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.
If we ever find a planet with life in it, we could never set foot on it, because the interaction of the two biologies can have unpredictable consequences
Submitted 2 weeks ago by ConstantPain@lemmy.world to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
Comments
switcheroo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
And they’ll bring that shit home too.
Of course, why would you leave your new significant other in outerspace?
slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
More importantly the most advanced labs are on earth. Would you leave something so dangerous to a second rate lab?
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
On the other hand, the two biologies could be so different from each other that they don’t interact at all.
Dogyote@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
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?
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
db2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
But how else am I supposed to get green Orton trader women on my arm?
AmidFuror@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
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.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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!
MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
toynbee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
s@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
I heard on the radio that bacteria is what killed the Martians
mech@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
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.
GhostPain@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
*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.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
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.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Who cares. We’re colonizers, the natives lives don’t matter /s
(check history book lol, humans are brutal)
protist@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Oh shit, sorry, didn’t realize y’all’d be so susceptible to chicken pox
diaphanous@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
There’s an entire very large genre of scifi about this very topic
scytale@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
We won’t even be able to reach it until we can figure out FTL travel or technology that can support multi-generational passengers to get there.
Xaphanos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
FTL travel implies a mastery over spacetime itself. After that, a practical time machine is a matter of engineering details.
We can be sure that we never get there because we are not flooded with tourists from the future. QED.
Windex007@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I love the hubris of this argument. It’s the identical construction of guys who say a woman must be a lesbian if they’re not into them.
bluGill@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
For that matter they have not sent travelers to us.
toynbee@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
As a kid, I once heard the theory that aliens are actually time travelers fucking with people.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
i wouldnt call it mastery, implies you can control spacetime as well, just finding ways around the speed of light limitations.
JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That depends on the type of FTL we use. Some just require infinite energy or exotic particles to work. No mastery of spacetime needed.
yobasari@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
You don’t need FTL travel or multi-generational ships really. If you get close enough to the speed of light, time dilation can make the travel time for the people on the ship be as short as you want. Only for the people that stay on earth would the spaceship appear to take generations. Getting enough energy to reach such high speeds would be the difficult part as well as accelerating quickly without crushing the travellers.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
And presumably not vapourising from collisions with random particles in space while travelling at a significant fractions of C.
FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Shouldn’t and couldn’t are too different questions.
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Inucune@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What does that life taste like? Someone will figure out how to prepare a fish that is truly out of this world.
Dasus@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
treadful@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Reminds me of Deathworlders. Some woman got stuck on a planet and had to take a shit and the microorganisms in her shit wrecked the planet.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oh no, a HFY story… They are kinda entertaining but filled with so much weird pathos and self-dirision. That “btw, religions suck” section was just so out of place.
Imagine that: Getting abducted by aliens, fighting and winning against some of the most dangerous aliens of the whole universe and when being interviewed about it, one of the first things he chooses to say about humanity is “btw, we have religion and it sucks”.
And these stories go on for all eternity. 97 long chapters.
That’s what you get when people on the level of fanfiction writers write original stories without any oversight by an editor.
treadful@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Never said it was the best. But yeah, I did read the whole damned thing.
Only thing that stuck out for me was the weird furry and homoerotic dog piles, but it was still fun.
lemmie689@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
MangoCats@feddit.it 2 weeks ago
There’s only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.
Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sexy results?
aarRJaay@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
They’re talking about sex 😉
tdawg@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well we can’t have infinite growth without infinite exploitation ConstantPain. Duh
remon@ani.social 2 weeks ago
Sure we can. Just send a few people to test the waters first.
thevoidzero@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And risk wiping the life on that planet? Considering something like that happened to native population in America, I guess people don’t care.
njm1314@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yo what world you been living on? Course people don’t care.
Geodad@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
We send a member of MAGA to explore first, then dissect them and evaluate the results on the body before exposing the general populace to the atmosphere.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Why would your first act on alien life be to launch our vilest weapons of mass destruction?
Geodad@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
More like miners with a canary in a cage.
bluGill@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
We currently couldn't detect life on earth from nearest star and it is unlikely we ever can build anything good enough to. Which means if we discover life we know they are plenty advanced as to make our efforts uneeded as they can tell us a better protocol. Not that we have the ftl needed to reach them anyway.
termaxima@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
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 ?
gmtom@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Read the book Children of Ruin
Sturgist@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Fuck reading just the one. Read the whole series. So very much worth it.
Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
That’s why this is done: https://www.nasa.gov/ames/space-biosciences/planetary-protection/
I realize you were probably talking about visiting other worlds in person, but we would probably still have unmanned missions there first.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
NASA is funny. They are always searching for signs of life, past or present, on planets in our system when they can send a lander of some sort. But, if there is a spot where there actually might be a chance of life existing, they avoid it because of the minuscule chance of some bacteria on any rover contaminating the area.
We’ll look for signs of life where it’s hard to find and avoid the areas where there might be a better chance of it.
Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
NASA has been doing the sterilization I listed above for decades now; it’s not new.
Can you give some examples (preferably with references) of where NASA (or ESA, etc) have avoided areas due to fear of contamination?
ViscloReader@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
No we will, the bigger question is if one of the parties will have sex or dinner.
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 weeks ago
Not really much of a shower thought. Pretty sure Clark or Niven wrote entire books on this concept (I forget, just know I read these books 40 years ago, and they weren’t new then).
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
*Another planet.
We have already found one.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Arent you renting or paying income taxes? Its not your planet, thats why you have to pay to exist here.
zeca@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
webp@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
No no, you are talking about sex, hehe
fubly_glaston@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
Rishathra, actually.
possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Sounds like a good time
KokusnussRitter@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
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.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yep i would expect them to send the blankets down from orbit first.
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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 there very own Chick-fil-A.
baronofclubs@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m sorry. I can’t let you do that.
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.