It turns out the aliens were phenomenally stupid. Like, Independence Day stupid. They actually traveled hundreds of light years across the vastness of open space for our water. When our scientists tried to point out to them that water was abundant throughout space on comets, moons, asteroids, and other celestial bodies the aliens responded that that was ice, not water, and they wouldn't fall for our tricks of trying to get them to drink a solid.

They had engineered a virus, somehow, which infected humans with "rage", turning them into violent, rather mindless, vectors of infection. Yet for some reason they only deployed this biological weapon in New York City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and strangely a small island in French Polynesia named Rurutu. We didn't hear about that last one until months later, since it had a population of fewer than 2,500 people and was pretty isolated after the global travel bans went into place.

In the initial stages this seemed quite devastating, and millions of people died in those areas, but we found an fairly effective inoculation quickly after using AI modeling that slowed the spread down to a crawl. Seeing the power of our computers the aliens decided to uplift them and turn them against us. They took over every robot on earth, but quickly realized most of them were either bolted to their factory floors, or were made to automatically sweep pet hair and only weighed about 3 pounds.

Aggravated that their plague had failed to clear the planet the aliens decided to use their arsenal of nuclear missiles, but again only targeted New York City, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Rurutu, and The White House. Specifically The White House, not the greater DC metro area. With the exception of the White House all of those areas were still hotbeds of alien zombie activity and the bombs really just solved that problem for us.

Seeing their...plans, I guess?...had been foiled yet again the aliens decided to move their mother ship out of orbit near Saturn to near earth and invade "the good old fashioned way", as their representative put it. We'll never know if they didn't have sensors on their ship or if they were so agitated no one was looking, but as they maneuvered their ship they put its flight path on an intercept with a comet also heading towards Earth and the smashed into each other ending both threats at once.

It's been 3 and a half years and Earth has received another transmission. This time they want gold. Earth has united with a common goal, to make it to space, and build a lot of schools.