Consider this. If you wanted to conquer another planet, you could descend upon it with your advanced technology and dominate the indigenous species. Like the native Americans who were here before the Spanish, English and French, that inhabitants would most likely be wiped out. In Earth's case, Humans would have a hard time defeating an extraterrestrial civilization that exhibited the technology witnessed by more people everyday.
The UFOs being captured on video today can out-maneuver outpace any known aircraft built by mankind. How could Humanity defend against vehicles that can not only fly circles around our most advanced planes, but fly circles around those circles and the phase into other dimensions? This would be one scenario, if UFOs were real, but does this have to be the only way in which to conquer another species. Heck, visitors to the "New World" (America) wiped out locals just be breathing on them and attacking immune systems that had simply never been exposed to viruses and bacteria from the "Old World"... And they did that by accident! Why then couldn't there be another way or another set of ways to destroy the dominant Terran species?
What about creating a space virus to which Earthlings had simply nevere been exposed? And, if the antidote for that illness that resulted from said space virus could only be derived from elements only found in space, all the better. Humanity would die off we'll before it could come together and share resources knowledge and know how that would allow it to launch a ship into space to retrieve the raw materials needed to counteract Space COVID. That might work, but then the clean in the aftermath of such an outbreak might be off putting to say the least. "I'm not cleaning up the gelatinous bags of decaying flesh left behind by the former eight billion stewards of Earth. And, besides there must be a more entertaining way to dispose of the evolves apes.
What if the alien invaders choice to soften Humanity up first. What if they decided to do it in a way that was at once effective, efficient and entertaining? How could they accomplish all three of these goals? Well, one idea that might be thrown out there could to introduce a technology that seems so benign but so utterly fascinating as to become ubiquitous is mere decades while causing a societal collapse so incremental as to go unnoticed even by those who believe they created the technology in question. What if Humanity was provided with a means of communication that gave the user a sense of inclusion while fostering an unavoidable divergence. What if we could introduce something where people would converse with one another without uttering a single word or making eye contact once?
If you could introduce a technology that caused communication to fail on such a microscopic level where eight billion organisms lose the ability to talk to the nearest neighbor, what could you do to hate that nearest neighbor. With this new tech introduced, you would simply need to create categories, demographics or classifications of which the Humans would place themselves. They would self-identity because, at that point, their ideas, policies, values would be based more of faith then facts.
You could make one group believe something just because they know it would piss off another group. Hell, you could tell two different groups the same thing in a slightly different way and get those groups to argue on the means to the same goal. And none of this would take very long at all.
This new technology could be introduced one day and within a decade or two feel as if Humanity had never existed without it. Few if any would have to know how it works, only that it works and supposedly keeps them apprised to what is happening in their world. This feeling of connectedness would be true in a sense, because their "World" will have collapsed to the most mundane small-minded view possible. We could get them to do things like sharing pictures of the food they eat or get them to focus of starting the latest trend or saying the coolest saying. Instead of sayings, we'll call them mooms... No, we'll call them memes. Yes, we can get them to focus on other people's lives instead of their own. We can even get them to focus on other people focusing on other people's lives. We'll call those reaction videos and we'll have teams for everything, just so they can learn to hate one another even more.
We'll get their view of the world... their focus down to a five by seven, seven by nine or to a scale suitable for the Human field of vision of say 16:9. Yes, we'll make it so they can't see anything past their outstretched hands. And, even then we'll have their focus aimed only at themselves... Selfies.
"And, what will we call such a destructive technology? The planet killer? The sixth mass extinctions for? The Death Knell?"
"No. We'll call it the cell phone?"
"The cell phone. I like it. It has a nice ring to it."
