On Planetary Colonization and Alien Pathogens.

[DunaManiac]

What's interesting, and all science fiction works I've seen don't take this into account, is the prospect of alien viruses/bacteria on other planets.

Assuming that life on other planets takes around the same path as Earth:

To start, let's use an example, the Coronavirus. A virus that evolved on Earth, in more or less the same conditions, but completely Novel, was able to infect millions in only a few months, and that was a relatively mild virus in most people.

If a virus like that is so potent, than what about a virus that evolved on a different planet all together? In that case, it probably wouldn't be a very good idea to land thousands of people on a planet which could have thousands of species of bacteria and viruses, and could hitch a ride back to Earth or other planets. In order to avoid this, they would have to spend probably years, even decades studying the planet, looking for every conceivable kind of pathogen, and create medical technology to combat it. But this costs money, and time, and most importantly, resources which you could be spending on improving existing infrastructure. Even assuming that they magically have a panacea that can cure all illnesses, even ones on other planets,  it still takes up valuable cargo space to send expensive medical equipment to a colony, and faster than light travel is not cheap.

Therefore, I think that perhaps large space stations could take the place of interstellar colonies, perhaps even terraforming mars-like planets in the habitable zone of their star.

What do you think?

[SOXBLOX]

Bingo! Either this or find an earth-like world sin flora and fauna. 

Of course, interesting cases arise if the alien viruses have the opposite chirality as earth lifeforms...

 

Edited July 25, 2020 by SOXBLOX

[Spacescifi]

11 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

What's interesting, and all science fiction works I've seen don't take this into account, is the prospect of alien viruses/bacteria on other planets.

Assuming that life on other planets takes around the same path as Earth:

To start, let's use an example, the Coronavirus. A virus that evolved on Earth, in more or less the same conditions, but completely Novel, was able to infect millions in only a few months, and that was a relatively mild virus in most people.

If a virus like that is so potent, than what about a virus that evolved on a different planet all together? In that case, it probably wouldn't be a very good idea to land thousands of people on a planet which could have thousands of species of bacteria and viruses, and could hitch a ride back to Earth or other planets. In order to avoid this, they would have to spend probably years, even decades studying the planet, looking for every conceivable kind of pathogen, and create medical technology to combat it. But this costs money, and time, and most importantly, resources which you could be spending on improving existing infrastructure. Even assuming that they magically have a panacea that can cure all illnesses, even ones on other planets,  it still takes up valuable cargo space to send expensive medical equipment to a colony, and faster than light travel is not cheap.

Therefore, I think that perhaps large space stations could take the place of interstellar colonies, perhaps even terraforming mars-like planets in the habitable zone of their star.

What do you think?

 

Depends on how determined a civilization is about colonization.

Colonization involves.... conquest. There, I said it.

 

Does not matter who or what already lives there, they must be assimilated to service the colony... or wiped off the face of the planet if they cannot be of any service... which is also highly unlikely.

More likely greed would cause that, not practical concerns.

[DunaManiac]

5 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

Does not matter who or what already lives there, they must be assimilated to service the colony... or wiped off the face of the planet if they cannot be of any service... which is also highly unlikely.

Depending on whether there is intelligent life on the surface or not.

Since Earth only has one intelligent species of life, us, and no others, especially since we have not found any other species of intelligent life in the Universe,  I'm willing to bet that intelligent life is a rarity in the Universe.

Edited July 24, 2020 by DunaManiac

[Spacescifi]

38 minutes ago, DunaManiac said:

Depending on whether there is intelligent life on the surface or not.

Since Earth only has one intelligent species of life, us, and no others, especially since we have not found any other species of intelligent life in the Universe,  I'm willing to bet that intelligent life is a rarity in the Universe.

In scifi there is.... I don't really mind if IRL it is rare because it is purposeful.

We explore the hypothetical what if's in scifi, not what is.

Edited July 24, 2020 by Spacescifi

[cubinator]

Or maybe we should just inhabit new metal bodies immune to such pathogens to travel the stars with.

[Bill Phil]

8 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Or maybe we should just inhabit new metal bodies immune to such pathogens to travel the stars with.

That may be possible, or it may not be. Or it may not be practical if it is possible. Even if it is practical there will be pretty large populations that refrain from doing so. 

That said, I don’t believe this will be an issue - because we’ll understand pretty quickly that colonizing a planet isn’t really worth the effort.

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, DunaManiac said:

What's interesting, and all science fiction works I've seen don't take this into account, is the prospect of alien viruses/bacteria on other planets.

Spoiler

And a lot of "space plague" novels.

Just they are excessive for plot, and nobody wants the heroes to wash hands every ten minutes and wear masks.

7 hours ago, DunaManiac said:

Since Earth only has one intelligent species of life, us, and no others

Why? Humans are more or less, too.

Spoiler

 

***

On topic. After 2020 humans will start detecting unusual proteins by sensors in every door handle.

[KerikBalm]

Alien viruses are not a concern,

Alien bacteria are a potential concern though.

[KSK]

Yep, I wouldn't be worried about alien viruses.

If a virus has evolved on an alien world, it has not evolved to live on our world. Therefore unless your alien lifeforms are extremely similar to terrestrial lifeforms at a molecular level, alien viruses are very unlikely to be a problem.

In more detail:

Viruses are (very simplistically) a piece of genetic material wrapped in a a protein capsid or a lipid membrane studded with proteins. They break into the host cell and then use the enzymes in that cell to duplicate themselves. Eventually the host cell bursts, releasing all the new virus particles to go out and infect new cells.

So, for an alien virus to be infectious, it needs be based on either DNA or RNA, those being the molecules your cells use to store, copy, and read out genetic information. That's not completely implausible - we've found various terrestrial biochemical precursors in interstellar dust clouds for example, and it may well be that alien life tends to use much the same kind of molecules as us simply because it started off from the same precursors and a similar prebiotic chemistry. 

However, assuming that your alien virus is based on DNA or RNA, it also needs to use the same, or a very similar genetic code to your cells. That is, a sequence of alien DNA would need to encode the same, or a very similar sequence of amino acids which, in turn fold up into a very similar protein. Otherwise the virus is essentially a bit of junk code - it might get into your cells but the protein it codes for is not going to be a viral protein. Your cells might not even recognise it as a valid protein encoding sequence at all, so it'll just float around in your cells until its degraded - which happens pretty quickly. Therefore the virus can't replicate in your cells and it just dies out. 

I think the chances of an alien virus using the same genetic code as your cells are substantially lower than the chances of an alien virus using DNA or RNA but lets assume that it does.

For an alien virus to infect you, first of all it needs to have a way into your cells. Viruses normally do this by recognising one protein or another on the surface of your cells and hijacking it. Even if the alien virus uses DNA/RNA and the same genetic code as your cells, the chances of it being able to recognise any of the very specific surface proteins on your cells are pretty darn low.

 

Bacteria on the other hand are autonomous cells that don't require a host to replicate in. Provided the alien bacteria are able to make use of you as a nutrient source (and bacteria will grow on pretty damn near anything), then they could be a problem. Even then you're carrying around a whole lot of commensural bacteria that have evolved to live on you and in you. They might actually be a decent defense against alien bacteria, because the aliens would need to outcompete a bacterial population that's already very well adapted to its particular ecological niche. 

Edit. As an aside, this kind of thing is why I agree with @DunaManiac -  colonising other life bearing worlds is a dumb idea in my opinion. Setting aside any ethical issues - which are significant in themselves, you're trying to occupy a world that none of the plants, animals or people that you're bringing with you have evolved to live in. Chances are that any lifeforms you encounter are either inedible or actively toxic and any new species you introduce (crops for example) that are edible, will be competing in an alien ecosystem that they are biologically not equipped to deal with.

If we ever have the technology to go visit extrasolar planets, then I suspect we'll also have the technology to build sufficiently large space habitats that colonising planets - with all their inconvenient gravity wells and biological messiness just isn't worth the trouble.

 

 

 

Edited July 25, 2020 by KSK

[JakGamingKSP]

chances are they will be very primitive.

at the worst you would need a excrements ton of penicillin or for a virus cold & flu medication

[KerikBalm]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

Your cells might not even recognise it as a valid protein encoding sequence at all, so it'll just float around in your cells until its degraded - which happens pretty quickly. Therefore the virus can't replicate in your cells and it just dies out. 

I think the chances of an alien virus using the same genetic code as your cells are substantially lower than the chances of an alien virus using DNA or RNA but lets assume that it does.

For an alien virus to infect you, first of all it needs to have a way into your cells. Viruses normally do this by recognising one protein or another on the surface of your cells and hijacking it. Even if the alien virus uses DNA/RNA and the same genetic code as your cells, the chances of it being able to recognise any of the very specific surface proteins on your cells are pretty darn low.

So DNA or RNA is not that unlikely, and the ribonucleic acid would have a >50% chance of having the same chirality... But the same methylation? What about the same chirality for the amino acids(if used, but I can grant that).

But what are the chances that they use the same 20 amino acids, given that not even all life on earth uses it?

Then, what are the odds of the 64 codon> 20 amino acid + start and stop signals are the same?

Then, getting in the cell is as much the cell recognizing them, as them recognizing the cell (mutual binding affinities), then once in, they need the cell to read the Rna/dna, this means the virus must have a promotor that binds to a host cell transciption factor/ ribosome unlike anything it ever encountered.

Then it needs to also be able to deal with host cell defenses unlike anything ever encountered, that will easily recognize the viral proteins and infected cells... Not gonna happen. It more likely that a virus from trees(or a bacteriphage, etc) infects a human. Even insect viruses are not a problem for us, its really only viruses that infect vertebrates that may cross over to us.

Bacteria are a lot more complex, so, its harder to predict.

They will not have evolved any defenses to our immune systems, which will easily recognize them as foreign. However, many of our immune defenses may nit be effective, as our immune system has never had to kill anything like them.

However, phagocytosis and the phagosomes are likely to kill them.

The acidic compartment with altered ion and salt concentrations should be pretty lethal to anything that replicates in our normal body tissue. Sure, thete are extremophiles that would not be phased by the acidity of the phagosomes, but then our normal body tissue would not be suitable for them.

They'd need to be suited to both (like day TB, but TB dies some stuff to block/reduce acidification).

But if alien equivalents of eukaryotes are there, there might be something convergent with the rather biochemically general phagocytosis killing method

Alien bacteria would likely be unable to infect us, but I would want to do extensive studies before any exposure, because there are a lit more variables, and they don't rely completely on the host to replicate them, and thus don't need to be nearly perfectly adapted to that specific host.

7 minutes ago, JakGamingKSP said:

chances are they will be very primitive.

at the worst you would need a excrements ton of penicillin or for a virus cold & flu medication

If they are alien, our current drugs are unlikely to work.

Although an alien rna virus would likely be vulnerable to drugs that are RNA analogues. But as I said, alien viruses infecting us is nearly impossible.

[JakGamingKSP]

5 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

If they are alien, our current drugs are unlikely to work.

Although an alien rna virus would likely be vulnerable to drugs that are RNA analogues. But as I said, alien viruses infecting us is nearly impossible.

basic antibiotics work by breaking down the fat lining which all bacteria has by basically obliterating it. so if we find a right antibiotic which literally destroys any bacteria it might work.

 

[KerikBalm]

10 minutes ago, JakGamingKSP said:

basic antibiotics work by breaking down the fat lining which all bacteria has by basically obliterating it. so if we find a right antibiotic which literally destroys any bacteria it might work.

 

No, you are thinking of soap.

Penicillin inhibits a bacterial enzyme that cross links peptidoglycans in the bacterial cell wall.

Even if the Alien bacteria have a cell wall with peptidoglycans, the enzyme doing the cross linking is likely to be completely different, and unaffected

[magnemoe]

6 hours ago, KerikBalm said:

Alien viruses are not a concern,

Alien bacteria are a potential concern though.

Agree, viruses are pretty specialized devices, they tend not to cross species barriers easy, not to talk about another biochemistry. 
Good chance bacteria will not be harmful either but its lots of them and some might, also the issue of the biochemistry itself who might be poisonous. 
But chances for an alien pest is very low, interstellar travel is anyway an very effective quarantine. 

[kerbiloid]

Use boiling to kill the extraterrestrial life you were looking for for centuries.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Use boiling to kill the extraterrestrial life you were looking for for centuries.

We're gonna need bigger kettles.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

We're gonna need bigger kettles.

This has an obvious question with all the broadside guns, why in the main guns rotated 90 degree? that is unless the broadside is the close in weapon systems and the bottom one is the mains, incoming mostly come from the side anyway. 
Note it makes some sense updated WW 2 battleships tended to have impressive anti air capabilities more so than dedicated anti air cruisers but they could not fire their main guns in an air battle and secondary was AAA. 

[DDE]

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This has an obvious question with all the broadside guns, why in the main guns rotated 90 degree? that is unless the broadside is the close in weapon systems and the bottom one is the mains, incoming mostly come from the side anyway. 

Oh yeah, this has been rather on the nose in the Battlefleet Gothic games: those ships don't have any ventral weapons whatsoever and some have no beam weapons and just broadside kinetic or plasma macrocannons... Except when the time comes to bombard a planet, then suddenly Imperial ships have this sort of 'downwards' beam attack without any visible weapons. I'm not sure anyone has tried explaining it, or when the visual became codified.

[Spacescifi]

9 minutes ago, DDE said:

Oh yeah, this has been rather on the nose in the Battlefleet Gothic games: those ships don't have any ventral weapons whatsoever and some have no beam weapons and just broadside kinetic or plasma macrocannons... Except when the time comes to bombard a planet, then suddenly Imperial ships have this sort of 'downwards' beam attack without any visible weapons. I'm not sure anyone has tried explaining it, or when the visual became codified.

 

We discussed to death how lame plasma weapons are... but I digress.

Assuming that vessel is using a high powered particle beam instead it would require an INCREDIBLE amount of energy to cut through all those layers of atmosphere. Since they appear to be flying extremely low orbit.

And a laser would be much the same, just likely weaker overall.

It would be arguably cheaper and more efficient to just fire some railgun or coilgun rounds.

Way more damage, less energy to fire and or produce I might add.

[DDE]

Just now, Spacescifi said:

We discussed to death how lame plasma weapons are... but I digress.

Hard sci-fi? In 40k? Surely you understand this is folly of the highest order.

[Spacescifi]

1 minute ago, DDE said:

Hard sci-fi? In 40k? Surely you understand this is folly of the highest order.

 

I barely even know what that is... but I get you.

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Hard sci-fi? In 40k? Surely you understand this is folly of the highest order.

They hear you.

[KSK]

2 hours ago, DDE said:

Hard sci-fi? In 40k? Surely you understand this is folly of the highest order.

Imperium of Man - the Emperor decrees that plasma beams are the best weapon and His will bends the universe to make it so.

Orks - just paint red stripes along the plasma cannon barrel. Every ork knows that red stripes make things work better - and therefore they do.

Eldar - gahhh. No reason needed because Eldar.