Yeerk Invasion 2013

[Tim Bruening]

If the Yeerks were invading today, what effect would modern technology have on the Yeerk/Animorph conflict?  I imagine that the profusion of camera phones would make it harder for Yeerks and Animorphs to hide their unEarthly activities.  (Imagine YouTube videos of the Animorphs morphing, or of Ax going berserk over food, or of Visser Three, or of Controllers pulling out their dying Yeerks during the beginning of book .

The Yeerks would probably utilize the NSA's vast spying apparatus to track down anyone who knows about them.  (Search for phone conversations and Internet postings containing key works such as "Yeerk", "Hork-Bajir", "Taxxon", "Visser", "Andalite", "Morph", etc).  They would also use drones (I have read of insect sized drones, which would neatly match the Animorph's insect morphs).

The Animorphs would seek to videotape the Yeerks with their camera phones, and post them on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, etc.  The Yeerks would probably have taken control of Mark Zuckerberg right away and have him delete postings about Yeerks.

I bet that the Sharing has long since won tax exempt status from the IRS.

[NothingFromSomething]

The NSA was doing a more primitive version of what they're doing now back in the late 90s, anyway, that wouldn't really have much of a huge impact.

[Tim Bruening]

How would today's technology (such as Smart Phones, camera phones, drones, 3-D printers, Google glasses, etc) affect the courses of events in the books?

I bet that Visser Three would set up drones and survailence cameras everywhere in an effort to catch the "Andalite bandits" demorphing, and locate their feeding grounds.

[AndaliteBlues]

I'm sure the Yeerks would have had drones of their own and surveillance cameras aren't that new. Anyway, as you say, with the increased number of camera phones and easy access to video sharing sites they wouldn't exactly need them.

[Tim Bruening]

From what I remember, there are a few instances that would be hard to cover up, just by the advent of cell phone cameras.

--Ax demorphing into Andalite in the mall, #5. The Predator.
--The Bug fighter crashing into a grocery store, #11. The Forgotten.
--Visser Three morphing above McDonald's, #18. The Decision.

When I think of covering up extraterrestrial activity on Earth in the digital age, I think of the totally bogus "covering up" the government did in the second Transformers movie, where it is so obvious they're either sentient robots or aliens.

If Animorphs took place today, it's fun to imagine how our government, the government we have today, would react to the presence of aliens on Earth. When thinking of that conference in the David Trilogy, I wonder what the conference would be about today. Probably the War on Terror. Imagine Controllers and The Sharing using the tragedy of 9/11 to scoop up more hosts. And I also can't help but feel that the Tea Party wouldn't be that welcoming of the new aliens, since they already feel a black man getting elected is the sign of the end of the world since it challenges old-time, dogmatic religious beliefs. Imagine them learning that aliens actually exist or worse, about the Ellimist and Crayak.

So the Animorphs would hook up with the local Tea Party!  The Occupy Movement might be an Animorph ally also.

Said black man has totally screwed up on healthcare, Benghazi, and the NSA!

[Astarte]

Let's not talk politics.

[donut]

To be fair, the NSA is doing what they've always done.  It's more like a failure of every president and congress to address the changes in who uses electronic communications since the early 90s.  Now the expansion of the NSA's surveillance programs in the last few years is different, not in what they're doing, just in how much.  It's hard not to give responsibility for that to people currently running things.

Of course, if the NSA can do it with the technology we have today, the yeerks certainly could have been monitoring wireless communications across most of the world when the books were written.  They even did this in Visser when they first showed up on the planet.  I think the biggest change would be that the anis wouldn't be able to carry any kind of cell phone with them when doing anything save the world related.  Which would be a problem for Jake if his brother notices he never answers his phone when the yeerks get attacked.

It's been a pretty long time for there to be a conference on the war on terror.  I mean, look at Syria, there are terrorist groups making a decent bid to take power in the country, a brutal dictator, and the largest chemical weapon strike since Saddam used them against Iran and the Kurds.  There wasn't enough international public support for an airstrike. I think an international conference today would almost certainly be on economic stability or climate change.  Seems ironic that (in the animorphs universe) a conference on saving the world would be used by the yeerks to destroy it. 

I agree with AB on drones.  The yeerks would have that technology, maybe not the numbers humans could put up, but they're at least a 100 years more advanced than technology today.


I think the biggest impact technology today would have is how much data the yeerks would have to sift through.  It's an overwhelming amount today, so it's hard to tell if the yeerks would be able to really analyze everything even with they're computers.

[Overtired]

The fact that pretty much everyone has a camera on them at all times would defiantly make it harder for both the Animorphs and the Yeerks to keep the conflict secret.

It's a lot bigger problem for the Animorphs though. They need to keep themselves hidden while they are actively being hunted. The Yeerks, on the other hand, only need to keep themselves hidden enough that secret-invasion-by-body-stealing-aliens-from-outer-space seems ridiculous.

If someone managed to get a decent video clip of a Hork-Bajir and put it on youtube not only would the Yeerks likely have the ability to get the video taken down but most people wouldn't think it was real anyway. They'd write it off as a well made student film or whatever. Even if a lot of videos made it to the web, it could easily be perceived as something like the Slenderman phenomenon.

If one the kids got filmed morphing though, the Yeerks would know that at least some of them are human. With a high enough level of quality, it's plausible that they could run facial recognition programs.

It would be dangerous for the Animorphs to upload stuff themselves as it could be traced – they wouldn't be dumb enough to do it from home – but it would only take a few upload from a location before the Yeerks started watching it.

As for the kids themselves going without the phones for extending periods of time, well that could defiantly be a problem for their home life. But in the books they used the everyone-is-staying-at-everyone-else's-house trick all the time and there and were never caught on it. So I don't think they'd be missing a lot of phone calls especially after the Chee show up and start subbing.

What would happen to a kid nowadays who repeatedly didn't answer when their parents called? It'd start with groundings and losses of other privileges. Groundings would get violated as missions require. They could get caught sneaking out of enough that their parents would watch them so closely that it necessitates sitting a mission out. But that's a far as it'd be likely to go. They'd be a somewhat uncontrollable teenager. It could conceivably get to a point where one of them might have to runway from home but that's the absolute worst case.

[Tim Bruening]

Let's not talk politics.

Why not?  The Yeerks engage in politics a lot!  We have turf wars between Vissers, an Inspector trying to discredit V3, the Yeerk Peace Movement, and even Tom trying to break free to form his own empire!

[Tim Bruening]

Of course, if the NSA can do it with the technology we have today, the yeerks certainly could have been monitoring wireless communications across most of the world when the books were written.  They even did this in Visser when they first showed up on the planet.  I think the biggest change would be that the anis wouldn't be able to carry any kind of cell phone with them when doing anything save the world related.  Which would be a problem for Jake if his brother notices he never answers his phone when the yeerks get attacked.

Could Ax program Jake's cell phone to answer for him, using an AI program that simulates Jake?

[yunyun]

Ahha, that would have been interesting, Ax texting a AI app under the table while eating XD
But shouldn't that be at least somewhat possible even in the 1990's? Since Ax was able to build a Z-space communicator, and I think something else out of stuff he bought at RadioShack, so it isn't that far fetched for him to build an AI program from scratch.