Why would aliens use Kaiju to cause an apocalypse instead of more effective weapons? [closed]

Question

Kaiju in fiction are usually alien in nature or are created by aliens. However, in my story Kaiju seems to be less effective as an apocalypse compared to diseases, asteroids, black holes, and many more apocalyptic threats. In my story aliens decide to use Kaiju to attack/destroy humanity. I know this is a broad question so to summarise why would aliens use kaiju to attack humanity instead of much more effective weapons?

• Kaiju are usually around 1 kilometer tall with some sort of directed energy breath attack.
• The aliens are similar to humanity in terms of society and personality but in terms of technology are hyper advanced.
• Earth is at the same technological level as they are now with countries possessing the same geopolitical standings.

Answer 1

Psychological Warfare & Cost/Benefit Analysis

Kaiju have several benefits over your other suggestions.

1. No Chance of Overkill: By definition they cannot destroy the planet or make it uninhabitable (unless the directed energy weapon is radiological, but even then it'd be HARD). Black holes destroy the planet. Nonstarter. Redirecting an asteroid to impact the earth is WILDLY cost inefficient given it's limited effectiveness. You'd have to pick the right asteroid/s, you have to move them into new orbits, you have to hang around in your spaceships to make sure humanity doesn't deflect them, you have to ensure your asteroids hit just so so they wipe out people but don't utterly wreck the planet. For the Kaiju you could easily (if you can make Kaiju at all) create them to self-replicate in a suitable fashion, seed the planet with some eggs/initial Kaiju drop, and come back X amount of time later once the Deed is Done.

2. They're Psychologically terrifying: The level of bio-engineering that would allow for the creation of a Kaiju of your specifications shows humanity without a doubt that they are wildly outclassed. Robot armies, laser guns, redirecting asteroids, tailored plagues... we're already on the cusp of/could be capable of doing all of those to a greater or lesser extent. But creating a kilometer tall fire/whatever breathing behemoth is as far beyond us as an Abrams main battle tank is beyond the capabilities of the Roman Empire. It sets a standard.

3. They're Politically Expedient: Because you can just drop them off and come back later, you don't need to DO anything. No armies means no (friendly) casualties. No need to stay around means your ships can be off doing other important things. No need for oversight means less chance some group of hippies sends film of Xenocide 24612 to the newsies back home. Even if by some miracle the humans defeat Kaiju Seeding Level 1, you can just repeat a decade later with a Level 3 seeding.

4. Easily Stopped (by Aliens): Once you're sure they're done, you can come in and blast the easily-targeted-kilometer-tall targets from orbit with Rods from God, lasers, or whatever you'd rather. This also works if you decide halfway through that humans would be better subjects/slaves than extinct. Just send some ships, blast them from orbit, and blame it on some OTHER aliens. Humanity hails you as heroes and BAM! New sweatshop employees. Tailored viruses and black holes don't leave easy undo buttons mid-invasion.

Bonus! They're self-cleaning: A biological warfare style kill COULD destroy humanity, but it leaves so many unsightly corpses! Your Kaiju eat the humans, cook them into easily disposed of ash, and might even turn the buildings into more-easily-recycled rubble. Hell if you engineer them to eat things like buildings and defecate the metals they could even speed up your colonization process! Once they're done (if you don't just blast 'em) you could heard them onto spaceships and take 'em to the next planet.

Answer 2

It gets more clicks.

The cruel nature of clickbaity headlines is that whoever uses them gets more exposure, and therefore more money, while whoever fails to use them gets less attention and less money. Taking an ethical stand against bad headlines makes you less relevant. They're a co-evolving parasite, exploiting flaws in human attention/curiosity.

Kaiju planetary invasions are the same way. No one on Kaiju Alien World is going to click on a AlienTube video showing an asteroid hitting a planet (seen one, seen 'em all), and, even if they did, well, that's just one video! That's not a content stream. Swift and efficient planet killing is heavily selected against in the content marketplace and alien attention economy. Making the choice to attack planets using cooler and more interesting methods, like bio-engineered monstrosities that defy the square cube law, gets you WAY more engagement, and, because it's slower and less efficient, you can stretch out one alien planet destruction over years, milking that content cow and saving you beaucoup bucks on the real startup cost of finding a whole new planet with an evolved intelligent civilization to destroy.

Answer 3

"Master of Disaster" is the biggest reality show on Channel 7.

In each episode a Kaiju, designed by one of the competing teams, is sent on a planet with the scope of dealing as much damage as possible and to complete specific sub-missions.

The show is aired with the comedic commentary of Sqyzbö and Gfüózpw, an acclaimed couple of comedians, who add fun to the show by making irony of the struggles encountered by the indigenous life forms when dealing with the Kaiju.

Answer 4

Free food for their pets

For this advanced race, Kaiju are either a strategic military resource, or just an exotic pet.

In either case, the thing's got to eat, and it's a pretty relaxed and easy way to feed it to just let it loose on a planet you wanted to destroy anyway. And as it has been mentioned in other posts, it might be entertaining to watch your dangerous pet eat.

Just like a farmer might get a cat to solve a mouse problem, even if setting out gut blocking pellets to kill them might me more effective.

Answer 5

Where do giant monsters come from? Little eggs!

It would appear logical to assume that large monsters have large offspring. But the beauty of organic systems is that they consume food from the environment and grow from there. So these monsters do not give live birth, they hatch and grow from very small eggs.

The pilot of a small flying saucer could carry a fridge-sized incubator with dozens of eggs. Land somewhere in the outback, where nobody notices the crop circle, and select one of the eggs. Put it into a pond and watch how the baby Kaiju becomes larger and larger.

Answer 6

What do you mean by 'more effective'?

I see that there are other answers (and some of them are excellent from a point of view of Societal commentary.)

However - I want to do a semi-Frame Challenge as to what you mean by the most Effective?

In Tank enthusiast circles - when inevitably the discussion on 'Which Tank is the best tank' comes up - there will be the obvious fanboys and fangirls - but then there is always one Sage old-guy who points out that the best tank is the one the suits the needs of the Terrain it was designed to fight on, the Mission that it was designed to support and the Doctrinal requirements of the Army that fields it (and usually that guy is named 'The Cheiftain').

In the same way with Small Arms - we often hear that the AR-15 is the deadliest rifle ever - when the reality is that it is a balance of compromises that gives the most amount of bang within a 0-400m distance that it was designed to operate in.

Is an AR15 more effective than an ICBM equipped with Thermonuclear warheads? - depending on your criteria for effectiveness it could be Yes, it could be No.

When we judge effectiveness there are the obvious criteria:

• Effect down range
• accuracy
• cost

etc.

But then there are also the less-obvious criteria.

• Social acceptability
• risk of escalation
• risk of tech being captured
• risk of friendly fire/collateral damage

etc.

If we look at say a certain conflict ongoing in a certain region between a certain Nation in response to a certain terrorist attack:

Carpet bombing an area and reducing it to rubble is the most effective means in one sense because it means you are not putting boots on the ground and risking the lives of your service men and women.

However - doing so has lots of collateral damage, galvanizes the population against them, increases support for said terrorist faction and creates lots of disturbing images that can be used to create international pressure. In that sense, it is the least effective method.

What I hope to have demonstrated is that when you are choosing a weapon to deploy - there are a number of questions you want to ask and that determines what is the most effective. Working backwards from what the Kaiju can do but other weapon systems can't do (and vice versa) gives you a series of points to work out what the Aliens criteria for effectiveness is and why they choose the Kaiju.

Answer 7

Since these are aliens, we can't presume that we know what, exactly, they want from their invasion. Maybe they want to destabilize the government, but keep the population base. Maybe they want to test us for resilience. Maybe they think we're a good test-bed for the latest politically-driven science experiment.

The nice thing about kaiju is that they are a very localized effect. You won't get radioactive fallout or biological contamination or post-asteroid life ending events. They can be sent in to destroy almost anything. You can even use one of the diggers to rip NORAD out of the ground.

Kaiju are like kicking over an ant hill and watching all the ants scramble around. Maybe that's the aliens' idea of fun. Maybe a quick conquering isn't what they're after, and they want to make sport of it.

Maybe they're even like the Predator race, sending teams in to take advantage of the chaos to extract specific resources from tough targets.

There are many possibilities. You just have to tack in ulterior motives, and change the aliens' true objective.

Answer 8

Honour and/or Humanitarian concerns. Here on Earth, we have any number of rules on how we're allowed to kill one another, which vary wildly across time and location. They're certainly not consistent, and which of them make sense is open to argument. For instance:

• It's fine to kill a foe in hand to hand combat, but using a ranged weapon is dishonourable. It may or may not be fine for several people to gang up on one.
• It's fine to shoot a foe, but not to shoot them in the back and/or when they're unarmed and/or when they're unaware, unless they're in a situation when they should have been more alert.
• It's fine to wage war but dishonourable to lure your foes by promise of peace and kill their leaders when their guard is down. To quote Tywin Lannister: "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner."
• It's fine to wage war if and only if you have a sufficiently good belli against the opposing ruler; what counts will vary wildly. The guilt (or lack thereof) on the part of those who will actually die is irrelevant.
• It's fine to shoot, bomb and shell the enemy, but chemical weapons and bioweapons are off limits. This also applies if the chemicals are non-lethal and would only temporarily disarm the enemy. Atomic bombs are the most taboo, regardless of whether or not they kill more people than firebombing and/or land invasion.
• Etc. etc.

Aliens are, well, alien, and so are their ethics and sensitivities. It could well be the case that sending Kaiju is considered an entirely fair and honourable way to approach a conflict, while most of the other options the aliens have at their disposal would be considered dishonourable or inhumane (inaliene?). Here are a few possibilities:

• Using diseases is taboo in the same way that it is for us; compare also with chemical warfare. Violating this type of taboo could not only make aliens unhappy, but also it might make it more likely that some faction in the alien society decides that biological warfare is apparently back on the menu and fair to use during the next intra-alien conflict.
• Using asteroids violates a similar taboo. As someone smarter than me once said, there is no such thing as an unarmed spaceship - between their propulsion systems and massive kinetic energy, they can wreak havoc on any planet just by ramming into it / turning their engines in its direction from a short distance. Thus, a spacefaring society might reasonably develop a strong taboo against using spaceships, space debris and asteroids for military purposes.
• Alternatively, using asteroids might be seen as the equivalent of shooting someone in the back or from hiding, and that could be seen as wrong.
• In general, the aliens might feel that the use of excessively advanced technology against a more primitive society is unsporting - it's like challenging someone to a duel and showing up with a modern machine gun while they brought a traditional duelling pistol. The aliens might feel compelled to avoid using anything too far out humans' reach - that would include black holes, nearly indestructible tanks (or whatever other vehicles they use for war) and many "apocalyptic threats".
• On the flip side, if the aliens do scale back their technology to give us a fighting chance, almost by definition this includes putting their soldiers in harm's way - which is also a scenario they'd rather avoid. If only there was someone else they could send instead... Some sort of a monster, perhaps?

As a convenient bonus, this sort of approach might go some way towards explaining how it is that we're putting up a fight against an enemy who seemingly should be able to wipe us out without breaking a sweat. Note also that while this solution appears to include some illogical behaviour on the part of the aliens, it doesn't necessarily seem more illogical than any conflict on Earth in the last couple of decades involving a major power and a lesser power, if we look at it from a distance.

Answer 9

Continuing effect

The only other disaster that breeds is an epidemic, and those mutate too quickly toward reduced harm, because their generations are too short, and keeping the hosts alive and able to spread them is too large an advantage.

Kaiju are fire and forget. They will ravage, they will breed, and they will eventually bring about catastrophe. Set a mindless monitor to send a signal when the planet's free enough.

Answer 10

Well the simple answer may be that the aliens are just savages and likes the idea of the earth getting destroyed slowly and cruelly (compared to other methods mentioned). It may even be bit accurate considering they have similar personalities compared to human beings

Answer 11

No assembly require, no disposal required, no control method required

Kaiju are self assembling. You get a mommmy Kaiju and a daddy kaiju, and you send the eggs out to hapless planets on a spaceship while they're easily transportable. Then you let them run rampage.

The the Kaiju then slowly starve to death as here's no way that something that large can gain sufficient calories from eating anything on earth to survive.

You can just keep kaiju bombing a world until a planet until the native population is gone, then wait till the last of the Kaiju starves before landing.

Answer 12

The goal of the kaiju is not the destruction of earth. The end goal is something else, for which the kaiju need to absorb power which happens when they destroy earth.

So we are just a convenient Ressource/ feeding ground.

The end goal could be for them to evolve to a strength where they can be used against enemies with alien tech. Or the end goal could be to just get rid of them because they enter a 10000 year slumber after eating a world (the aliens can’t kill them because their weapons interact with the kaiju in a way that could rip reality apart).