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
Clarification: I'm not talking about sex. I'm talking about biological exposition.
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?
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?
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.
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.
We won’t even be able to reach it until we can figure out FTL travel or technology that can support multi-generational passenger ships to get there.
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.
For that matter they have not sent travelers to us.
I love the hubris of this argument. It's the identical construction of guys who say a woman must be a lesbian if they reject thier advances.
As a kid, I once heard the theory that aliens are actually time travelers fucking with people.
i wouldnt call it mastery, implies you can control spacetime as well, just finding ways around the speed of light limitations.
at least beings shows that control are close to being godlike energy beings.
That depends on the type of FTL we use. Some just require infinite energy or exotic particles to work. No mastery of spacetime needed.
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.
And presumably not vapourising from collisions with random particles in space while travelling at a significant fractions of C.
There's an entire very large genre of scifi about this very topic
Shouldn’t and couldn’t are too different questions.
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.
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.
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.
we could never set a foot on it
I'm not talking about sex
It's ok Quentin.
There's only one way to be sure: nuke it from orbit.
Sexy results?
They're talking about sex 😉
Well we can't have infinite growth without infinite exploitation ConstantPain. Duh
What does that life taste like? Someone will figure out how to prepare a dish that is truly out of this world.
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.
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.
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?
No we will, the bigger question is if one of the parties will have sex or dinner.
Read the book Children of Ruin
Fuck reading just the one. Read the whole series. So very much worth it.
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).
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.
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 ?
No no, you are talking about sex, hehe
Rishathra, actually.
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.
Don't tease me with a good time
Just wear protection
What are you saying? Are you saying it isn't like in Star Trek where they can beam people down to untraveled planets and somehow still have a breathable atmosphere suitable for humans? Say it isn't so!
It would go exactly like in many (bad) movies, Yolo! (seriously.)
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.
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.
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.