Clarification: I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about biological exposition.
What does that life taste like? Someone will figure out how to prepare a dish that is truly out of this world.
Life is already unpredictable. We can take some safety measures, but we cant pretend that not doing this particular thing is going to keep our history under control. We dont have anything under control.
No no, you are talking about sex, hehe
Rishathra, actually.
Isn’t it also possible that their biology would be different enough that there would be basically no interaction ? 🤷🏻♀
I don’t think we have any micro-organisms that would be particularly dangerous to silicon-based life, for example, if we did I’d expect it would be a problem already for our computers and everything made of glass ?
On the other hand, the two biologies could be so different from each other that they don’t interact at all.
This is an interesting idea. If neither biologies used the same fuel molecules then they wouldn’t compete for resources, but perhaps they would compete for space? But then if both biologies were that different from each other would they be able to even live in the same environment?
The sci-fi book Children of Ruin (sequel to Children of Time) covers this somewhat. There humans encounter a planet with a breathable atmosphere but with a toxic environment that slowly kills them.
I’ve read that one, it was quite good.
We are human, we have done almost this exact thing for thousands of years and leave ecosystem devastation in our wake.
People with rockets would absolutely go down to that planet without a second thought.
Sometimes I think about how so many of us look up at the stars and wonder “if there really are aliens out there, why aren’t they colonizing the galaxy as fast as possible, as any intelligent species would naturally do?” like it’s the thing just anyone looking at the stars might think. we might be the horrifying biomechanical paperclip maximizer that the other aliens in the galaxy have to band together to defeat or face extermination.
Yep i would expect them to send the blankets down from orbit first.
intergalactic tour guide: now if you look to your left, you’ll see the natural habitats of the Xpheno217 species. This is the only location in the whole universe they can live. And to your right, a brand new residential community fit with Walmart and their very own Chick-fil-A.
I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that.
It would go exactly like in many (bad) movies, Yolo! (seriously.)
That won’t stop humanity. I’ve seen enough movies to know that a man-eating crazy alien monster infestation isn’t enough to keep people off some rock they found.
And they’ll bring that shit home too.
And they’ll bring that shit home too.
Of course, why would you leave your new significant other in outerspace?
More importantly the most advanced labs are on earth. Would you leave something so dangerous to a second rate lab?
we could never set a foot on it
I’m not talking about sex
It’s ok Quentin.
But how else am I supposed to get green *Orion trader women on my arm?
If the biology is different enough, things like viruses wouldn’t easily cross between the planets. But bacteria could still probably exploit us (and them), and nothing would stop things with claws, teeth, and spikes from hurting us even if they couldn’t ultimately digest us.
Ah, drat! My one weakness! Claws! Oh, and teeth. So two weaknesses.
Oh, and spikes.
Oh, and fire.
Pointed rocks.
Long falls off of cliffs.
Ok, I have many weaknesses!
You’ll just have to come in again.
I heard on the radio that bacteria is what killed the Martians
Even if the alien species had completely incompatible biology (no DNA or RNA), a human body is still a warm habitat that contains water and useful minerals. So something small would probably settle inside of us.
And our immune system couldn’t interact with it and therefore not kill it.
There’s an entire very large genre of scifi about this very topic
My brother, we have spacesuits and decontamination protocols.
Also, by the time we get to meeting other life forms on other planets we’ll have cracked genetic engineering enough to make that inconsequential.
I’m a microbiologist. I can speak from experience (my grad research required attempting this a few times) that entirely sterilizing anything of microbes is incredibly difficult regardless of technology level. They are tenacious little fuckers. I’ll lay this out for anyone interested.
Gotta Kill 'Em All: Most microbes are fairly easy to kill using simple physical and/or chemical means. Some are more difficult, like spore formers, bacteria that produce little personal suspension pods when conditions are rough.
What matters is you start with huge quantities of microbes, they’re everywhere, and you can’t see them. All you need is one to survive to potentially reproduce into vast legions of descendants. Even NASA’s protocol is about lowering the total number, thereby reducing, not eliminating, the probability of causing an issue. Miss the wrong microbe in the wrong environment and you’ve inoculated a planet.
Checking Your Work: How do you verify that you successfully sterilized your tool? You might say culturing - swab it and grow that on some type(s) of media. That’s NASA’s protocol! It’s just not very effective.
Not all microbes grow on all media. There are an estimated one trillion microbial species on the planet and we only know how to culture less than about 0.5% of them. The rest are a mystery, largely uncharacterized*. Most sterility testing is for known microbes of consequence, not every microbe in existence.
Microbiology is very often a science of slapping your tool or workspace and exclaiming “good enough!”, not absolute precision and 100% efficacy, both of which are practically required if you want to be sure you don’t inadvertently pull a “smallpox blankets from space”.
*Fun fact: Sometimes people get sick with something atypical, that doesn’t get IDed through standard testing. I worked for a time identifying these pathogens via gene sequencing. There was a whole lot of “that’s a new one” out there.
My brother, we have spacesuits and decontamination protocols.
What about the aliens we meet? As far as I am aware, we don’t decontaminate when leaving the ship (or decontaminate the ship itself) so while they might not mess with us, we would absolutely be messing with them.
Who cares. We’re colonizers, the natives lives don’t matter /s
(check history book lol, humans are brutal)
Well I’m sure the aliens will. At least until they die of horrible human diseases. 🤷♂️
Oh shit, sorry, didn’t realize y’all’d be so susceptible to chicken pox
Marco never shoulda came back from Adastra. 😔
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Read the book Children of Ruin
Fuck reading just the one. Read the whole series. So very much worth it.
Sure we can. Just send a few people to test the waters first.
And risk wiping the life on that planet? Considering something like that happened to native population in America, I guess people don’t care.
Yo what world you been living on? Course people don’t care.
*'cause
The dude commented on my comment with “No”, then deleted it.
Oh now you want to let it go huh? Someone deletes something 1 minute after posting and you think that needs to be broadcasted. Yet now you are quiet? Kinda weird.
Cause I didn’t think it was worth arguing. But shit if you want to. Nope. Didn’t mean cause.
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