling health scientists with their overbearing chutzpah?

Sorry, archaeology majors, I'm afraid it's time to switch your profession choice.  Health science is the new cool, and the scientists themselves can hold off angry tribal men better than our old pal.

Don't look so upset, Indie.  It was bound to happen someday.

Well folks, if anything proves that Lipozene is a miracle drug, this is it.

Better than a golden idol could ever hope to be.

Earth's Magnetic Field

One day, out of sheer curiosity, I opened up the God-sent, CPU hogging, massive program known affectionately as Google Earth.  I started randomly exploring places, you know, such as Area 51 and the like, but, after engaging in a nice conversation with a friend of mine, I got bored with it and, just like everyone else, started spinning the earth around as fast as I could.  Then I discovered something truly amazing:

There was a strange circle of gray rectangles in the exact center of Antarctica.

Signs of intelligent life?  On this planet?  Absurd.

My curiosity sparked, I decided to do a little research.  After hours of random typing and clicking on Google (Bing sucks, just face it), something totally unrelated to my search topic happened to catch my eye.  It was an ad in bold lettering titled "Eskimos Originally From Antarctica?"  I had no choice but to click it.  What I would find would haunt my already disturbing dreams and would bring about an almost religious revelation.

Basically, the article stated that way back in the day when Earth was Pangaea, there was a tribe of Eskimos that lived in what we now call Antarctica.  There are fossil records that prove this.  I'm not going to say what these records are or where they're at, because you are probably the typical American and will just take my word for stuff.  So believe it.  I'm telling you the complete truth.

Anyhoo, tests were conducted at the University of Phoenix that proved that, during Pangaea, tribes of Eskimos actually did migrate throughout the massive continent, and laid the foundations for the people spread in the various locations after Pangaea split up, such as the Mesopotamians and the Aztecs.  Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So right now you might be asking, "What does this have to do with Earth's Magnetic Field?"  Well, put down the Mountain Dew and wipe off those cheesy fingers because what I'm about to tell you is something you need to brace your self for.  No, not embrace.  Okay, ready?

As we all know, Earth's magnetic field protects us from cosmic radiation.  If it weren't for this invisible force shield, we would all be fried as if Picard had shot us with his phazer on maximum setting.  However, Earth did not always have this nice protective force field around us.  Now before you start blaming the aliens you must first know that the Eskimos were immune to this radiation from the cosmos.  However, vegetation wasn't so great, and food supplies were scarce for the people, save for the few and far cannibalistic tribes, thus explaining the migration across Pangaea.  Oh, by the way, this was all proven true according to studies conducted by NASA.  Furthermore, because the Eskimos were such geniuses back in the day, they realized that they could boost vegetative production and thus establish an entire ecosystem by somehow reducing or completely stopping the flow of radiation into Earth's atmosphere.  How did they do this?  Well, underneath the crusts of the earth they discovered massive blocks of magnetic ore.  They took half of them to one side of the planet, and the other half to the other side.  From there, they constructed perfect circles of the magnets.  At one side of the planet, they built it so that only the "north" side of the magnet faced inward (of the circle, that is), and on the other was just the opposite.  This created the nice magnetic field we know and love today, and established our polar "North" and "South".

As one can clearly see, it's a highly sophisticated structure of blocks slapped on top of each other, similar to your little brother's legos.

So, what happened to our resistance to radiation?  According to the principles of Lamarckism, after years of really having no need for radiation resistance, we simply lost the ability when the gland that provided that protection shrank.  What was this magical gland?  The pineal gland.  That's right.  I found this information from a credible scientifical website. 

The blocks were originally put together similarly like a large building, with layers reaching miles deep into the crust.  Constant winds and the tendency of the planet to be ever-changing have uncovered the top layer in Antarctica.  As for the north pole, the crust the blocks were buried under were flooded over, but both structures are still fully functional.