You vs Death Angel Alien in A Quiet Place Movie - Could You Defeat and Survive It?

"With explosive booby traps, sonic weapons, thermobaric explosives, and airborne anti-tank cannons, these guys really seriously picked the wrong planet to mess with."

- The Infographics Show

You vs Death Angel Alien in A Quiet Place Movie - Could You Defeat and Survive It? is a video on the Infographics Show discussing how the Death Angel aliens from "A Quiet Place" could be realistically defeated with the globally advanced military technology of the world, including cannons, explosives, and sonic weapons.

Synopsis
You've seen the hit horror film "A Quiet Place" and remember those horrible aliens that has super sonic hearing and would attack anything that moves, right? Well darn it, but those aliens have shown up on Earth, and the military is doing it's best to contain them, but they can't protect everyone, and soon you're going to have to fend for yourself. Could you be quiet enough and survive "A Quiet Place", or are those aliens bound to hear you opening a bag of survival snacks?

Transcript
A meteor has struck Mexico with the force of a nuclear weapon, and from the wreckage - most improbably - have appeared a swarm of heavily armored aliens that are now rampaging through Earth. The aliens seem to have only one goal in mind: kill and consume every living thing that they come across, and now you're on the menu. So, could you realistically survive living in the world of "A Quiet Place"?

Well, let’s start at the beginning. Realistically speaking no material in the world could protect an alien hitching a ride on a meteor that slams into the earth at orbital speeds. We're talking about tens of thousands of miles per hour of speed coming to a very abrupt, and inconvenient, stop on the earth's surface. Fine, let's say that somehow the armor these aliens have on can withstand such incredible impact forces - which instantly vaporizes any other matter. Well, these aliens are still pretty screwed unless that armor comes with airbags. While the outside may survive a forty thousand mile an hour impact with the Earth, the creature's flesh colliding with the inside of the armor at that same speed isn't going to fare so well.

Then of course there's the incredible heating caused by the impact event, reaching temperatures as hot as the surface of the sun. Unless that armor has pretty incredible thermal protective qualities, the aliens are going to be barbecued on impact. But, fine, let's go ahead and skip the whole landing part and pretend that the aliens have made landfall on earth in a more... graceful manner than just slamming into it in a death asteroid. Could you survive living in the world of A Quiet Place if the aliens instead took, I don’t know, a Greyhound bus?

First, let's talk about these aliens. We know they have armor that's incredibly tough, able to shrug off firearms. They also have incredible hearing, and can echo-locate even from incredible distances. Small animals, big animals, pretty much anything that makes the smallest noise is fodder for these aliens. Specially little kids playing with space shuttle toys. The most fearsome aspect of these aliens though is their incredibly mobility, as quadrupeds they are able to move extremely fast, upwards of thirty miles per hour (48 km/h).

They are also incredibly strong, which makes sense considering that they have to lug around bulletproof armor plating their whole lives. Hiding inside a car isn't going to do much for you, as these aliens are able to use their claws to rip apart and shred a modern automobile to get to the soft cream filling of human beings inside. So forget your weekend krav-maga classes you've been taking, because you're going to want to avoid going toe-to-toe with these baddies.

In the film world the world's militaries failed to fight off these alien invaders, which begs the question: in the real world, could they be fought off? Well, given their bulletproof armor plating, first contact with these monsters isn't going to go well, and massive casualties are going to be inevitable in the first few days of the war. However, the world's militaries long ago stopped relying on rifles alone to kill things, and there are plenty of weapons in our current arsenals which would be devastating to the aliens.

Their armor may be bulletproof, but even a bulletproof armored personnel carrier has difficulty standing up to the punishing firepower of America's M2 Bradley's Bushmaster cannon. Capable of firing depleted uranium rounds at a distance of over a mile (2 km), M2 Bradleys scored multiple kills on Soviet made tanks in Desert Storm. While modern tanks are able to resist an M2's Bushmaster cannon, they also have several inches of thick armor to absorb the shock of impacting rounds. As the biology of these aliens proves, their armor isn’t thick enough to dampen kinetic impacts sufficiently, meaning that their flesh is going to be directly exposed to the shock of impacting rounds.

Even if their armor protects them from incoming rounds, the flesh underneath will be so badly bruised that no alien will be able to take more than a few dozen rounds before simply moving around is too painful to do anymore. Just ask anyone that's been shot in the chest wearing modern military body armor. Then of course there’s the internal bleeding that such impacts can cause. The odds of fending off a depleted uranium round fired by an M2 Bradley are pretty low, but even if the aliens are able to, well the impact force alone on their flesh is going to be pretty devastating. However, the Air Force has something to add to this fight if the M2's Bushmaster cannon is inadequate.

Picture this: a horde of alien invaders come streaming over a hill. You, Billy Bob, and Ray J are ready and waiting for them with your stash of Freedom Arsenal weapons that no government is going to be taking away. But as you fire away your spirits sink as you see the bullets pinging harmlessly off their thick armored carapaces. Then, suddenly, you hear the sound of a jet engine, followed by the most beautiful sound that any infantry under fire has ever heard in the world, a deep, bassy, “BBBRRRRRRTTTTTT!!!” that you can feel in your stomach!

Roaring overhead is one of the ugliest aircraft you've ever seen, and purring like a very pissed off and very large cat is the GAU-8 Avenger autocannon, one of the most devastating weapons ever made by man. The cannon fires 30 mm armor-piercing incendiary rounds at a rate of 3,900 rounds a minute, and the cannon is so powerful that if the A-10 Warthog it is equipped on fired it at any other angle but a downwards one, it will threaten to stall out the aircraft. The A-10's cannon fires a five-to-one mix of armor piercing incendiary and High Explosive incendiary rounds.

Basically, it fires a shower of flaming hot metal death on anything stupid enough to get caught below, and even modern tanks are easily chewed to pieces by the A-10's cannon. Aliens - no matter how futuristic their armor plating - are going to be having trouble shrugging off 200 kilojoule impacts, or approximately 147,512 foot-pounds of force per round. If the A-10's cannon isn't enough to deal with the alien threat though, there's a plethora of thermobaric weapons in the US's arsenal that will more than do the job.

Unlike a conventional explosive, which typically has a mixture of 25% fuel and 75% oxidizer, a thermobaric weapon- or fuel-air explosive- is nearly 100% fuel. Instead of carrying oxidizer to ignite the explosive, a thermobaric weapon simply uses atmospheric oxygen to do the trick, allowing it to pack a far greater punch. A typical thermobaric bomb employed against the aliens would consist of a large canister dropped from a plane. As it nears the impact site, the first of two explosive charges is set off. This bursts open the container, spraying the surrounding area with fuel. The fuel is vaporized and immediately seeps through cracks in buildings, moves around corners, underneath doors, you get the picture.

Then the second explosive detonates the cloud of fuel. The aliens need to keep their armor plating open in their head area in order to pick up sounds and home in on targets, so they can't walk around with their armor perfectly sealed up. That means plenty of fuel is going to seep through cracks in the armor, and when it goes off, that fuel is going to turn the aliens' insides into pudding. Even if they manage to seal off against fuel seepage though, there's still the incredible impact energy of an explosive many times more powerful than a conventional explosive going off. Remember the airbags thing from earlier? Yeah, once more our aliens are going to turn into milkshakes inside their pristine body armor.

But we can't simply bomb every single alien because they'll pretty quickly spread into our cities. This fight is going to inevitably have to be won on foot, and you are going to be part of the vanguard that helps destroy this alien menace. Luckily for you, evolution designed these aliens... well, pretty stupidly for going to war against a technological foe. Unlike in the world of A Quiet Place, our real world is full of decently competent engineers, scientists, and well, people with just plain old common sense. As we well know, sound attracts these aliens, but it also makes them incredibly vulnerable.

In the middle of a silent forest or abandoned town, the aliens will be able to pick off individuals who sneeze with ease - but in the middle of a modern battlefield with gunfire, explosions, and screaming, well, we imagine it would be like us using our eyes to stare into a spotlight and try to make out details. But even though the aliens may take us by surprise initially, it's not going to take long to figure out they operate by sound, and it'll take even less time to figure out how to turn that into a major weapon against them.

If you're being ambushed by a gang of ravenous aliens, try blasting some Rage Against The Machine and crank it up to 11. However, odds are you'll be able to pick up any of the thousands of sonic and ultrasonic weapons that are even now in use by militaries and police departments around the world. Typically these devices are used for crowd-dispersal operations, but they can be easily used to kill instead of just incapacitate individuals. Long-range acoustic devices have been used for everything from deterring protesters to fending off pirate attacks, such as the case of the Seabourn Spirit, a cruise ship chased and attacked by pirates who fended off its attackers with the aid of a sonic weapon.

Sonic weapons however can do more than just shatter ear drums - though that alone has proven fatal for our alien invaders. Low frequency waves can damage your body, even cause tissues to shear and give you hypothermia like symptoms. Above 184 decibels, the effects of a sonic weapon very quickly turn deadly, and no amount of armor is going to protect from it. You can find sonic weapons in a wide variety, from hand-held sonic cannons, to those mounted on vehicles or ships, to even sonic bullets, grenades, and mines. I guess what we're saying is that for an alien species that relies on sound, invading Earth is probably the last thing they'll ever do.

But you don't really need your own sonic weapons to defeat the alien invaders terrorizing your country farm, as you can easily set up a variety of traps to rid yourself of your alien pests. Notably, these aliens lack any visual acuity whatsoever, relying completely on echo-location. Echo-location has actually proven to be an incredibly acute sense for navigation, with bats able to pluck individual insects out of the sky while in flight. However, it is also an extremely easy sense to fool with even basic building materials. The important thing to remember about these aliens is that they may be terrifying, but they are generally pretty stupid, displaying only a predator-like intelligence and a seemingly blind aggression - pun intended - towards any source of sound.

With these flaws in mind, building a trap or even an ambush would be relatively simple. Making homemade explosives is incredibly easy, even more so if you live on a farm and have access to plenty of fertilizer. It's so easy we're not going to tell you how to do it here, since we don't want to be writing more episodes of The Infographics Show from behind prison bars. But in the case of an apocalypse, we're sure you'll pretty quickly be able to get the info you'll need - specially as the US military's counter - homeland invasion planning includes the dissemination of millions of little brochures that describe how to build homemade explosives and weapons so the general population can resist a foreign invader.

Your plan is simple: create explosives, rig a speaker to the explosives, and then just turn the speaker on. What do you play on that speaker to lure the aliens in? We don't know, it seems just about anything will do. How about the silky smooth jazz stylings of Kenny G? Or fine, maybe the screams of a panicked human being. Remember, these aliens are actually really dumb. Then, well, you really only have to wait for the aliens to come, and once they've reached your trap - boom. Honestly, this plan is so simple that we kind of feel bad for these poor aliens. With explosive booby traps, sonic weapons, thermobaric explosives, and airborne anti-tank cannons, these guys really seriously picked the wrong planet to mess with.