Here’s the problem: we don’t know how scientifically advanced the aliens are, just that they are more advanced than we are, they’ll be here Very Soon, and they probably won’t be friendly. So how can we militarily deter an ARBITRARILY advanced opponent?

Only one solution seems possible: by a natural evolution of the MAD strategy (mutual assured destruction) which avoided (if only very narrowly) nuclear war during the Cold War, it is neccessary to develop the capability to destroy the universe itself. Only then can we hope to deter an arbitrarily advanced alien civilization from acting in any way inimical to our interest.

Sir Roger Penrose has suggested a suitable scheme: produce a gravitational wave which develops a null curvature singularity which destroys the universe as it propagates (at the speed of light, so evasion is futile). Such waves are certainly permitted by our gold standard theory of gravitation, general relativity, since one can easily write down simple exact solutions (certain pp-waves) having this property. So the only question is how to generate such a “wave of death”. Or more precisely, a “thunderbolt” which only destroys spacetime along the direction of a beam of radiation. Fear not, work is in progress and (according to well-informed sources) is nearing the experimental stage.

http://www.sff.net/people/Geoffrey.Landis/stl.htp

This new planet is close enough to eliminate any claims for alien primacy by the Dogon people of Mali, with their (supposedly) advanced knowledge of astronomy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people#Controversy

By the way, today, 28 April 2007, is the 101st birthday of Kurt Gödel. 101 years is a prime number of years. This comment refers to itself. So does this sentence.

“This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty-four letters.”