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From: davidl@mako.UUCP (David Levine)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers,net.tv
Subject: Re: Invasion of the Space Nazis, the final battle
Message-ID: <110@mako.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 11-May-84 13:47:16 EDT
Article-I.D.: mako.110
Posted: Fri May 11 13:47:16 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 20-May-84 00:18:49 EDT
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I'm one of those folks who just loves to come up with rational
explanations for irrational Sky-Fy, so...

Obviously, the Visitors are a high-technology people.  (Consider the
energy required to hold those motherships up...)  A reasonable
assumption is that they have been civilized for a long time, and
probably spent several hundred years between their Industrial Age and
the development of interstellar travel.  This is more than enough time
to mess up an ecology completely.

Suppose the Visitors, being exclusively carnivorous, managed to wipe
out all the non-domesticated edible species on their home planet in
that time.  After a few hundred years of inbreeding, it is possible
that the domestic species could suddenly lose viability.  This could
happen in any number of ways, but one likely problem is a plague to
which all the members of a given inbred species are susceptible (for
example, the Irish potato famine of the last century was caused by the
fact that most of the potatoes in Ireland were of the same strain, and 
all succumbed at once to a potato blight).

Now we have a planet full of civilized, spacefaring carnivores who find
their food supply in deadly peril.  Perhaps they can hold out for a
while on the remaining species of edible domestic animals, but they
know that they're in trouble.  The cure to inbred, vulnerable strains
is fresh breeding stock.

So, off they go to other worlds for more breeding stock.  However, the
chance of the new stock being able to interbreed with the native life
is remote at best (OK, sometimes you get lucky, but you can't count on
it).  Therefore, the breeding population they bring back has to be
large enough to avoid genetic degradation for as long as possible...
millions of individuals at least, possibly billions.  Those individuals
also have to be as genetically diverse as possible.

The strategy is obvious.  Large ships and many of them are sent to each
likely world.  Those ships take on native life from geographically
diverse areas to assure a genetic mix.  On civilized worlds, they
settle over cities to reduce the distance the native life must be
transported.

Why take an intelligent species?  I think it's because intelligent food
animals would require less effort to care for once they were properly
domesticated.  In our case, we simply proved too intractible and the
Visitors left quickly, to cover their losses.  Note that they did get
away with 50 motherships full of uncounted millions of frozen humans.

Why sneak about in plastic bodysuits?  I think it's just to make it
easier for them to gather as many of us as possible as easily as
possible.  After all, we don't slaughter cattle in the field and drag
them to the butcher; we make them walk to the slaughterhouse under
their own power.  Dragging a hostile native population in from the
hills is an expensive proposition, since they'll be fighting a geurilla
action on their own home territory.  If wearing an uncomfortable
bodymask and lying through your pointed teeth for a few years is the
alternative to decades of geurilla war, it starts to look attractive.

Why steal water?  This one's simple.  Water is too easy to manufacture
from common elements for it to be in short supply for a spacefaring
race.  However, if your ships require water for fusion fuel (or
cooling, or whatever) and you're already going down into a gravity well
for supplies, there's no reason not to pick up a few million gallons
while you're there.  ("John, honey, would you mind getting gas while
you're going to Earth?  The tank was three-quarters empty last night.")

However, not even I can explain the ending.  I think that "Elizardbeth"
(not original with me) reached across the universes and through time
and space to tap into the energy generated at the end of "Star Trek -
the Motionless Picture I"...

Another modern Just-So Story from

David D. Levine   (...decvax!tektronix!tekecs!davidl)      [UUCP]
                  (...tekecs!davidl.tektronix@rand-relay)  [ARPA]

(By the way, I can't resist mentioning that every time they showed the
aliens' headquarters in Los Angeles I thought of it as the "LA
convention and Visitors' bureau.")