I disagree entirely, within the range of mere plausibility, although still speculatively. (And your “almost” puts you within the same range of plausibility.)
Yes, but in the post I was responding to, you called miller’s view speculative as a criticism. If that was not your purpose in calling the view speculative in that particular post, then I don’t know why you brought it up at all. We all already know there is speculation going on here. Why highlight the speculative nature of miller’s view in particular? And why follow up this comment immediately with a characterization of his view as “nonsense?”
Anyway, the point still stands. “Your view commits you to saying aliens wouldn’t even decompse! That’s absurd!” This doesn’t work as an argument because it begs the question at issue. Its only absurd if you assume alien organisms would be such that Earth bacteria (etc) would try (and succeed) to digest them.
For all I know, an alien organism could easily be based on some set of substances which is destructive of any Earth organism that cares to try to eat or infect it.
I don’t know why you think I’ve suggested anything about a standard. But what you are saying here is that the standard ought to be that viewpoints expressed be plausible to you. (See for example your second to last sentence.) Is that what you meant to say? Because I thought the standard was supposed to be that a viewpoint be plausible to miller. If not, then that’s my mistake.
-FrL-
I think that you’re very much wrong, here. It is not remotely plausible at all, although technically it remains within the outer reaches of “possible,” which is why I’ve qualified my statements with “almost.”
Mind, I rank this with things like FTL travel, and dogfights in a vacuum as, “not scientific, but cool enough that I don’t care.”
Well obviously there’s a huge gulf between our respective definitions of such words as “plausible” and “biology,” so we’ll have to agree to disagree. I still think that within the general plausibility standards of even the best scifi, imperviousness is far less plausible than some unknown, unpredictable, um, perviousness.
Organic bodies will decompose even in absence of bacteria as intercellular mechanisms continually dismantle proteins that are not being regenerated by active metabolism; this is called catabolism. The term you are trying to apply is putrefaction, the decomposition of organic material by bacteria. Putrefaction occurs because an organism is no longer circulating oxygen (which is a deadly toxin to anaerobic bacteria) to the affected area. Whether putrefying bacteria could attack an alien organism would depend on whether the proteins are usable by it; it’s possible that there may be such proteins, or that terrestrial bacteria could adapt to utilize alien proteins, but it’s not particularly likely that they would be able to do so very effectively, at least compared to its effects on terrestrial organisms. (There may be a few common structures, especially carbohydrates and lipids which are simple enough to be similar in construction such that putrefying organisms could feed on them, but proteins are unlikely to be independently replicated.) There are, in fact, plenty of organisms which play host to putrefying bacteria and suffer no ill effects while alive, and organic structures that resist putrefaction, though the bacterial kingdom is diverse and widespread enough to digest pretty much any terrestrial organic structure available.
Bacteria involved in decomposition processes are quite different than pathogenic bacteria and viruses which are co-evolved with and strongly adapted to the organisms they inhabit. It would be unlikely that a bacteria evolved in an environment and in hosts that are entirely distinct from a non-terrestrial organism would be able to attack the latter with any effectiveness, and virtually impossible for a virus species (which requires the hijacking of the host organism’s cellular machinery for metabolism and reproduction) to affect an alien species. On the other hand, we would expect an advanced multicellular organism with an immune system analogous to our own to pretty easily detect and defeat any threatening invasive species of bacteria just as it would any inert microscopic matter in the body.
And of course, we’d expect any species sufficiently advanced to invade another world would make at least a precursory effort to evaluate air quality and pathogenic potential before just opening the ports and taking a breath. Unless, of course, they’re actually refugees from their equivalent of a sci-fi t.v. show. “Hey! Don’t open that! It’s an alien planet! Is there air? You don’t know!”
So yes, the resolution of Wells’ classic are a cheap deus ex machina, and the Independence Day ripoff of it even more so. Unless, of course, Steve Jobs is actually one of them…that would explain a lot, actually…
Stranger
Again, speculative, with none of the standards of proof you’re applying. The standard of plausibility–scifi plausibility at that, where plausibility is only too rarely applied as a standard in favor of gullibility–is met, in my opinion.
I’d forgotten that throwaway line about the mother ship being “one fourth of the Moon’s mass”, or something like that. So, if it were orbiting at, say the distance of geosynchronous satellites, it would cause tidal effects about 250 times as great as those caused by the Moon, flooding every coastal city at high tide.
You guys are completely ignoring the effect of the treadmill.
It is not remotely plausible–at least not to someone experienced in molecular biology–that a terrestrial microorganism could be aleady adapted to rapidly and completely hijack and disable an totally alien metabolism. Something like a fungus might be able to invade topically, feeding off of simple residues, but any organism requiring sophisticated interaction on the cellular level is going to be patently unsuited for the job.
Similarly, writing a computer virus for an operating system of not only unknown provenance but even radically different principles (even assuming the use of binary logic and emulation layers to separate hardware from core operating system still gives a virtually infinite arrangement of command grammars and communication protocals) is a project that would take a team of electrical engineers and computer scientists years if not decades just to figure out the fundamentals for implementation, much less effective execution. One guy with a PowerBook is a laughable leap of plausibility by any measure.
Stranger
I’m not sure what kind of last-word game you’re playing here, but I’m gonna leave you to play with yourself. If you have to keep adding red herrings like “requiring sophisticated interaction on the cellular level,” then have at it.
I think one can recognize that a particular plot element is scientifically impossible without it necessarily spoiling the movie itself. I mentioned in an earlier post that I don’t mind the concept of faster-than-light travel in science fiction, even though that’s flatly against some of the most basic laws of physics. Similarly, the incompatability of alien biologies doesn’t bother me when I’m watching someone on an alien planet happily chowing down on the local cuisine. There’s aesthetic value in the science fiction convention that outweighs the scientific implausibility.
How’s that a red herring? Alien cells in all likely-hood won’t work and won’t have the same features as native cells. Ergo viruses and bacteria that attack and/or use those features won’t be able to attack the alien cell structure. Seems pretty straightforward to me. Viruses in particular would be useless because they require hijacking of host DNA which I think we all can agree alien DNA (or whatever method they use to copy and reproduce their cells…if they even have anything we’d recognize as cells) is unlikely to be close enough to earth DNA to matter.
Bacteria that merely breaks down carbon or other simple structures have a chance if the alien happens to use those structures but it’s doubtful the alien biology is so frail it’ll let its body break down while it’s still living.