Doomsday: 10 Ways the World Will End (2016) s01e09 Episode Script
Alien Invasion
Across the world, a deadly attack unfolds.
- This is it, this is the apocalypse.
This is fire and brimstone and cross your fingers.
It's a fight for survival against an alien invasion.
- You look up.
You see, perhaps, what look like meteors or fireballs in the night sky.
They strike with more powerful weapons than we've ever seen, from energy beams to biological warfare.
- Our entire body would not feel like it was part of us any longer.
We would begin attacking anything that got near us.
- Panic, complete panic.
People are scrambling for their lives.
- Billions of human lives have ended.
Will you be ready when Doomsday strikes? Can any of us survive? There are over 100 billion planets in our galaxy.
Most scientists believe there must be alien life out there, and some may be more technologically advanced than us.
What if these aliens came to Earth, and they didn't come in peace? - All of a sudden the sky above their heads lights up with meteors, meteors raining down everywhere.
- Society would begin almost immediately to break down.
- We will not be just fighting an alien invasion from the skies, but we will be fighting to survive against other humans that are looting, panicking, freaking out.
At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officers of the Joint Space Operations Center monitor the skies.
Their job is to detect and track all artificial objects in Earth's orbit.
Although run by the U.
S.
military, it's staffed by an international team of Americans, Brits, Canadians, and Australians.
- You're monitoring all the satellites above.
You're monitoring all the aircraft.
You're monitoring the possibility of enemy missiles coming in.
The instruments detect a large object approaching Earth.
It's as far away as the moon, and it's moving in an unusual way.
- Deep sky observations are done every day in low Earth orbit.
We have radar that tracks all of the trash that is surrounding Earth, whether it's satellites, a bolt coming off an Apollo capsule.
We know where stuff is.
We know where our probes are.
Something completely anomalous will immediately raise red flags.
It's not a comet.
It's not an asteroid.
Officials suspect something far more extraordinary.
- There's absolutely a scientific consensus that the universe is so large, statistically there has to be intelligent life out there somewhere.
Just because we haven't found it yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
We know something is out there.
- To deny that there would be any other intelligent life out there in the vastness of eternity, I think, is a little bit naive.
There's got to be somebody out there.
Although it seems like a plot out of a science fiction film, governments worldwide consider the threat of alien invasion a possibility, and some have a plan of action in place.
- In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, it's easy to conceive that there could be civilizations out there with a billion-year head start on us.
With my 21 years at the Ministry of Defense, I've clearly gained an insight into how we would fight an alien invasion.
I know full well that there are, of course, deeply classified projects, black projects, classified weapons programs that are not yet public knowledge.
- Members of Congress, I have the The United States Capitol Building, 9:00 p.
m.
- The President of the United States.
The president gives the annual.
State of the Union address.
It's the optimal time for an attack on the most powerful nation on Earth.
- On the night of the State of the Union Address you would have the U.
S.
President, U.
S.
Vice President, all members of the House of Representatives, all senators present under one roof at one time.
- So with that, you would get a very large portion of the United States' political leadership, which would be, from the extraterrestrials' standpoint, a fairly good starting point for taking the United States military offline.
It does two things.
One, it affects our decision-making, and two, it sends a very powerful statement that whoever, whatever it is that's attacking us, they're not here to play.
In a surprise attack, the space object unleashes dozens of smaller craft into Earth's atmosphere.
- An alien attack on the planet could come in the form of this force that can kind of hover above us and strike with pinpoint accuracy against targets that make sense.
- They would want to take out our most advanced militaries, and probably the most advanced military around the world is that of the United States.
And to take out our military, you have to take out the leadership, because without the leadership, in the White House in Washington, then the military really doesn't have direction.
One alien craft settles over Washington, D.
C.
While others take position over London, Moscow, and other world capitals.
Just as the craft are about to strike, the aliens start knocking out our communications satellites hovering in space.
The goal is to cripple the military's ability to respond.
- The first thing, they would get rid of our satellites so that we get completely confused.
- They could use what we call ASAT, an anti-satellite weapon, which is something as simple as a rock or a bullet.
That could be very effective in space.
- If you disrupt communication, you disrupt the ability to react, and if they can't see where you're coming form, well, then it's easier to go in.
The Space Operations Center at Vandenberg, along with other key U.
S.
military command centers, are now helpless.
- All of a sudden your screens go dark.
All of a sudden you have no information.
- They would blind us by knocking out our satellites, GPS, telecommunications.
Now the alien air war is unleashed.
- This may take the form of laser weapons, directed energy weapons, and others that we can only speculate about.
Perhaps some things we can't even guess at.
The Capitol and most of central Washington are vaporized, replaced by a crater over a half-mile deep.
More than 1/3 of the nearly 700,000 residents in Washington, D.
C.
are killed in the initial onslaught, and the entire upper echelon of the U.
S.
government is eliminated in a blinding flash.
- This would have the effect of decapitating the leadership of the United States.
You'd take out the president, the cabinet, the joint chiefs, the Supreme Court, a large part of Congress.
- To take out that building, you will be taking away all of the elected officials who can make decisions and lead the country in a time of crisis.
Coordinated attacks Centered on important world capitals simultaneously strike around the globe.
- You take out the Kremlin, and then you take out London, and then you take out Beijing, and you take out all of these cities, simultaneously.
All of that order that civilization has struggled for for thousands of years is wiped away as if it never existed.
- Most societies have the same vulnerabilities when it comes to leadership.
There's a comparatively small group, and if you take them out, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Moments later, a new wave of the assault begins.
Thousands of projectiles enter Earth's atmosphere and race towards the surface.
What are they? And can any of us survive this alien attack? If aliens attacked our planet could we survive? It's been ten minutes since an unidentified object from space unleashed a devastating assault on humanity.
But while government structures from the White House to the Kremlin have been wiped out, it's happened so quickly that in some places, people don't even realize an attack has begun.
Outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a crowd fills the seats of the local stadium.
- So here we are, sitting in the stands.
Everybody's focused on the field down blow.
The lights are brilliant as they're playing football across the field, back and forth, and then all of a sudden the sky above their heads lights up.
- You look up.
You see something's coming into the atmosphere.
Looks as if it's burning up.
You just think, "Oh, a shooting star," and you make a wish.
But these are no meteors.
1,000 feet above the stadium they stop in mid-air, burst open, and a black rain erupts down towards the crowd below.
- One very efficient way to attack a civilization like ours is with a biological weapon, something that could infect a few people around the world and then spread from person to person.
- Oh, get it off! - Get it off! National security experts warn that just one craft spraying 200 pounds of a biological agent over a heavily-populated area could kill 3 million people.
- It would make the most sense for them to do so against the most heavily-populated areas first.
You have a concentration of what you're attempting to get rid of, and that is humankind.
People sprayed by the black rain have no idea that it's a biological ticking time bomb, gruesomely engineered to spread death around the planet.
Meanwhile, the aliens continue to attack our infrastructure.
Having already destroyed our satellites, they set their sights on the most critical form of communications for the masses, the Internet.
At 60 Hudson Street sits an unassuming building, but its walls conceal a vast network of servers and cables.
More than 100 telecommunication companies run their networks through this major hub.
And each one is critical for the operation of the Internet and global communications.
- Those digital hubs are really the heart of the Internet, and the Internet is not just something that we use for posting and disseminating funny cat videos.
They're actually a critical and essential thing that we use on a daily basis that not just for passive and silly purposes but for incredibly important purposes.
- If the extraterrestrial attack is able to take out the Internet, our economy and our basic infrastructure would fail.
- Society is really, I think, held together by a very vulnerable, interwoven web of key points, and you know, if you take down a few of those critical hubs, the whole thing comes crashing down.
- Please help me.
Please, I'm begging you.
Please, please! Just one hour after the initial attack Global communications are completely destroyed.
In cities everywhere, terrified people, many covered by the mysterious black rain, are cut off from any information about what's happening.
- It would be so disorienting for people and so scary for people that it would be complete chaos.
- Oh, my - Open the door, please! - This is the apocalypse.
This is fire and brimstone and, you know, cross your fingers that you make it through to the other end of this.
- Stop it! The attack has been so well orchestrated that it seems the aliens knew exactly how best to strike us.
But how would an alien civilization acquire such vital intelligence? The answer may simply be that we gave it to them.
It's been 12 hours since a devastating alien attack force began a worldwide siege on Planet Earth.
Communications have been annihilated.
Major military installations have been vaporized, and millions of people are already dead.
It's a clear and coordinated strike against the people of Earth.
But how did they find us? - Well, the fact that we are here is obvious to the aliens because we've been broadcasting our existence into outer space for the last 50 years.
Since the dawn of broadcasting in the 1920s, radio waves have left our planet at the speed of light.
Today, they create a sphere approximately 110 light years around Earth, literally trillions of miles.
Any alien intelligence within that boundary could easily detect Earth and the life forms that inhabit it.
Scientists have also broadcast detailed messages into space intentionally, hoping that someone out there is listening.
- Are we nuts? I mean, honestly, if you are lost in a jungle and you don't know what's out there, are you going to kind of go, "Hello, hello, here I am.
Predators, come get me," you know? You won't, right? I mean, you'd be quiet because you don't know what's out there.
In 1977, NASA sent out a golden disc on the Voyager I and II spacecraft.
It provided a visual look into who and what humanity was all about.
- We sent beautiful images of the Earth.
We also sent music.
- Hello from the children of Planet Earth.
- And we also sent a lot of greetings of "Hello" - In all these different languages.
- And they came up with this golden disc that contained a map, and it gave you the location of the Planet Earth.
If hostile aliens found that golden disc, they could easily journey into our corner of the cosmos for a closer look at Planet Earth.
- So if they come sufficiently close that they can, for example, start intercepting satellite communications, they could perhaps tap into the Internet.
- They will also be able to learn everything that they need to know about where our military is, what it's armed with, where our centers of government are located.
- It's all there.
We're giving away our best secrets.
We are telling anyone who taps into that exactly where our vulnerabilities are.
Soccer fans in Argentina are among the hundreds of thousands around the world falling victim to a strange affliction Carried by a black fluid that rained from the sky.
This is biological war Specially engineered to inflict maximum damage.
- If they were going to engineer something that would kill us that well, it would have to be something that's based at least in part on what we have here on Earth.
It could be engineered using their technology, but it has to affect us as residents of Earth.
It has to be in some way customized for us.
- Looking down at the pantry of what the aliens would have to choose from, they would think, "Would it be this virus, or this bacteria, "or even the Cordyceps fungi? Would that do the job for us?" And they may take a look at it, see how easily it would spread, how quickly it would work, and they would say, "This is the one we can use.
" Cordyceps is a fungus that infects insects like ants.
When the time comes to reproduce, it seizes control of the host's brain, forcing the insect to climb to a high position on a plant or tree.
- Now, I know this sounds like a zombie movie, but it's true.
This is what it does to ants.
As it takes over the ant and begins growing inside, it makes the ant go crazy.
It runs around, bumps into things, and then it climbs up on a leaf and locks its legs on the leaf, and it can't move.
There, it murders the host, and large masses emerge from the head and body.
They explode, spreading spores from this high position out across the forest to infect as many new victims as possible.
Aliens have transformed the Cordyceps fungi, raining from the sky, into a human parasitic disease with one purpose: the annihilation of humanity.
From Argentina to New York and across the world, anybody infected feels an uncontrollable urge to climb.
- Our entire body would not feel like it was part of us any longer.
It was fighting against us.
Our minds would not be able to focus.
We would see threats around us everywhere.
We would begin attacking anything that got near us.
And then suddenly our bodies would freeze up, and they would lock in a death lock.
Then, just as it does with ants and other insects, the Cordyceps fungi begins to reproduce.
- Slowly these clubs of material begin growing out of our heads, out of our chests, out of our backs.
It would be grotesque.
And then as we died, shells of humans would lay on the ground, and the fungi would waft through the air, the spores, looking for more humans to breathe in and to start all over again.
Within hours, around the world, the air fills with deadly spores.
- The worst-case scenarios for a biological weapon are just devastating.
They could kill almost everybody, maybe even every single person across the entire planet.
As the Cordyceps fungi spreads its fatal effects on human hosts Mass panic erupts in the streets.
At the 2,400-bed.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, the situation is desperate.
- I've been here for an hour and my head is bleeding.
- Seriously? - Our medical response infrastructure has limits, and those limits are taxed with things like major tornado outbreaks or hurricanes or major earthquakes.
And so certainly if something on that scale is going on the worldwide, yeah, we're gonna overwhelm our medical system.
- If this is something that is alien-based or alien-engineered, they might not even know how to deal with it.
From a doctor's side, they're becoming infected themselves.
This is ugly.
As more and more of humanity succumbs to the biological attack, those who have been able to avoid exposure have only one choice if they are to survive: fight back.
It's been one week since a vicious alien attack has rocked Planet Earth.
Thousands of cities have been destroyed, and millions of lives have already been lost.
A deadly biological agent rained onto major cities is spreading.
For those left alive it is a battle to survive.
And as a world leader once famously predicted, an alien attack would unite mankind.
- I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
- Humanity as an organized, civilized structure would collapse in the opening week of an invasion.
However, we will regroup.
That's the power and spirit of humanity, that we will fight back for our common interest, 'cause we're fighting now for the homeland.
- Ironically, the same thing that could cause the greatest chaos in our history could also be the most unifying event in our history.
Major military bases and capital cities are in ruins.
But around the world, surviving units are doing what they can.
- Small groups of the military have endured and are trying to fight back, but it's it's pockets here and there.
We would hit them with anything and everything that had survived.
To defeat the aliens, there is only one option.
- Assuming that our nuclear capability has survived, we would launch an attack with that.
- United States Navy operates submarines that are capable of firing a Trident II missile, which is a nuclear weapon, and those submarines, if they're out to sea at the time of this attack, they might therefore be able to continue operating, and they might therefore be able to launch.
- Lieutenant.
- Aye, Captain? - Load tubes one and two.
- Aye, Captain, load tubes one and two.
Load tube one and two.
Tubes one and two loaded.
Maintaining depth at 100 feet.
- Maintain.
- Holding.
- We have firing solution.
- Lieutenant.
- Aye, Captain? - Fire tubes one and two.
- Aye, Captain.
Fire tubes one and two.
- The second that they launch, this alien intelligence will be able to determine an exact location and launch some sort of counterstrike against them.
So at best, we might get off one broadside of a few nukes, and then it's all over.
- If humanity was attacked by an extraterrestrial civilization, I frankly think we would have little if any chance against them.
Any civilization with the technology to reach Earth Viable interstellar travel When we can just about only limp out of the solar system with a couple of unmanned probes, that civilization is clearly going to be orders of magnitude above and beyond our own in terms of their science, their technology, and their weaponry.
As mankind struggles and fails to find anything to counter-attack the aliens, there is another enemy lurking in the shadows.
Could mankind survive an alien invasion? One month into a catastrophic and deadly attack, the human race faces mass devastation.
Cities are in ruins.
The military is defeated.
And a grotesque biological weapon continues to spread outwards from major cities.
The world's population of 7 billion is down to less than a million survivors, and they face a harrowing future.
- We're going to have major sanitation issues, dealing with all of the dead bodies, because a very large number of people will have died as a result of malnutrition.
- Things like water treatment systems, if they're not back online, you're gonna have real contamination problems.
People are gonna be drinking any water they find, whether it's contaminated or not.
E.
Coli could be spreading, and people are dying, and there's no infrastructure left to clean things up.
With civilization in a state of chaos, a new enemy emerges Mankind itself.
- There are examples in the past of what happens when people were stranded and they need help and help wasn't there yet, and many of them became aggressive, - The majority of society, regardless of your socioeconomic stature, will fall apart into tribal warfare.
We will not just be fighting an alien invasion from the skies, but we will be fighting to survive against other humans that are looting, panicking, freaking out, mass suicides.
It's all the bad parts of the Bible except with an alien invasion.
- A very large number of people will have died as a result of violence from the tribalistic society that our world devolves into.
As the aliens take full control over our planet, if there is any hope for humanity, it might be to negotiate for peace.
- When the situation became critical, leaders all around the world would doubtless try to negotiate with the extraterrestrials.
I mean, we would say, "Look, you know, "what do you want? "Please, let's talk.
If there's something you need, we'll give it to you.
" We would try to negotiate with them, and if that failed, we might even try an unconditional surrender.
We would do anything to survive.
But is there anyone to negotiate with? - If we did somehow manage to shoot down an alien ship and went to go look at it to see what it's made of, we might find that there's nobody inside of it, that the whole thing is just a big machine, a big computer, big robot, if you will.
- We've been brainwashed by Hollywood into believing that an enemy force will consist of little green men, but chances are they're gonna be part robotic, because space travel is dangerous.
There's cosmic rays.
There's accidents.
There's micro meteorites.
- If what we're facing is artificial intelligence, if what we are dealing with is machines, any attempt at negotiation or surrender would be meaningless.
Sending robots to explore space is hardly the stuff of science fiction.
Humans have been doing it for decades.
- It's a lot easier to send a robotic craft from one planet to another than it is to send something with some biological life form in it.
That's why we sent a Mars rover instead of sending people to Mars.
- We've had robots that have landed on Mars and started to patrol around and inspect that planet.
An alien life form, an advanced intelligence would be doing the same thing to us.
Today, we even use robots to wage war.
- There's an interesting comparison to be made with humanity.
Drones, probes are very much something we use in military attacks.
Unmanned combat air vehicles are very much the future of warfare.
But why have these robotic invaders come to Earth? And is there any hope for mankind? It has been six months since an alien invasion has crippled humanity on Planet Earth.
World governments lie in ruins.
Major cities smolder from the attack.
And those who have managed to survive struggle with a sparse food supply, a diminishing number of fresh water sources And an entire digital communication system that has been destroyed.
- Even if extraterrestrials launch a devastating attack on Planet Earth, some of us will endure.
We will go on, but it will be in very small numbers and in a totally different way.
- People who were lucky enough to still be alive are the young and the strong, the ones who have managed to find a community, a pocket that they can live in that has some supplies.
Hunting and other primal instincts will be the keys to sustaining life.
All the while, like the spacecraft hovering in the sky, one question will loom.
Why would alien robots have traveled across the universe to wipe out life on Planet Earth? - Earth has minerals and all sorts of resources that can be harvested by an energy-hungry civilization, so there's always a chance they'll land on the Earth and plunder us.
But there are gonna be a lot of other habitable planets that are rich in natural resources that have no life on them, and I think those are the planets they would plunder first.
- What is likely is that they've exhausted their own resources and polluted their own planet beyond the point of return, and they have to come here to make this the place that they're going to set up shop and continue to live.
Not just to set up mining colonies to pull iron ore out of the ground and tungsten out of the ground.
They're coming here to live here.
For the aliens, with the attack complete, the next phase is terraforming, the process of converting a planet to an environment better-suited for your particular form of life.
- I could well imagine the next phase might be machines, huge machines that drop down from the sky, hit the Earth, anchor themselves into the Earth, and begin chugging out new gases, changing the temperature of our world, changing our atmosphere to a different composition.
Invasion.
- This is no different from what humans are beginning to do.
We're sending out robotic space probes, for example, to Mars.
They scoop up some soil.
So there's nothing new about this.
Any extraterrestrials coming here to attack, then to terraform would really be only doing a slightly more advanced version of what we are ourselves doing.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
For any survivors on Earth, terraforming would be humanity's final demise.
- They come here, and then they terraform the planet and turn it into the air that they can breathe, which then kills us off.
- We would not be able to breathe.
- Our plants, our animals would wither and die, given the fact that the atmosphere itself is being changed, in which case we would be driven to extinction.
And there is some sort of species there that is in our way, I think we'll destroy it so that we can go on.
It's the law of survival.
- Truthfully, it just may be business.
They are expanding.
Their outlook on the universe is very different than ours, and the Earth just happens to be on a part of the Orion Arm in the Milky Way Galaxy they're passing through right now, and they're going to use it for their needs without a second thought of what lives on it or whether it's precious or should be saved or not.
It's just business.
- This is it, this is the apocalypse.
This is fire and brimstone and cross your fingers.
It's a fight for survival against an alien invasion.
- You look up.
You see, perhaps, what look like meteors or fireballs in the night sky.
They strike with more powerful weapons than we've ever seen, from energy beams to biological warfare.
- Our entire body would not feel like it was part of us any longer.
We would begin attacking anything that got near us.
- Panic, complete panic.
People are scrambling for their lives.
- Billions of human lives have ended.
Will you be ready when Doomsday strikes? Can any of us survive? There are over 100 billion planets in our galaxy.
Most scientists believe there must be alien life out there, and some may be more technologically advanced than us.
What if these aliens came to Earth, and they didn't come in peace? - All of a sudden the sky above their heads lights up with meteors, meteors raining down everywhere.
- Society would begin almost immediately to break down.
- We will not be just fighting an alien invasion from the skies, but we will be fighting to survive against other humans that are looting, panicking, freaking out.
At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, officers of the Joint Space Operations Center monitor the skies.
Their job is to detect and track all artificial objects in Earth's orbit.
Although run by the U.
S.
military, it's staffed by an international team of Americans, Brits, Canadians, and Australians.
- You're monitoring all the satellites above.
You're monitoring all the aircraft.
You're monitoring the possibility of enemy missiles coming in.
The instruments detect a large object approaching Earth.
It's as far away as the moon, and it's moving in an unusual way.
- Deep sky observations are done every day in low Earth orbit.
We have radar that tracks all of the trash that is surrounding Earth, whether it's satellites, a bolt coming off an Apollo capsule.
We know where stuff is.
We know where our probes are.
Something completely anomalous will immediately raise red flags.
It's not a comet.
It's not an asteroid.
Officials suspect something far more extraordinary.
- There's absolutely a scientific consensus that the universe is so large, statistically there has to be intelligent life out there somewhere.
Just because we haven't found it yet doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
We know something is out there.
- To deny that there would be any other intelligent life out there in the vastness of eternity, I think, is a little bit naive.
There's got to be somebody out there.
Although it seems like a plot out of a science fiction film, governments worldwide consider the threat of alien invasion a possibility, and some have a plan of action in place.
- In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, it's easy to conceive that there could be civilizations out there with a billion-year head start on us.
With my 21 years at the Ministry of Defense, I've clearly gained an insight into how we would fight an alien invasion.
I know full well that there are, of course, deeply classified projects, black projects, classified weapons programs that are not yet public knowledge.
- Members of Congress, I have the The United States Capitol Building, 9:00 p.
m.
- The President of the United States.
The president gives the annual.
State of the Union address.
It's the optimal time for an attack on the most powerful nation on Earth.
- On the night of the State of the Union Address you would have the U.
S.
President, U.
S.
Vice President, all members of the House of Representatives, all senators present under one roof at one time.
- So with that, you would get a very large portion of the United States' political leadership, which would be, from the extraterrestrials' standpoint, a fairly good starting point for taking the United States military offline.
It does two things.
One, it affects our decision-making, and two, it sends a very powerful statement that whoever, whatever it is that's attacking us, they're not here to play.
In a surprise attack, the space object unleashes dozens of smaller craft into Earth's atmosphere.
- An alien attack on the planet could come in the form of this force that can kind of hover above us and strike with pinpoint accuracy against targets that make sense.
- They would want to take out our most advanced militaries, and probably the most advanced military around the world is that of the United States.
And to take out our military, you have to take out the leadership, because without the leadership, in the White House in Washington, then the military really doesn't have direction.
One alien craft settles over Washington, D.
C.
While others take position over London, Moscow, and other world capitals.
Just as the craft are about to strike, the aliens start knocking out our communications satellites hovering in space.
The goal is to cripple the military's ability to respond.
- The first thing, they would get rid of our satellites so that we get completely confused.
- They could use what we call ASAT, an anti-satellite weapon, which is something as simple as a rock or a bullet.
That could be very effective in space.
- If you disrupt communication, you disrupt the ability to react, and if they can't see where you're coming form, well, then it's easier to go in.
The Space Operations Center at Vandenberg, along with other key U.
S.
military command centers, are now helpless.
- All of a sudden your screens go dark.
All of a sudden you have no information.
- They would blind us by knocking out our satellites, GPS, telecommunications.
Now the alien air war is unleashed.
- This may take the form of laser weapons, directed energy weapons, and others that we can only speculate about.
Perhaps some things we can't even guess at.
The Capitol and most of central Washington are vaporized, replaced by a crater over a half-mile deep.
More than 1/3 of the nearly 700,000 residents in Washington, D.
C.
are killed in the initial onslaught, and the entire upper echelon of the U.
S.
government is eliminated in a blinding flash.
- This would have the effect of decapitating the leadership of the United States.
You'd take out the president, the cabinet, the joint chiefs, the Supreme Court, a large part of Congress.
- To take out that building, you will be taking away all of the elected officials who can make decisions and lead the country in a time of crisis.
Coordinated attacks Centered on important world capitals simultaneously strike around the globe.
- You take out the Kremlin, and then you take out London, and then you take out Beijing, and you take out all of these cities, simultaneously.
All of that order that civilization has struggled for for thousands of years is wiped away as if it never existed.
- Most societies have the same vulnerabilities when it comes to leadership.
There's a comparatively small group, and if you take them out, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Moments later, a new wave of the assault begins.
Thousands of projectiles enter Earth's atmosphere and race towards the surface.
What are they? And can any of us survive this alien attack? If aliens attacked our planet could we survive? It's been ten minutes since an unidentified object from space unleashed a devastating assault on humanity.
But while government structures from the White House to the Kremlin have been wiped out, it's happened so quickly that in some places, people don't even realize an attack has begun.
Outside of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a crowd fills the seats of the local stadium.
- So here we are, sitting in the stands.
Everybody's focused on the field down blow.
The lights are brilliant as they're playing football across the field, back and forth, and then all of a sudden the sky above their heads lights up.
- You look up.
You see something's coming into the atmosphere.
Looks as if it's burning up.
You just think, "Oh, a shooting star," and you make a wish.
But these are no meteors.
1,000 feet above the stadium they stop in mid-air, burst open, and a black rain erupts down towards the crowd below.
- One very efficient way to attack a civilization like ours is with a biological weapon, something that could infect a few people around the world and then spread from person to person.
- Oh, get it off! - Get it off! National security experts warn that just one craft spraying 200 pounds of a biological agent over a heavily-populated area could kill 3 million people.
- It would make the most sense for them to do so against the most heavily-populated areas first.
You have a concentration of what you're attempting to get rid of, and that is humankind.
People sprayed by the black rain have no idea that it's a biological ticking time bomb, gruesomely engineered to spread death around the planet.
Meanwhile, the aliens continue to attack our infrastructure.
Having already destroyed our satellites, they set their sights on the most critical form of communications for the masses, the Internet.
At 60 Hudson Street sits an unassuming building, but its walls conceal a vast network of servers and cables.
More than 100 telecommunication companies run their networks through this major hub.
And each one is critical for the operation of the Internet and global communications.
- Those digital hubs are really the heart of the Internet, and the Internet is not just something that we use for posting and disseminating funny cat videos.
They're actually a critical and essential thing that we use on a daily basis that not just for passive and silly purposes but for incredibly important purposes.
- If the extraterrestrial attack is able to take out the Internet, our economy and our basic infrastructure would fail.
- Society is really, I think, held together by a very vulnerable, interwoven web of key points, and you know, if you take down a few of those critical hubs, the whole thing comes crashing down.
- Please help me.
Please, I'm begging you.
Please, please! Just one hour after the initial attack Global communications are completely destroyed.
In cities everywhere, terrified people, many covered by the mysterious black rain, are cut off from any information about what's happening.
- It would be so disorienting for people and so scary for people that it would be complete chaos.
- Oh, my - Open the door, please! - This is the apocalypse.
This is fire and brimstone and, you know, cross your fingers that you make it through to the other end of this.
- Stop it! The attack has been so well orchestrated that it seems the aliens knew exactly how best to strike us.
But how would an alien civilization acquire such vital intelligence? The answer may simply be that we gave it to them.
It's been 12 hours since a devastating alien attack force began a worldwide siege on Planet Earth.
Communications have been annihilated.
Major military installations have been vaporized, and millions of people are already dead.
It's a clear and coordinated strike against the people of Earth.
But how did they find us? - Well, the fact that we are here is obvious to the aliens because we've been broadcasting our existence into outer space for the last 50 years.
Since the dawn of broadcasting in the 1920s, radio waves have left our planet at the speed of light.
Today, they create a sphere approximately 110 light years around Earth, literally trillions of miles.
Any alien intelligence within that boundary could easily detect Earth and the life forms that inhabit it.
Scientists have also broadcast detailed messages into space intentionally, hoping that someone out there is listening.
- Are we nuts? I mean, honestly, if you are lost in a jungle and you don't know what's out there, are you going to kind of go, "Hello, hello, here I am.
Predators, come get me," you know? You won't, right? I mean, you'd be quiet because you don't know what's out there.
In 1977, NASA sent out a golden disc on the Voyager I and II spacecraft.
It provided a visual look into who and what humanity was all about.
- We sent beautiful images of the Earth.
We also sent music.
- Hello from the children of Planet Earth.
- And we also sent a lot of greetings of "Hello" - In all these different languages.
- And they came up with this golden disc that contained a map, and it gave you the location of the Planet Earth.
If hostile aliens found that golden disc, they could easily journey into our corner of the cosmos for a closer look at Planet Earth.
- So if they come sufficiently close that they can, for example, start intercepting satellite communications, they could perhaps tap into the Internet.
- They will also be able to learn everything that they need to know about where our military is, what it's armed with, where our centers of government are located.
- It's all there.
We're giving away our best secrets.
We are telling anyone who taps into that exactly where our vulnerabilities are.
Soccer fans in Argentina are among the hundreds of thousands around the world falling victim to a strange affliction Carried by a black fluid that rained from the sky.
This is biological war Specially engineered to inflict maximum damage.
- If they were going to engineer something that would kill us that well, it would have to be something that's based at least in part on what we have here on Earth.
It could be engineered using their technology, but it has to affect us as residents of Earth.
It has to be in some way customized for us.
- Looking down at the pantry of what the aliens would have to choose from, they would think, "Would it be this virus, or this bacteria, "or even the Cordyceps fungi? Would that do the job for us?" And they may take a look at it, see how easily it would spread, how quickly it would work, and they would say, "This is the one we can use.
" Cordyceps is a fungus that infects insects like ants.
When the time comes to reproduce, it seizes control of the host's brain, forcing the insect to climb to a high position on a plant or tree.
- Now, I know this sounds like a zombie movie, but it's true.
This is what it does to ants.
As it takes over the ant and begins growing inside, it makes the ant go crazy.
It runs around, bumps into things, and then it climbs up on a leaf and locks its legs on the leaf, and it can't move.
There, it murders the host, and large masses emerge from the head and body.
They explode, spreading spores from this high position out across the forest to infect as many new victims as possible.
Aliens have transformed the Cordyceps fungi, raining from the sky, into a human parasitic disease with one purpose: the annihilation of humanity.
From Argentina to New York and across the world, anybody infected feels an uncontrollable urge to climb.
- Our entire body would not feel like it was part of us any longer.
It was fighting against us.
Our minds would not be able to focus.
We would see threats around us everywhere.
We would begin attacking anything that got near us.
And then suddenly our bodies would freeze up, and they would lock in a death lock.
Then, just as it does with ants and other insects, the Cordyceps fungi begins to reproduce.
- Slowly these clubs of material begin growing out of our heads, out of our chests, out of our backs.
It would be grotesque.
And then as we died, shells of humans would lay on the ground, and the fungi would waft through the air, the spores, looking for more humans to breathe in and to start all over again.
Within hours, around the world, the air fills with deadly spores.
- The worst-case scenarios for a biological weapon are just devastating.
They could kill almost everybody, maybe even every single person across the entire planet.
As the Cordyceps fungi spreads its fatal effects on human hosts Mass panic erupts in the streets.
At the 2,400-bed.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, the situation is desperate.
- I've been here for an hour and my head is bleeding.
- Seriously? - Our medical response infrastructure has limits, and those limits are taxed with things like major tornado outbreaks or hurricanes or major earthquakes.
And so certainly if something on that scale is going on the worldwide, yeah, we're gonna overwhelm our medical system.
- If this is something that is alien-based or alien-engineered, they might not even know how to deal with it.
From a doctor's side, they're becoming infected themselves.
This is ugly.
As more and more of humanity succumbs to the biological attack, those who have been able to avoid exposure have only one choice if they are to survive: fight back.
It's been one week since a vicious alien attack has rocked Planet Earth.
Thousands of cities have been destroyed, and millions of lives have already been lost.
A deadly biological agent rained onto major cities is spreading.
For those left alive it is a battle to survive.
And as a world leader once famously predicted, an alien attack would unite mankind.
- I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
- Humanity as an organized, civilized structure would collapse in the opening week of an invasion.
However, we will regroup.
That's the power and spirit of humanity, that we will fight back for our common interest, 'cause we're fighting now for the homeland.
- Ironically, the same thing that could cause the greatest chaos in our history could also be the most unifying event in our history.
Major military bases and capital cities are in ruins.
But around the world, surviving units are doing what they can.
- Small groups of the military have endured and are trying to fight back, but it's it's pockets here and there.
We would hit them with anything and everything that had survived.
To defeat the aliens, there is only one option.
- Assuming that our nuclear capability has survived, we would launch an attack with that.
- United States Navy operates submarines that are capable of firing a Trident II missile, which is a nuclear weapon, and those submarines, if they're out to sea at the time of this attack, they might therefore be able to continue operating, and they might therefore be able to launch.
- Lieutenant.
- Aye, Captain? - Load tubes one and two.
- Aye, Captain, load tubes one and two.
Load tube one and two.
Tubes one and two loaded.
Maintaining depth at 100 feet.
- Maintain.
- Holding.
- We have firing solution.
- Lieutenant.
- Aye, Captain? - Fire tubes one and two.
- Aye, Captain.
Fire tubes one and two.
- The second that they launch, this alien intelligence will be able to determine an exact location and launch some sort of counterstrike against them.
So at best, we might get off one broadside of a few nukes, and then it's all over.
- If humanity was attacked by an extraterrestrial civilization, I frankly think we would have little if any chance against them.
Any civilization with the technology to reach Earth Viable interstellar travel When we can just about only limp out of the solar system with a couple of unmanned probes, that civilization is clearly going to be orders of magnitude above and beyond our own in terms of their science, their technology, and their weaponry.
As mankind struggles and fails to find anything to counter-attack the aliens, there is another enemy lurking in the shadows.
Could mankind survive an alien invasion? One month into a catastrophic and deadly attack, the human race faces mass devastation.
Cities are in ruins.
The military is defeated.
And a grotesque biological weapon continues to spread outwards from major cities.
The world's population of 7 billion is down to less than a million survivors, and they face a harrowing future.
- We're going to have major sanitation issues, dealing with all of the dead bodies, because a very large number of people will have died as a result of malnutrition.
- Things like water treatment systems, if they're not back online, you're gonna have real contamination problems.
People are gonna be drinking any water they find, whether it's contaminated or not.
E.
Coli could be spreading, and people are dying, and there's no infrastructure left to clean things up.
With civilization in a state of chaos, a new enemy emerges Mankind itself.
- There are examples in the past of what happens when people were stranded and they need help and help wasn't there yet, and many of them became aggressive, - The majority of society, regardless of your socioeconomic stature, will fall apart into tribal warfare.
We will not just be fighting an alien invasion from the skies, but we will be fighting to survive against other humans that are looting, panicking, freaking out, mass suicides.
It's all the bad parts of the Bible except with an alien invasion.
- A very large number of people will have died as a result of violence from the tribalistic society that our world devolves into.
As the aliens take full control over our planet, if there is any hope for humanity, it might be to negotiate for peace.
- When the situation became critical, leaders all around the world would doubtless try to negotiate with the extraterrestrials.
I mean, we would say, "Look, you know, "what do you want? "Please, let's talk.
If there's something you need, we'll give it to you.
" We would try to negotiate with them, and if that failed, we might even try an unconditional surrender.
We would do anything to survive.
But is there anyone to negotiate with? - If we did somehow manage to shoot down an alien ship and went to go look at it to see what it's made of, we might find that there's nobody inside of it, that the whole thing is just a big machine, a big computer, big robot, if you will.
- We've been brainwashed by Hollywood into believing that an enemy force will consist of little green men, but chances are they're gonna be part robotic, because space travel is dangerous.
There's cosmic rays.
There's accidents.
There's micro meteorites.
- If what we're facing is artificial intelligence, if what we are dealing with is machines, any attempt at negotiation or surrender would be meaningless.
Sending robots to explore space is hardly the stuff of science fiction.
Humans have been doing it for decades.
- It's a lot easier to send a robotic craft from one planet to another than it is to send something with some biological life form in it.
That's why we sent a Mars rover instead of sending people to Mars.
- We've had robots that have landed on Mars and started to patrol around and inspect that planet.
An alien life form, an advanced intelligence would be doing the same thing to us.
Today, we even use robots to wage war.
- There's an interesting comparison to be made with humanity.
Drones, probes are very much something we use in military attacks.
Unmanned combat air vehicles are very much the future of warfare.
But why have these robotic invaders come to Earth? And is there any hope for mankind? It has been six months since an alien invasion has crippled humanity on Planet Earth.
World governments lie in ruins.
Major cities smolder from the attack.
And those who have managed to survive struggle with a sparse food supply, a diminishing number of fresh water sources And an entire digital communication system that has been destroyed.
- Even if extraterrestrials launch a devastating attack on Planet Earth, some of us will endure.
We will go on, but it will be in very small numbers and in a totally different way.
- People who were lucky enough to still be alive are the young and the strong, the ones who have managed to find a community, a pocket that they can live in that has some supplies.
Hunting and other primal instincts will be the keys to sustaining life.
All the while, like the spacecraft hovering in the sky, one question will loom.
Why would alien robots have traveled across the universe to wipe out life on Planet Earth? - Earth has minerals and all sorts of resources that can be harvested by an energy-hungry civilization, so there's always a chance they'll land on the Earth and plunder us.
But there are gonna be a lot of other habitable planets that are rich in natural resources that have no life on them, and I think those are the planets they would plunder first.
- What is likely is that they've exhausted their own resources and polluted their own planet beyond the point of return, and they have to come here to make this the place that they're going to set up shop and continue to live.
Not just to set up mining colonies to pull iron ore out of the ground and tungsten out of the ground.
They're coming here to live here.
For the aliens, with the attack complete, the next phase is terraforming, the process of converting a planet to an environment better-suited for your particular form of life.
- I could well imagine the next phase might be machines, huge machines that drop down from the sky, hit the Earth, anchor themselves into the Earth, and begin chugging out new gases, changing the temperature of our world, changing our atmosphere to a different composition.
Invasion.
- This is no different from what humans are beginning to do.
We're sending out robotic space probes, for example, to Mars.
They scoop up some soil.
So there's nothing new about this.
Any extraterrestrials coming here to attack, then to terraform would really be only doing a slightly more advanced version of what we are ourselves doing.
- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
For any survivors on Earth, terraforming would be humanity's final demise.
- They come here, and then they terraform the planet and turn it into the air that they can breathe, which then kills us off.
- We would not be able to breathe.
- Our plants, our animals would wither and die, given the fact that the atmosphere itself is being changed, in which case we would be driven to extinction.
And there is some sort of species there that is in our way, I think we'll destroy it so that we can go on.
It's the law of survival.
- Truthfully, it just may be business.
They are expanding.
Their outlook on the universe is very different than ours, and the Earth just happens to be on a part of the Orion Arm in the Milky Way Galaxy they're passing through right now, and they're going to use it for their needs without a second thought of what lives on it or whether it's precious or should be saved or not.
It's just business.