ijuin

Landing at a sufficiently low speed so as not to damage anything is also difficult for the inexperienced flier.

More to the point, our reach has exceeded our grasp, killing-wise. Basically, our instincts are built for melee combat, where each enemy is killed in a discrete action. Such instincts don't apply as well to modern bombardment-based warfare where you push a button and unleash a bomb that annihilates a whole bunch of people at once. Our subconscious instincts are not really able to distinguish clearly between killing one enemy and killing all of them at once, which in turn makes it disturbingly easy to engage in massive overkill and collateral damage. Fire a rifle, launch a nuclear missile, it's all the same in terms of the psychological/emotional reactions of the one pulling the trigger--it does NOT take one million times as much resolve to launch a nuke that will kill a million people as to fire a bullet that will kill one person.

If catgirls are cute and shrunk girls are cute, then shrunk catgirls are cute squared!

Also, with the asking for Tedd to make it into a clone form, Elliot is implying "hey, I want to share this fun form with you too".

Oh, I was just imagining a dog having to live with removable dentures and all of the things that a human with dentures has to do as a result.

I think that people are still feeling squeezed financially (even if they have jobs, either the pay is too low to have much left over after the essential bills are paid, or there are fears of poor job security), so "shopping for its own sake" isn't so much of a thing at present except for those who really really love to do so.

The "somebody stole our key resource and we never knew that it's missing or even existed in the first place" idea was played with for Naquadah in the Stargate franchise--the aliens who had posed as gods thousands of years ago had extracted all of Earth's easy-to-reach deposits of Naquadah, so Earth scientists never knew of this element until they encountered aliens using it in the 1990s. Naquadah allows for, among other things, neutron-free nuclear fission (thus allowing the "atomic power in your pocket" dream of the 1920s-50s to be realized, and a megawatt-class reactor is man-portable). Anyway, your idea sounds like a good idea for a SF story--what if the material that is key to FTL is common in the universe, but aliens mined most of it from Earth (and maybe other Solar System bodies) before humans ever became civilized? Maybe we discover a small amount of it on some other Solar System body--just enough to figure out its secrets and outfit ONE expedition of starships to go out and search the galaxy for more . . .

Yes, and assuming that FTL is not something simple that we have merely overlooked due to our modern reliance on Relativity and Quantum-based scientific paradigms (as in "The Road Not Taken"), we can pretty much assume that any aliens that travel to us are at least a couple of centuries ahead of our current tech. Our real-life Alcubierre-White Warp Drive theory (the closest thing we have to actual FTL at present) requires that we first discover how to create gravity-like repulsion, which we as yet have no idea how to achieve unless we can find some negative-mass matter somewhere.

Of course then there's the Deviled Ham, and the Devil's Food Cake . . .

Sure, but I meant that we shouldn't declare them to be a lost cause without really trying.

I think that I read that the US government considers the minimum necessary force for a First Strike against Russia (i.e. one that degrades their air and missile bases enough to prevent any of them from launching nukes of their own) is about three thousand warheads. As for the alien biosphere thing, presumably the main reason that they might want to keep our biosphere alive for other than purely scientific/curiosity reasons would be because our life is biochemically compatible enough for exports made out of it (foods, wood, clothes, whatever) to be worthwhile. If our life is poisonous to theirs, then they would want to wipe most of it out anyway.

Perversion is in the eye of the beholder.

People who should know better and refuse to change would be represented by Rich, while those who are ignorant and confused but willing to learn would be better represented by Larry. There are a lot of both kinds in the world, but we shouldn't let the Riches' douchebaggery prevent us from trying to reach out to the Larrys.

If I recall correctly, each Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1st, which means that one striking on Memorial Day weekend would have formed within the last two weeks before the new season begins.

*starts imagining what dentures for dogs would be like and how to keep the dog from spitting them out*

The wisdom of bombardment depends on how much of the native biosphere the aliens want to keep intact. If they are fine with eradicating all of the native life, then bombs away! If, on the other hand, they want our wildlife and vegetation and livestock and just want to get rid of the humans, then an engineered plague would be a better weapon--something that can spread through the air like influenza, but against which we have no natural immunity.

There's also the matter that planets that are even marginally habitable are somewhat rare as compared to lifeless worlds that require bioforming "from scratch". For any species that likes climates at all similar to Earth's, gaining possession of our planet would probably be worth the cost that it would take to get rid of us. On the other hand, the aliens may not even want our planet and may simply want to kill us pre-emptively before we can become a threat to them.

Bayonets were great in the days of muzzle-loading firearms where a soldier had no reasonable chance to stop in the middle of a melee in order to spend ten to fifteen seconds reloading after each shot. Halberds ruled mainly in the era before firearms became standard-issue for armies. Nowadays where we have magazine-based reloading (can reload up to a few dozen shots in about five seconds), a semiautomatic handgun becomes the preferred close-range lethal weapon against any unprotected opponent.

Twenty extractions? What sort of creature was it that needed half of its teeth pulled all at once?

Yes, the problem with scythes is that the side with the sharp edge is facing towards the user, which means that your opponent has to be CLOSER to you than the blade for you to cut them. To be a practical weapon, it needs an edge on the outside as well. If you want an actual practical weapon that combines two different things, try a halberd--it's a combination battle axe and spear, lighter and faster to swing than a full axe, with the stabby potential of a spear. Halberds were favored by infantry in Europe in the days after plate armor made knights more-or-less swordproof, creating the necessity for heavier weapons.

That works if they prefer an environment that is unlivable for us (hot enough for heatstroke or contains stuff poisonous to us, or a huge difference in air pressure).

If their biochemistry is similar enough for them to eat our food, then their more-generalist microbes should likewise be able to eat us, though as HarJIT pointed out, some pathogens are so closely adapted to their preferred hosts that they can not infect anything else (for example, there are several dozen infections that are known to attack ONLY humans and no other species on Earth--and if they can not infect something that has 98% similarity to us such as gorillas, then there's no way that they can infect something that probably isn't even a mammal). As for reasons for aliens to want to dominate us, perhaps they have an ideology of Manifest Destiny, whereby they see themselves as the rightful current or future rulers of this region of space (or the whole galaxy, or the whole cosmos). They may also have a paternalistic view that they are "enlightening" us or "helping" us by taking control (similar to European attempts to Christianize and "civilize" the rest of the world), and not merely glorifying their own empire. As for killing us, we may simply disgust them (we're ugly or have some organic functions or secretions that they find repulsive), or something about our culture or religions are regarded as an abomination unto their own culture or religion (e.g. "You ritually consume the flesh and blood of the Incarnation of the Most Holy and Untouchable Supreme Being?! Monstrous!"). Alternatively, they may simply be pre-emptively eradicating us before we learn how to attack their own worlds, or they might think that Earth is a nice piece of real estate that they would like to own for themselves.

Ah yes, I tried some Crystal Pepsi a couple of months ago. It reminded me why I didn't like it back in the 90s.

The "Because he's Tedd" explanation that Elliot gave to Ellen in http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=673 probably indicates that both Elliot and Ellen are accustomed to the "Tedd likes to wear female forms" idea by this point, though Elliot couldn't understand what cooking had to do with being female precisely because he knew that gender stereotypes such as cooking mean bullcrap when talking about a person who can change between male and female bodies on demand.

Right. Just about any inorganic material and most simple organic molecules (such as hydrocarbons) can be readily acquired from a lifeless planet, moon, comet, or asteroid. It's only if you want organic stuff (or if you want the organisms themselves--e.g. if you're capable of eating the native life and want a new food supply, or maybe their hides make for nice clothing), or if you want to subjugate the local sapient race (or kill them because you don't like them), that you need to invade an inhabited world. You want metals or minerals? Go mine some asteroids. You want water? Most of the large moons of the gas giants in our solar system are covered in water ice. You want fuel? Titan has literal seas of hydrocarbons--although if you have fusion power then you probably want deuterium, which is literally the third-most-common substance in the whole freaking universe and can be extracted in parts-per-million concentrations from any source of hydrogen (i.e. gas planets or the aforementioned water ice). In short, if aliens invade, it's either because they want to steal our crops and livestock, or because they are after us humans.