Because nobody asked

I'm a big nerd and read the Scifi blog io9 religiously. Today they interviewed Daniel Wilson, robotics expert and author of the books How to Build a Robot Army and How to Survive a Robot Uprising and asked him about the many other calamities humanity may face (such as alien invasion) and how we might survive them. If you heard a big-ol-geek-snort-laugh from the Westside today, that was me reading his take on how to beat the Cloverfield monster. Largely because this is the type of stuff I think about in my free time as well. Ask me about how I would have defeated the tripods in Spielberg's War of the Worlds sometime... I've thought out the science of it, and have one compound word for you: land mine.

OK, and now for the question in everybody's minds: Who would win in a fight between Giant Robot and Cloverfield?

Metal beats flesh. The book covers a similar scenario, describing how to defeat Godzilla. The secret is: Don't send in a Giant Robot! That would just be silly. First, keep a legion of autonomous underwater vehicles out patrolling the oceans. (Giant monsters almost always emerge from the seas.) As soon as the monster appears, send thousands of flying micro-air vehicles toward it to collect information. Unmanned aerial vehicles are too large and will likely be destroyed just like conventional aircraft, but a swarm of six-inch spying eyes are too small for Cloverfield to even notice. Once a weakness has been identified, send in mining robots that are loaded with swarms of smaller, crab-like burrowing robots, explosives-laden suicide robots, and robots with sensing and communications equipment. Using a mix of human telepresence and robot autonomy, this heterogenous team of robot troops can find weak spots in Cloverfield's skin, burrow deeply toward vital organs or brain matter, and detonate in a series of controlled explosions. Now we humans can eat the carcass for the next hundred years. The great circle of life is complete!

Robotics Expert Daniel Wilson Says Earth is Unprepared for Alien Invasion