Smallpox, chicken pox, rubella, measles, and other infectious diseases were already well adapted to Homo sapiens, and due to continued outbreaks of infections in Eurasia, the European colonists had evolved resistance to these illnesses (often after the diseases winnowed away the less resistant members of the population in large swaths), relegating them to being mostly childhood sicknesses, after which immunity through antibodies was acquired. Native Americans, on the other hand, has been in a separate genetic pool for more than ten thousand years and had not evolved the same resistance to these pathogens. Furthermore, the Native Americans did not engage in widespread husbandry of mammals as was a common pre-colonial technology in Eurasia, and so did not experience the transmissiblity of infectious diseases and accompanying resistance, which explains why the Europeans were not subject to complementary plagues from North American pathogens.
A bacteria or phage capable of attacking a non-terrestrial species, on the other hand, is very unlikely. Even if we posit that the alien species uses a DNA molecule to code for genetic information and construct proteins, the actual structure of the resultant genes and proteins would very likely be so unlike terrestrial organisms that it would be blind outrageous chance that a bacteria could even obtain nutrition from an alien, and a infinitesimal chance that a virus could use the alien’s cellular organelles for replication. It’s not even terribly likely that a macroparasite could successfully prey on the alien (or vice versa), as the metabolism of each organism would have very different requirements.
Actually, I doubt it; at least, not and come up with the same story. Frankly, any contact with an alien species capable of traveling across interstellar space (even for such an inane purpose as savaging Earth’s material resources) is going to be so vastly beyond current human military technology that it would be like attacking an elephant with a fly swatter. Any realistic contact scenario is going to be something more like 2001 or Rendezvous With Rama than Battlefield Earth or Footfall.
Exactly. If I remember the movie correctly (I only saw it once, when it came out), it started with Judd Hirsch sneezing. A lightbulb went off over Jeff Goldblum’s head, and he said something about a virus.
And I said to myself, “Self, that’s how they’re going to save the world… but introducing a virus like the flu, or smallpox, or HIV, or something to infect the aliens. They’re stealing from War of the Worlds but it’s a reasonable plot device.”
When I realized Goldblum was talking about a computer virus, which he was going to write on his Mac and deliver to the mother ship (with what kind of interface, exactly?) I almost walked out of the theater right then. It was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.
On the topic of War of the Worlds, not only is it at least arguably implausible that the aliens would be vulnerable to earth microorganisms, it’s VERY implausible that they would lack sufficient microbiological knowledge to test for and be aware of such potential vulnerabilities. Are there microorganisms on Mars that are harmful to humans? Well, it’s unlikely. But if we terraform and settle Mars we’re certainly not going to just start randomly sending huge groups of people there all at once without air filtration systems, tests with animals, and lots and lots and lots of other steps.
As for the original question, no single step in that process is necessarily impossible, but let’s ask a similar question: Take a very smart guy from the year 1920 or so. Give him every tool that was available at the time. Plop him down in the cockpit of an F14 off an aircraft carrier, whose combat computers are still connected to the aircraft carrier’s combat information network (or whatever). Tell him “please remotely crash the aircraft carrier”. Can he do it?
Let me take what gotpasswords said and give you a real-life example. Many years ago, I had a software company, and we developed an MS-DOS system to replace an extant system a competitor was selling that used proprietary hardware. Proprietary to the point that they changed the pinouts on their printer cables (requiring special printers) just so their customers couldn’t buy something off the shelf. To make it easy for their customers to become our customers, I had to be able to pull data from their system.
Pulling data from an unfamiliar system into a familiar system is a much MUCH easier task than writing a virus/worm that will infect and destroy an unfamiliar operating system running on unfamiliar hardware. Here’s what I had to do:
Spend hours with meters and a protocol analyzer figuring out the pinouts on their cables.
Build a cable that connects our system to theirs
Figure out how to initiate file transfers on their system
Spend days determining how their file system worked and which files I needed
Write a program to capture data from their system
Spend days figuring out their file transfer protocol, which turned out to be a packetized system with error detection/correction laid over their own private version of RS-232.
Tweak the drivers so that I could use a serial port on the DOS machine to communicate
Actually transfer a file (yay!)
Spend weeks figuring out their data compression and file format by making minor tweaks to the file on the proprietary system, retransmitting it to my system, and then comparing the results.
Spend days writing a file converter
Spend days testing with data from a dozen different people
And after all of that (total elapsed time of a month and a half), it still wasn’t perfect.
Now imagine that the connectors weren’t DB-25 or RJ-11 and had to be fabricated from scratch. And the voltages weren’t our standards. And you didn’t have access to their system to figure out how to initiate a file transfer or run the worm program. And the system might not be binary (how about a 0/1/Z trinary system?). And the word length might be obscure. And the data compression wasn’t a variant found in one of your handy reference books from college.
This is an overwhelmingly huge job, and there’s no conceivable way one dude could do it in that period of time.
Not a Trojan. In fact, although they called it a virus in the movie, I’d say it was a worm, just given the way it spread through their systems.
Speaking of all this, and it’s been a long while since I’ve seen the movie, but wouldn’t the (presumably well secured) mothership notice the return of a 50-year AWOL fighter asking to land? Yeah, there’s a lot of ships coming in and out but I’d guess the mothership is in communication with all of them as the arrive and depart. It seems like expecting to be allowed to land on an aircraft carrier just because you’re flying an F-16.
Was this addressed? It may well have been but I just don’t remember.
Good post, but regarding the above: Gah! I already said (probably more than once) that I didn’t realize it was supposed to be one guy doing this from scratch in a few hours. I thought it was the united states government doing it over the course of decades.
I think this is the ultimate stumbling block, in a sense. You’ve got buttons with labels that you don’t understand, and when you press them in some order, little characters that you don’t understand appear on a screen. You can make it happen again. And maybe you can make the lights flash or the windshield wipers move. But essentially you’re a parrot, repeating something without comprehending it.
If you meet someone who doesn’t speak English, you can point at a chair and say “chair”. Hieroglyphics were a mystery until someone found the Rosetta Stone, which had the same message in multiple languages. You can use that little kernel of knowlege to start unraveling the rest, but without it you’re dead in the water.
Where is the Rosetta Stone in Independence Day? You send 9 volts down a wire and something happens, so what? Good, bad, right, wrong; there’s no way to tell. If you can’t tell what an alien computer is doing, or what it’s supposed to do, there’s no way to make it do something else.
I dunno, that bugs me simply because what resources could they get from Earth that they couldn’t more easily harvest from asteroids or comets or whatnot? There’s no indication they wanted to colonize the place after killing off all the humans, nor were they interested in our technology, so if all they wanted were minerals and water and junk, they could more easily find it elsewhere.
While Battlefield Earth was a terrible move with utterly moronic plot holes (like USAF fighter jets perfectly functional after a millenium in a bunker) Earth’s military was only able to hold out for less than 15 minutes against the Cyclos. That was the only thing in the movie that made sense. Nobody else seems to have brought this up, but wouldn’t destroying the mothership (with 1/4 the Moon’s mass) in Earth orbit cause more damage than the aliens incinerating our cities?
And as true as that statement is, it is still one of the lesser logical flaws in the film. Of course, when you’ve pieced your story together from fragments of other sci-fi films from Star Wars to Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers it’s pretty hard just to make a coherent story, much less one that has any degree of scientific plausibility.
If it’s in orbit presumably it will stay in orbit. Of course, if it is in LEO then something that massive will have substantial tidal effects on the Earth, so…yet another inexplicable plothole.
It was just a part of the XenOS KernelCrash API, the documentation for which the alien pilot clearly had stuffed in the glove compartment before the crash. Next to developing for KDE 1 it’s a snap.
All things considered, the virus idea was probably the least stupid part of ID4. After the virus drops the shields of the large 15-mile-in-diameter ships, what does humanity attack them with? Why, AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, of course!
Even though that’s debatable (the viruses most lethal to humans, for example, are those that are not, despite your claim, adapted to H. sapiens; it’s non-adaptive to kill your host), that’s not what **garygnu **said, and therefore not what I was responding to.
I find it pretty plausible that a bacteria, virus, whatever, that’s adapted to attacking soft tissue, for example, would not necessarily distinguish between species (or higher, as in the speculative case under discussion). To believe otherwise, as your post implies, is to suggest that it’s plausible that a dead alien would not decompose. I think it’s far more likely that an alien immune system would not be perfectly attuned to terrestrial pathogens, and that an alien body would begin to “decompose” as soon as it’s exposed to them, let alone after death.
And while all of this is highly speculative, I hope at least it illustrates that your certainty is unjustified.
No it doesn’t. It only means that our protocols are sufficiently simple that they can reverse engineer them easily. It doesn’t go both ways.
I could, in a few days, write a program that I could hook up, say, a telegraph to via parallel port, and have my computer send telegraph messages to someone over phone wires. That would not, in even the most remote way, imply that someone on the other end, with a morse key, could write software that would execute on my computer.
Yes, but they are adapted to carbon-based lifeforms combosed of dual strands of nucleic acid, which is the basis for all life on Earth. A space alien isn’t going to have DNA. It’s not going to have anything remotely resembling DNA. It’s flesh is going to be either totally inert, or deadly toxic, to anything from Earth that tries to eat it. Go back far enough, and every ecosystem on Earth is ultimatly related. This isn’t going to be the case with ecosystems from different planets. They’re going to be fundamentally incompatible, owing to their entirely unique origins.
Of course, in War of the Worlds, this can be somewhat subverted by positing that life on both planets came from the same source, either via colonization of Earth by ancient Martians in pre-history, or fertilization of both planets by panspermia.
It’s not clear to me which side of this debate is right, but I’ll point out that you, as well, are speculating. You’re speculating that an alien body would decompose.
Actually I am pretty sure it would decompose–due to its own microbes from its own native world. But supposing somehow all of those were taken out of the picture, then who knows? Maybe alien bodies wouldn’t decompse. That turns on the very question at issue, so it’s not legitimate to just take it as given that it would (or wouldn’t).
Probably, it would, as it would be carrying bacteria from it’s native world with it. But it would almost certainly be entirely unaffected by terrestrial bacteria. If it were completely sterilized before it came here, it would indeed not decompose if it died on Earth.
Um, I’m the one who has pointed out, multiple times, that this is all speculative. But I can come up with very few speculative situations in which an alien body would simply be utterly impervious to any and all terrestrial, well, agents of putrefaction. Again, since this is totally open-ended speculation, I’m sure there are imaginations great enough to derive such a scenario. The very question at issue, though, to borrow a phrase, is simply, is it *plausible *that an alien body would be subject to such agents? The “burden” begins and ends at mere plausibility, which I think is more than met. Again, the standard here is merely plausibility; you seem to suggest that it’s proof. And it seems seems more plausible to me that an alien body would be subject to some type of terrestrial biological action, than that it would be utterly impervious. Standard met.
I already said (probably more than once) that I didn’t realize it was supposed to be one guy doing this from scratch in a few hours. I thought it was the united states government doing it over the course of decades.