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I am looking for as hard science answers as possible, but I am willing to bend some rules for a good answer.

Assume they need to move 10 million 100 million people off of a planet

what technology should be used for an alien species to abduct around 50 million people to use as slaves?

This is for my own story, in which I once had the idea that an entire nation of millions (of an alien species, not humans specifically) were abducted, almost every single one of them, by outside extraterrestrials and taken to work as slaves, some of them as gas-giant miners/extractors on special stations built to mine gas-giants of whatever resources they have, but I was told by some people on the Worldbuilding subreddit's Discord that it would probably not be profitable for the aliens doing it. Especially as they'd need many people and possibly a lot of equipment and technology to get the slaves.

bonus question, I would be happy if you answered this but it is not obligatory: would this be profitable?

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  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to Worldbuilding. That's a lot of questions you've thrown out, and generally we prefer only one question per post. Asking about how to abduct a large number of humans and asking what good that would do is two separate questions. $\endgroup$
    – Halfthawed
    Feb 18, 2020 at 20:51
  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to Worldbuilding. You are providing answers to your own question, in the asking. This can deter people from giving a lot of thought because it communicates your bias. If you need specific things to be assumed as part of your desired answers then state them as clearly. And focusing your question as narrow as possible will typically generate better answers. You can ask as many questions as you want in separate posts. $\endgroup$
    – EDL
    Feb 19, 2020 at 0:14
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    $\begingroup$ It would start with scotland. It will "beam up a scotty" at a time. $\endgroup$
    – Gerhard
    Feb 19, 2020 at 14:08
  • $\begingroup$ I saw this and I had to say it. Because it would be the ultimate heist $\endgroup$
    – Varad Mahashabde
    Feb 19, 2020 at 14:13
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    $\begingroup$ I would imagine some sort of big spaceship. $\endgroup$
    – Daron
    Apr 4, 2022 at 15:20

9 Answers 9

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Purchase your slaves from other members of their species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade

Current estimates are that about 12 million to 12.8 million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic over a span of 400 years, although the number purchased by the traders was considerably higher, as the passage had a high death rate... Millions of slaves also died as a result of slave raids, wars and during transport to the coast for sale to European slave traders...

This system provided slaves to the new world for centuries. Persons of the same species and living in the same area as the soon-to-be-slaves captured individuals and presented them for sale.

Your aliens could do the same. Outsource all of that to the locals. Let them handle chasing down persons who do not want to be slaves, making war with their governments and families etc. Purchase or trade goods with those persons in exchange for individuals ready to be transported off to the work sites.

I feel like someone might read this and downvote because slavery is bad. Agreed: slavery is bad. But talking about bad things is not bad. Evil hates the light.

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    $\begingroup$ This is a good answer, so up vote for that. Also, wish I good give a second upvote for acknowledging that humans, over the course of history, have behaved in pretty awful ways to each other. That and that slavery has been around for the entirety of human history. We do need to acknowledge it, if for no other reason than to despise it. $\endgroup$
    – Paul TIKI
    Feb 19, 2020 at 15:10
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Depends on the technology ...

A sufficiently advanced technology could send warp ships into orbit, beam the people directly into stasis pods, and then fly them to the destination. The problem with that is that a technology which has transporters like Star Trek, and computers to control all this, might not need millions of workers.

An insufficiently advanced technology could send ships into orbit, bomb the planetary defenses and any organized resistance into pices, and send down squads to round up abductees and herd them into shuttles. While scattered remnants of the defenders take potshots at them. Aliens with a relatively low level of technology might need human workers, because their tech isn't good enough to replace them with AI, but this insufficiently advanced technology would find it harder to grab the humans.

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  • $\begingroup$ I was wondering about this very problem. They'd automate everything in the first place I fear. Even as slaves of a sexual nation they would probably not be worth it. But maybe they could use them as servants. It does feel better, I'd argue, to have a real living being congratulate you than having a robot say it, no matter how realistic it is. Or maybe that's just my present tech mind talking. $\endgroup$
    – LukasExemplar
    Feb 21, 2020 at 10:15
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Weapons

You can't kidnap 50 million humans without someone noticing. It's simply not possible. In addition, the amount of logistics and energy you would require in order to transport 50 million humans off-world is such that your fleet would be noticed by the current space gazing infrastructure. Sure, you can bend rules to give your fleet ultra-stealth capacity, but if you want to be realistic, your fleet will be noticed by the humans.

So, then you have the age-old method of abducting people from a technologically inferior society. You take your superior weapons, (presumably some sort of kinetic energy weapon a la Project Thor style) point it at the technologically inferior people in question, and loudly say

"Oh, will you look at that. It looks like I have these here Kinetic Energy Weapons aimed at you puny Earthlings and it would be such a shame if my finger slipped on the trigger and dropped these on your pitiful little planet. Especially since it could only be avoided if, say, you decided to sell me a few million of those Earthlings of yours. And if you do that, I might just leave one or two of my more outdated toys for you to place with. Just saying."

Now, some of Earth's more freedom-loving countries may protest at this, but there are a countries on Earth which have leaders who do not value freedom so much or the lives of their citizens, but do value their own lives and would love to get their hands on some second-hand alien tech. Not to mention that said countries are well acquainted with propaganda and ordering their citizens around.

[Bonus answer: Presumably, this isn't really profitable, unless humans have some innate advantage that no other life form has compared to any other alien race; i.e. their are unique enviroments that humans are more suited for, humans are more long lived, humans can give birth to more children. Or possibly that the aliens have figured out some mind-control tech that only works on humans to make rebelling impossible.]

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Aliens silently made planet inhospitable - they tricked lesser race to believe their planet has global warming, while, in reality, its has ice age starting. After long winters and floods destroyed crops, lesser race will willingly follow anybody, who promise to save them from hunger, even if they had to board big and overcrowded warp ships, that will transfer them to some nameless solar system to work as miners in asteroid belt.

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Skyline's aliens

Considering

1) You can't make your aliens too advanced, because they could build realiable robots to do whatever they want, not aliensweating even a bit.

2) It also needs to have economics in play. They need it to be cheap, because otherwise they would find other ways to do the job, like cloning humans in a lab. War is expensive, so that option is discarted.

3) It has to be systematic, to acomply for 2)

4) It needs to be elegant on paper, since its storytelling. You can't just have giant robots snatching people and throwing them in a basquet.

Considering all this, I find the Skyline movie approach most seducing, hipnotizing humans to walk on the trap by themselves, and promptly leave. A lightning fast approach would be most effective. Send 100000 carriers to the most densely poblated cities, wait 10 minutes to humans to jump in, and leave never to return.

You can however ignore 1) and 2) if their culture is all about slaving for their own glory. Robots just don't cut it, they need to subjugate other species.

Extras: Please ignore the last 2 minutes of the movie, and Skyline 2 altogether.

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If the aliens penetrated society as impersonators using disguises of some kind, and with their tricks, assumed positions of power in the governments, funded space colonization programs, then they could move out people, without being under suspicion, to their home planet.

However, sending 50 million humans on a space colonization mission is nearly impossible because of the amount of time, resources, and logistics required for a mission like this.

Why not consider the aliens taking away enough sperms and eggs to grow their own humans where they need to in specially modified habitats?

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Welcome to your friendly supplier. We got a recent batch mature for employ!

Kidnap a few, say a hundred for gene diversity.
The acepted bare minimum for a viable colony was about 2k. Yet with gene editing you can get a smaller subset and edit away the defects.

Remember stars are light years apart. By the time you reach the other stars of the galaxy, your humans could have been cloned, indoctrined and stashed in stasis pods. Ready to sell.

Or let them breed as animals. Remember, space is mindboggling big. Would take centuries traveling at light speed to waddle around OUR corner of OUR GALAXY.

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NO, BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE

It's impractical because, for the aliens, it's much, much cheaper for them to construct machines to mine the gas of a gas giant than for them to abduct an entire continent of slaves to do it. But there are ways to make it practical.

Ways like, say, a nearby pulsar, with a whomping strong magnetic pulse that regularly sweeps the planet in question.

Basically, instead of a gas giant, you have a rocky, barely-habitable planet with a high concentration of incredibly valuable metals that only exist because of the effects this particular pulsar's magnetic pulses are having on this particular planet.

Thing is, the pulses happen fairly frequently, and are incredibly strong. If the aliens tried to use automation, they'd be constantly repairing or replacing anything that had electricity-bearing wires, and to properly shield the electronics would be economically unfeasible, and possibly even outright impossible. The cost of automation, as a result of all this, would be astronomical, and maybe even downright impossible.

As a result of this, only manual labor is possible, necessitating the use of slaves. And whaddya know, there is a planet with sentient organisms whose biology just so happens to be capable of breathing this planet's air just a handful of light-years away! So, naturally, they go to a third-world nation, abduct the entire population, and then export them to this planet, setting them to work mining the aforementioned metals.

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It's a scam. The people think they're leaving to colonize an Earth-like planet with alien help. The aliens can't go themselves because they can't breathe the atmosphere.

The humans line up and even pay for the privilege of going.

Lies about travel speed make the lack of feedback plausible.

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