The Problem with Alien InvasionsBy Sally Morem

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”

This is how Herbert George Wells began his magnum opus of 1898, The War of the Worlds. His novel is set in a specific time and place, England in the early 20th century, the near future for Wells and his contemporaries. Wells wields his novel as an ideological weapon pointed against human ecological hubris and English imperialism, as well as an entertainment; a war story (albeit, a very odd war story told decades before the emerging genre of science fiction even had that name). He justifies the alien invasion (if that’s the right verb) by explaining that Mars had been undergoing catastrophic climate change for some time. Mars was dying, and so too, of course, were the Martians.

The secular cooling that must someday overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbour. Its physical condition is still largely a mystery, but we know now that even in its equatorial region the midday temperature barely approaches that of our coldest winter. Its air is much more attenuated than ours, its oceans have shrunk until they cover but a third of its surface, and as its slow seasons change huge snowcaps gather and melt about either pole and periodically inundate its temperate zones. That last stage of exhaustion, which to us is still incredibly remote, has become a present-day problem for the inhabitants of Mars. The immediate pressure of necessity has brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers, and hardened their hearts.

We humans have had a considerable amount of unnerving experience with invaders seeking to escape such catastrophes, even though not on a global scale. The herding peoples riding their horses on the Eurasian plains seemed to be hell-bent from time to time on attacking the great civilizations of China, the Middle East, and Europe. At that time, no one knew what drove them. Now, with the careful study of such things as tree rings and core samples, we scan the history of the waxing and waning of grasses and herds in response to global, or at least, regional warming and cooling. Generally speaking, warming brought bounty and cooling brought disaster in the forms of famine and plague. We now have very strong evidence that such a disastrous cooling took place as the Roman Empire crumbled.

As scientifically minded people in turn-of-the-century England became aware of such fluctuations, the once inexplicable acts of such people as the Mongols became quite understandable, if not acceptable in polite society. And so, the Victorians understood Wells’ story. The desperation of “the natives” made perfect sense. The Martians invade Earth because they want to survive.

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety--their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours--and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet--it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war--but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

Wells was a good enough writer and thinker to know that an invasion from Mars would have to be made by a people far superior to us in the sciences and technology. An invasion of desperate herders simply would not do. Wells name-drops Schiaparelli in his prologue. He was the real-life 19th century astronomer who introduced the notion of “canali” being visible on the surface of Mars. Percival Lowell mistranslated “canali” (channels) into “canals,” and insisted that he did indeed see canals on Mars through his telescope. The imagination of the novelist turned the imagination of the astronomers into a story so potent that radio show director Orson Welles was able to use a slightly updated and Americanized version of the story to scare millions of people into really believing the Martians up to no good in Grover’s Mill in 1938.

Unfortunately, for subsequent editions of the story, such as the 1988 TV series (a sequel to George Pal’s 1953 movie) and Spielberg’s 2005 movie, the story doesn’t bear close scrutiny. For one thing, American space probes, such as Mariner and Viking, proved that there could never have been canals, Martians, or a vast, dying civilization on that benighted planet. The Martian atmosphere turned out to be so thin that it was impossible to imagine anything other than very tough bacteria surviving below the surface there. Our space probes destroyed what was left of the plausibility of every science fiction story ever written featuring Martians—not just The War of the Worlds. And they didn’t even have to zap anyone to do so.

This is why Spielberg transformed his aliens from Martians to invaders from an unnamed star system. This is also why Spielberg used a heavily edited version of Well’s prologue at the beginning of the movie, eliminating all mention of the 19th century, Mars and Martians. Unfortunately, this transformation undermined the little that remained of the story’s fundamental structural soundness by removing the very reason we feared the invaders in the first place—we, the readers, listeners, viewers, of the various permutations of The War of the Worlds knew that the Martians were out to take what was ours because they desperately needed it. We knew that they would do anything, anything at all to take Earth and kill us all. But as far as Spielberg’s aliens are concerned…well, we have no idea what they’re really trying to accomplish, except that they’re clearly evil. Boo! Hiss!

Tom Cruise plays a divorced dad in the movie who runs for his life as a tripod erupts out from under the sidewalks of New York and zaps people

with its death ray, turning them into crumbling bits of drywall. (Spielberg, in a tip of the special effects hat to Wells, retains the classic Wellsian shape of the original Martian death-dealing machines and the death rays). Dad is forced to take his surly teenage son and his screechy young daughter on a horrifying cross-country drive, while dodging attacks by surprisingly graceful, almost octopus-like, tripods, up to his children’s grandparents’ home in Boston. At times the kids get to be almost as annoying as the aliens. At one point, in an example of the triumph of the latest in special effects, a serpentine reconnaissance probe slithers its way through a basement hideout while the family and another man attempt to make themselves as small as possible in the wreckage. The thing is beautiful and genuinely creepy.

Soon thereafter, Dad discovers to his horror that odd looking red alien plants growing in the window well are actually [shudder] living on human blood! But things get worse as his freaked-out daughter gets them captured by aliens. They wind up in baskets suspended under a tripod. Every few minutes another unfortunate human winds up getting sucked into the alien version of a food processor. The way dear old dad gets them out of that fix is simply unbelievable.

The family does make it to what’s left of Boston. The alien invasion seems to have slowed down…and…er…stopped. Dad stands next to the famous statue of the Minuteman, symbol of the defenders of American freedom during the American Revolution. It is covered by the alien plants. (A very pointed metaphor.) But the plants are desiccated. They are no longer red with blood. A tripod succumbs; its once graceful limbs collapse; its force field disabled. American soldiers are able to blast it. Spielberg retained Wells’ deux ex machina: the death of the invaders by illness brought on by the work of bacteria and viruses they had no natural immunity to.

In the end the red weed succumbed almost as quickly as it had spread. A cankering disease, due, it is believed, to the action of certain bacteria, presently seized upon it. Now by the action of natural selection, all terrestrial plants have acquired a resisting power against bacterial diseases--they never succumb without a severe struggle, but the red weed rotted like a thing already dead. The fronds became bleached, and then shriveled and brittle. They broke off at the least touch, and the waters that had stimulated their early growth carried their last vestiges out to sea.

The movie viewer is impressed, until some irreverently practical questions bubble up in the mind. The aliens buried their tripods on Earth, some characters guessed, a million years ago. (Spielberg thought it would be cool to have the tripods attack from below, instead of from the sky.) However long ago it really was, it had to have been well before any civilization grew on Earth, because the tripods lie hidden beneath every Earth city, even the most ancient. They are activated by what appears as a very odd lightning storm early in the movie. We viewers wonder why the aliens came by so long ago, buried their war weapons, and left. What was their plan? Why didn’t they do the job back then, invading when there were very few pesky humans to impede them, or none at all? Or did they need humans—that precious human blood? No character in the story even thinks to ask the question; neither did the screenwriters.

And why the need for human blood? Blood nourishes alien plants that grow everywhere, a red-stained horror of a landscape. Why would human blood nourish alien plants? Where would the aliens get all that blood? They had been indiscriminately killing off as many humans as possible—zapping their feedstock before they can become feedstock. And how practical is blood as a food supply for plants anyway? Blood is fragile. We humans are warm-blooded creatures. Our blood needs its cozy, comfortable 98.6 degree Fahrenheit environment in order to be able to transfer oxygen to every single one of our needy and deserving cells. How long would those alien plants survive a chilly New England fall evening, let alone a bone-chilling below-zero Minnesota winter day?

Since none of this makes any logical sense, the viewer concludes that everything we’ve seen is there to gross us out. No matter how well done the special effects, Spielberg is actually borrowing heavily from Fifties horror movie and schlocky sci fi tropes: Death rays zapping people, war machines rising up turning cities into rubble, blood nourishing vampirish bad guys, enslaved people being harvested, monsters in wait underwater capsizing a helpless ferry jammed with terrified people. All of it horrifies, and none of it makes any sense at all, at least as far as any really practicable alien invasion plan is concerned.

I’m convinced we science fiction fans suffer from a lot of this nonsense at least partially because of bad advice to writers from science fiction workshops. What do the instructors tell the novice writer? “Grab your readers. Make your characters suffer. Make your readers cry. That’s

how to sell stories and books.” And so, we are reduced to reading and viewing the kind of stories science fiction writer Norman Spinrad blasted in a phrase that’s unrepeatable here. Let’s just say the phrase begins with “mind.” Imagine the rest.

The problems with this movie led me to question a number of underlying assumptions made by science fiction writers in their alien invasion stories—not just the assumptions that may be driving the storytelling by Spielberg or Wells. For one thing, none of these writers seem to take economics seriously. I’m not referring to the formal academic discipline of economics—the mathematical analysis of how human beings make decisions in a money-based economy—but the due consideration of a much more basic concept: the bare-bones assessment of deciding what is easier and what is harder to undertake when one chooses to take an action.

Invading a planet is hard work. Earth’s surface covers nearly 200 million square miles. If you, as an alien invader, are unconcerned with the oceans, you still have to deal with its astonishingly huge 57 million square miles of continents and islands. Where and what do you fortify? Which trade routes do you disrupt or destroy? Which leaders do you kill or sequester? Which nations or empires do you take out first? Which ones next? What do you want “the natives” to do and how do you force them to do it? How many tripods would Spielberg’s aliens have had to bury and where in the vast wildernesses they would have encountered a million years ago? If his aliens really wanted to nail future human cities, they would have had to make some astonishingly good guesses as to the future development of human civilizations, bearing in mind the problem of anticipating future patterns of silting and erosion.

The surface of a planet lies at the bottom of a steep gravitational well. It takes Mach 22, or 17,500 miles per hour to get the Space Shuttle into low-Earth orbit. Earth’s escape velocity is 25,000 miles per hour. That’s enough to take a spaceship into another planetary orbit around the Sun. But remember, planets are also deeply embedded in star systems. Our Sun’s huge mass creates an extraordinarily deep gravitational well. The Solar System’s escape velocity is nearly 1.4 million miles per hour. Simply from the standpoint of the definition found in physics (work is force times distance), leaving a star system is an enormous amount of work.

Engineering students may amuse themselves by trying to determine the amount of work involved in moving a one million-ton spacecraft out of the gravitational well of an ordinary star system (the amount of force pushing that spaceship so that it accelerates to escape velocity), but my dimly remembered math skills are not up to the challenge. Suffice it to say that the work involved (in the everyday usage) in designing, constructing, and deploying the necessary invasion fleet (complete with crews, troops, foodstuffs, life support, and weaponry), and building up the enormous infrastructure to enable all that to happen would be indescribably difficult. No science fiction writer that I know of has given the economics involved due consideration. Would the payoff (taking over Earth) be worth all that effort? Not likely.

I can think of numerous, far easier ways for expansive alien civilizations to capture needed raw materials, water, and energy than by climbing out of gravitational wells, flying trillions of miles (with warp drive or not) and confronting frightened and angry natives deep down in their own gravitational well. Nip off some water from Saturn’s rings or the Oort cloud. Grow vast solar panels near Mercury and get ready to receive an enormous amount of energy. Build vast O’Neill space colonies with materials found in the asteroid belt. Grow your food in them. It would make life so much easier than having to deal with planets, natives, and their ornery ways. That’s economics at its most basic.

Writers of alien invasion stories (and stories about human invasions of alien planets—they’re the same thing, really) without exception fail to engage in such assessment. As a result, sharp-eyed SF readers wonder what the hell these invaders are thinking of. Are they thinking at all? Consider all the invasion stories you’ve read or seen in your life as an SF fan. After doing so, didn’t you conclude with some disgust that the aliens in question were really stupid? I’m not referring to the deliberately written as silly stories—“Mars Needs Women” or “Earth Girls Are Easy” or “Mars Attacks,” in which the Martians are not done in by bacteria, but by Slim Whitman records—I’m referring to the supposedly serious stories, such as “V” or “Independence Day” or Harry Turtledove’s WorldWar novels, in which the aliens are determined to make what is ours theirs.

In “V,” the aliens are invading so that they may drink our water and feast on us. Apparently, they didn’t realize that Saturn’s rings are loaded with ice water and are there for the taking. Nor did they realize that our biology and

theirs were almost certainly incompatible. Our bodies would likely prove to be so much non-nourishing pap to them. Presumably, they were putting Damon Knight’s cookbook to good use. In “Independence Day,” the aliens wanted to kill us all just because they hated us. There was another invasion story (I can’t remember the title, thankfully) in which aliens came to steal our electricity. Didn’t they understand the concept of an electric dynamo? And that they could build their own pretty much anywhere? One wonders how they ever figured out how to cross interstellar space.

I hate to break it to you, but your favorite writers had to make their aliens stupid in order for their invasion stories to retain some semblance of logic. Smart aliens would never invade a planet without considering the possibility of biological incompatibility…or something worse. Smart aliens would not wait. If they really wanted to take us out, they’d immediately start blasting away and not give humans any time to fight back. Smart aliens wouldn’t bother invading at all in search of water, food, or electricity. Being highly evolved, smart sapiens, they’d know how to distill water from practically anything involving oxygen and hydrogen, grow their own food, and generate their own electricity.

Writers of alien invasion stories face what I believe is an even more fundamental problem: The extreme likelihood, realized by Enrico Fermi and Frank Drake, that two contemporary technological civilizations existent in our (or any) galaxy would prove to be not even slightly equivalent in their level of mastery over any aspect of technology, let alone military technology. Writers of the traditional space opera operate under the mistaken assumption that there are several, perhaps many, civilizations out in the Final Frontier with at least roughly equivalent scientific and technological infrastructures. Space battles are ubiquitous in such imagined universes. I’ll admit that they’re lots of fun. “Launch photon torpedoes, Mr. Sulu.” “Aye, Captain.” And invasions make almost as much sense there as they did here on Earth during the development of roughly equivalent Earth-bound rival civilizations.

However much we enthusiasts may regret it, our universe is not the Man/Kzin universe, or the Battlefield: Earth universe, or the Lensmen universe, or the Star Wars universe, or even the Star Trek universe. The very existence of science fiction itself has illustrated a point that leaves a large portion of its offerings obsolete: Technological development speeds up over time. When Verne and Wells were writing their “science fantasies,”

they were responding to a deeply felt sense of this speedup among Europeans and Americans. Turn of the century essayists were rhapsodizing over the fact (true) that the 19th century had made more scientific and technological progress than all other centuries in history combined. They waxed eloquent on the marvels to come in the [insert trumpets here] 20th century. Expositions and world fairs exhibited the wonders already crafted and posted illustrations of the wonders to come. This widely shared sense of technological change was sure to have a strong impact on all the arts, including fiction writing. Science fiction was born decades before Hugo Gernsback gave the new genre its name.

And so it goes. The 20th century proved to be more wonderful (and far more terrifying) than any of those Victorian futurists ever dreamed. And the technological acceleration they noted back then continues unabated to this day. Some say the acceleration itself is now accelerating. We can state without fear of contradiction that the 20th century itself far outstripped all preceding centuries combined in technological advancement, including the 19th. That’s why the Victorian Age seems so quaint to us in the 21st. And, then there’s the fact that we’ve already achieved advances in robotics, in genetics, in communications and computation, in miniaturization, and in precision machining that earlier science fiction writers were certain would take generations or centuries to achieve, not to mention the vast proliferation of new scientific disciplines and sub-specialties unheard of in Wells’ time. Do you remember the old 23rd century original Trek flip top communicator? “Beam me up, Scotty.” It’s known as the cell phone here in the 21st.

If we plot measurements of technological exponential growth as points on a graph, there comes a time in the history of any technological civilization when growth approaches “the knee” in the curve. That’s the time when the “doubling effect” of invention and mastery’s true explosive nature reveals itself. Vast paradigm shifts in the sciences and technologies take place, no longer in centuries, but in decades, years, months, days, and unimaginably, in hours and minutes. The Singularity grows near. The implications of exponential growth as far as the race for mastery between alien civilizations are clear. A truly advanced civilization will leave latecomers, any would-be rivals, far behind in its nanotechnology dust.

Acceleration gives a new answer to the Fermi Paradox, first stated by physicist Enrico Fermi in 1950. He used straightforward logic to assume that if space-based technological civilizations got a toehold in the galaxy

they would become common. If said civilizations got into the habit of spreading, as the human variety has on Earth, then the galaxy ought to be fully inhabited. We would be living in the Star Trek universe. The paradox lies in our astonishment at their apparent absence. Where are they? We should be swamped with alien messages and alien visits. We should’ve been made a part of the Galactic Republic or Empire or League or the Culture, or at least the Federation of Planets, ages ago. We haven’t been and we aren’t. The absence of any evidence of the existence of highly advanced alien civilizations (questionable UFO reports notwithstanding) has been called The Great Silence.

Astronomer Frank Drake attempted to come up with an explanation for the Fermi Paradox in 1961 by devising a famous equation, which multiplies the number of habitable planets by the fraction of planets actually inhabited by life by the fraction of life-bearing planets inhabited by a growing technological civilization by the fraction of such civilizations existent at any given time. Depending on which numbers you plug in, you get a galaxy brimming with life or a galaxy almost devoid of life. Apparently ours is the latter. If so, either we are the first technological civilization in the history of the Milky Way--(that seems unlikely, doesn’t it?)--or, other civilizations have come and gone. Carl Sagan and others thought they destroy themselves every time they get to a certain point of development. (That seems equally unlikely. All of them?) Or, perhaps they achieve their technological singularity and transcend all limits of matter and energy that we are aware of. Perhaps they just…leave. Whatever happens to them, they are no longer available to play Space Invaders.

Or perhaps they’re on their way, but the speed of light limits them just as it limits us. Consider how determined members of a truly advanced civilization—one that has achieved its scientific and technological Singularity—could take Earth if they wanted it and were still interested in doing that sort of thing. They’d send a swarm of microscopic assemblers into orbit, let them float through the atmosphere while some fall to the surface, wait a few weeks while they ate bits of their surroundings and transformed that matter into enormous numbers of copies of themselves, and allow the doubling effect to take hold. Then they’d watch as quadrillions and quintillions of nanobots dissolve every bit of Earthly biomass (including us) and reconstruct an alien biosphere for their own use and pleasure. This story wouldn’t be very satisfying. In fact, it would be a very short one, less then a page, a vignette describing the process and the inevitable result. This

story wouldn’t qualify as a real story because there would be no human resistance to the horror, no conflict at all. Alien invasion: A done deal. The End.

What would aliens have to be like in order to commit such unbelievably evil acts? The most important evolutionary survival strategy we humans learned over hundreds of thousands of years was this: Look at your surroundings; find the human. We humans are pattern seekers for a number of good, solid, evolutionary reasons. It was very handy for our ancestors to spot lions and tigers and bears before it was too late, but finding the most important pattern in nature was mandatory for our survival. Find the human. Find out if they’re friends or enemies. Find out if they’re related to you. Find out what they know. Find out if they have vital trade goods and are willing to cut a deal. As the numbers of humans and their encounters grew (exponentially, of course), this is how civilizations began. This is how they grew. All those ancient humans seeking and finding the human. Every time we failed at this task, failing to find the human where humans really were, as the fascist and Communist tyrannies did by denying tens of millions of people their humanity, our survival was in serious doubt. If we ever achieve First Contact with real aliens, I do hope we put our pattern seeking skills to better use. And as the best science fiction stories have made clear, the best of us will seek out “the human” and will find it in them. They will be alien, but they will have the attributes of intelligence and curiosity that we associate with humans.

Various science fiction writers crafted eerily alien aliens by denying them these attributes, which produce the ability to seek and find the human. By so doing, writers hoped to create the true Alien in monstrous aliens, but wound up turning their aliens into enigmas, totally incomprehensible to science fiction readers. We wonder how these—I’d call them cardboard characters, but that would insult cardboard—aliens could have so little curiosity while surviving long enough to create planet-bound civilizations, let alone star-faring civilizations. How did they ever find the human among themselves?

As we’ve seen, the likelihood of any kind of alien visit, either hostile or benign, must now be considered remote. But, if advanced aliens actually do stumble upon our planet some day, after watching a point glow hot in broadband communications frequencies in their star sensors, one would reasonably assume that this discovery would be even more significant for them than it would be for us. After all, they would be the ones who had

been wandering through thousands of empty star systems, seeking for that which they knew not. The most noteworthy thing about Earth would not be the planet itself, even as marvelous as it is; they would’ve seen millions of them. The most noteworthy thing would be us. They would’ve found the rarest of beasts in the vast universe; they would’ve found the human. Would any reasonably sane alien civilization, after making the discovery of the eons, come in with tripods and blast away? You make the call.

A Cast of Sources:

(Listed in order of appearance)

The War of the Worlds, 1898, by H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds, 2005, by Steven Spielberg

The War of the Worlds radio drama, 1938 by Orson Welles

The War of the Worlds movie, 1953, by George Pal.

The War of the Worlds 1988 TV series (a sequel to George Pal’s movie)

Mars Needs Women 1967, by Larry Buchanan

Earth Girls Are Easy 1988, by Julien Temple

Mars Attacks 1996, by Tim Burton

V 1984 TV series by Kenneth Johnson

Independence Day 1996 by Roland Emmerich

The Worldwar and the Colonization novels by Harry Turtledove

Man/Kzin universe by Larry Niven (includes a number of novels and short stories)

Battlefield: Earth series by L. Ron Hubbard

Lensmen series by E.E. “Doc” Smith

Star Wars movies by George Lucas (there are also a number of novels)

Star Trek universe by Gene Roddenberry (a vast frontier of novels, short stories, TV series, and movies)

The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

A good description of the Fermi Paradox and the Drake equation can be found at this site: http://www.fermisparadox.com/Fermi-paradox.htm

Some Alien Invasion Stories Not Mentioned

(Listed for your enjoyment and future edification)

Friendly takeovers with bite—Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke and David Brin’s Uplift Universe novels

Alien scolds—The Day the Earth Stood Still

The enigmatic aliens, they come; they conquer; they go home; with no apparent rhyme or reason to it—The Alien Years by Robert Silverberg

Humans as fodder for a strange reproductive strategy—Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Alien lions invade and find out humans are genuinely smarter than they are, hurting their pride —Pandora's Planet by Christopher Anvil

Aliens make nasty use of kinetic weapons—Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Meant seriously, the movie turned out to be so awful it seemed like a spoof—Plan 9 from Outer Space

The title says it all—The Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein

Scary monster movie with sci fi twist—The Thing by John Carpenter

Funny monster movie with a sci fi twist—The Blob by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr

Medieval humans turn the tables on the invaders—High Crusade by Poul Anderson

The Borg conquer Earth in an alternative universe—Star Trek: First Contact. Resistance was futile until the Enterprise tweaked the timeline.

This novel was based on a short story published many years ago in which friendly humans visit the aliens’ planet and are enslaved for their trouble. Emshwiller tweaked the story by turning it into an alien invasion of Earth in her novel—The Mount by Carol Emshwiller

This isn’t really an alien invasion story, although the movie did include a nifty little starship chase. But who can pass up a chance at commenting on the benevolent Roman invaders, as in “What have the Romans ever done for us?”—Life of Brian by Monty Python

“They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.”

“And what did we get in return?”

The intended rhetorical question received unwanted answers, including aqueducts, sanitation, irrigation, roads, medicine, education, wine, and public baths (no doubt needed after the wine).

Bloody beasts, advanced civilizations!

Check out that old Monty Python routine here:http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/brian/brian-09.htm