Axel the Chimeric wrote:

I don't know about that. There was an incident a decade or so ago where a biotech company tried to create a genetically modified version of a bacterium that's ubiquitous here on Earth in an attempt to turn waste crops into alcohol that could be used for all sorts of things (including biofuel). It was only by sheer luck and good science that it wasn't released, as it was discovered that it didn't care if the plants were alive or dead and produced alcohol by eating live plants, which, in turn, killed the plants and most everything in the soil but these bacterium.

Do you have any references to this? I would love to read more about this incident both professionally and for EP! Alien hockey-mask-kudzu is a fun idea. In most cases alien organisms are not a threat, and those that are can easily be managed. But there is always a risk of everything going wrong in the right way. Consider a diamond-based lifeform that absorbs carbon dioxide from air and manufactures more of itself when there are ambient electric fields or enough sunlight. On its home world, a cold gas giant moon, it just form dirty, glittering crusts and drifts on the ice. In a human habitat it starts to quietly replicate and evolve. At first it just adds to the dust load, but then things start to fail: it is abrasive, so sensitive mechanisms like robot joints or railguns will start to break. Carbon from the habitat biosphere starts to disappear into the dust, messing up the ecosystem. As it becomes more common it causes silicosis by irritating biomorph lungs. Breaking it down requires some heavy duty nanoswarms that need lots of energy and produce toxic by-products from broken lifeforms. Worse, they are evolving rapidly in this lovely new environment to make use of present resources...

Yes yes the ecological ramifications of novel extra solar organisms are unknown in the absence of extant competition. I believe the original point of nezumi.hebereke though was that you're not going to get "rigellian fever" or whatever visiting exoplanets. Your cell receptors, among other things are all wrong. To put it more succinctly; native earth pathogens are the result of millions of years of evolutionary pressure and adaptation. This makes them damn good at what they do (the losers aren't around anymore). Any non hyperadaptive (non TITANesque that is) pathogen will be just left scratching it's little microbal head saying what the hell is this and what am I supposed to do with it? While your immune system would scream "intruder" as soon as it shows up. Indeed analphylaxis would most likely be your greatest concern. Come to think of it as an aside, minor cellular difference has also probably been deliberately engineered into biomorphs. It would make them immune or highly resistant to most normal earth derived pathogens as well. Essentially to use an computer analogy if I take a PC and turn it into a weird PC/Mac hybrid with a custom OS, computer viruses presumably would have a harder time infecting it. This is actually a line of research I plan to pursue IRL at some point. Err the biological part not computers that is. I'm not even going to touch the D and L amino isomeric issue as Arenamontanus briefly mentioned. Although it amuses me to think of predators stopping to ask which you've got. And to address yet another earlier point yes EP is just a game. It's a game scientists play. That should be quite the complement. The high standards are one of the reasons I'm all over this. You could say I'm all over EP like Salmonella enterica subspecies arizonae on Varanus komodoensis. }: ) But you wouldn't say that cause it's goofy right? Hmm now that zoonoses has been mentioned I can't help but wonder what interesting "bugs" could actually exist and are floating around EP. Stuff that my dracomorphs have to be concerned about.

Adding to the scenario where "benign" life forms that isn't normally regarded as compatible or even parasitic, thriving where they "shouldn't". Fungus spores that thrives when stuck in air scrubbing filters. Algae & Spores clogging up various filtration systems. Inhaled tree seeds taking root inside lungs... http://www.stuff.co.nz/oddstuff/2339017/Tree-grows-inside-mans-lung They could also "accidentally" trigger allergic responses, because the (healthy paranoid) systems cant determine what it is & decides to take no chances. Especially when the remedy is worse than the initial problem.

It that must not be named wrote:

Even if an alien virus can't hijack a cell from an earthly organism the way a terrestrial virus can alien microbes could still be deadly, maybe they just eat your cells like little tiny versions of the blob, or they consume your organic molecules, of ,maybe a spore or mold gets into your lungs and grows, like histoplasmosis, or something starts growing on your skin like a fungus. AIDS patients get all sorts of things like that as their immune systems fail to stop them anymore. Alien microbes are a potential X threat, even if they may not be able to work like a "normal" virus. They may just eat you alive at the cellular or molecular level like you were nothing but a pile of nutrients for them if nothing else as your immune system fails to stop them.

Maybe they puncture your cell walls trying to get to your DNA to figure out what to do with you. In the mean time your body starts to fail from all the damage the alien virus is causing on accident. Think like a bull in a china shop.

Quincey Forder wrote:

but if viral and bacterial attacks are ineffective, what about toxins and animal venoms? if a gatecrasher got stung by an alien bug, would the bug's venom harm (if not kill) him?

Who knows. We have that problem here on earth now. I know I'm immune to Poison Ivy/Oak, but my mother breaks out if you get the stuff anywhere near her, and my father can't touch the stuff, yet some how it won't bother me in the slightest. Not even a minor itch or anything (made clothes washing a monster for my mom when I was a kid, as I didn't care what I got into...). For all we know alien venom might make us itch a little, do nothing, or make our heads swell up as it collects all the blood in our body until it explodes. So my answer is this: Get creative.

Axel the Chimeric wrote:

Yes, actually. Check out Klebsiella planticola (it's since been renamed to Raoultella planticola, but this occurred before that) for more details.

Cool! Of course, the original paper is a bit less exciting than cracked.com, http://infolib.hua.edu.vn/Fulltext/ChuyenDe/ChuyenDe07/CDe63/63.pdf but seems to have killed off the research quite strongly. Of course, being a bit of a blackhat, I guess various biowarfare agencies might have taken up investigation... For EP, this is a fine example of how you can sabotage a habitat discreetly. The local ecosystem is dwindling, yet there seems to be no link whatsoever with that tourist 6 months ago with slightly dirty jeans...

Quincey Forder wrote:

HAve you seen that movie about the group of people stuck in a groceries store when the town is invaded by a mist and the wicked insectoid creeps looming in there. At one time, a bug sneaks in and stung the hottie of the flick (well, one of them, at least!) the swelling that resulted was... damn just thinking about it still makes me shudder (just love the ending, tho!)

I'm more partial to the bite victim from Cloverfield. ;) But the point is, make stuff up. Unexpected reactions happen all the time.

I've just been doing some work on vCJD and BSE and the link between them with Prions. Doesn't have to be a bacteria or a virus to infect and reproduce. A prion (pretentious infectious particle) is a type of protein that is found normally within an organism that in some circumstances exhibits an abnormal shape - proteins are very complex, folded, 3d shapes. This abnormal folding can mean the protein becomes immune to the normal protein destroying enzymes and that it can pass through the cell membrane and cause proteins with the correct shape to spontaneously change into the infectious shape. This shape can't pass back through the cell wall, so the proteins just build up within the cell, as it produces the protein in its normal operation, until it ruptures, spilling the mass of altered proteins out to infect other cells.... This is thought to be what causes spongiform diseases like Scrapies in sheep, BSE in cows and various brain diseases in humans (CJD, vCJD, Kuru etc.). It has been shown that although rare, such proteins from one species can pass through the blood/brain barrier - the proteins are only found in the brain - usually after consumption of contaminated tissues, espacially those to do with the nervous system, endocrine system or organs. It is thought that this is how such diseases spread from sheep to cows to humans. There is a LOT more to it than that, of course - humans have been eating sheep for centuries, yet there are no documented cases of scrapies in humans, but we do seem to be suceptable to vCJD derrived from BSE, for instance - but it's another potential infectios angle. G. Edit 1: Another prion related disorder is FFI - Fatal Familial Insomnia. Google it. Scared the crap out of me. Edit 2: Time travel - same problem as getting a supermassive black hole and spinning it around. You can only go as far back in time as when you started mucking about with it. If I send my pandora gate off into space at near relativistic speeds now, even if time effectivly stops for the remote gate, the earliest I can go back in time is... well, now. Might be useful if I want to wait 200 years and then come back to now again, but of zero use to PC's right this second. Unless the find one that somone already set up, of course.

Prions are why I'm not allowed to give blood; I was in England during the Mad Cow scare. Given the long gestation times from consumption to appearance, if you've got it at all, I won't even have a clue if I've got it until my 30s-40s. Funniest part is, my family has this tradition of living to an old age, then dying with horrible mental degradation. Stories like a great aunt chasing my uncle with a butcher knife because her Alzheimers left her unable to recognize him, thinking he was a burglar, and the slow, terrible twilight of my great grandmother (which I was witness to) are just two of the more potent. If I develop it, it'd be something of a family tradition, really. That delightful fact aside, unexpected reactions can be all kinds of unusual too. They need not be dangerous or fatal. Or they can be, but in round-about ways. Imagine a plant which releases a defensive scent that is repulsive to animals on its homeworld but, in humans, induces feelings of religiosity, which only grow with the duration of exposure. Eventually, a group of argonauts are bowing down in worship before pagan altars, kneeling at carved wooden idols, and castigating the critical or unaffected as blind and faithless. Soon, the hunger for that religious sensation is all that matters to them, and one particularly charismatic and affected member of this cult remodels their morph in the image of the god, declaring themselves a prophet, and starts preaching the word of their unusual deity. Then, they start to explain that their god is unhappy with so many pagans in their midst, and that all disbelief must be removed... One way or another.

hi hi The time travel explanation on page 16 didn't sit right with me either, but in my campaigns I just hand wave it away and say that the gates somehow compensate for time dilation. However, saying that "Special relativity only applies locally," is just total nonsense. There is no preferred frame of reference. As for pathogens causing problems for people, I figure it is a 50/50 chance. Once you start getting alien where neither the body or the pathogen has any adaptations for or against each other, any damage from either side is going to be by accident.

Of course with all this "Alien microbes will KILL YOU" talk that's floating around, why not have it do other effects? Weird stuff that's ultimately harmless but might put people out of sorts until they can explain it. Say a Ruster morph (and it only affects Rusters) comes in contact with an alien microbe/venom/thing and his skin turns purple. Each morph type has it's own genetics, so in theory something could affect them all differently. What turns a Ruster purple might give a Bouncer a minor rash, cause a Neotenic to have explosive diarrhea, and cause a Fury to exude a weird pheromone that makes them VERY attractive to the local equivalent to a howler monkey. Have fun with it.

Arenamontanus wrote:

babayaga wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

Some of us use it to write science papers. (Seriously - a paper indirectly based on Think Before Asking is nearly finished)

This made me really curious... can you tell us (or at least tell ME :D ) more?

Right now Stuart Armstrong, me and Nick Bostrom have a manuscript tentatively called "The power of intelligence" (we need a *much* better title) about how to keep Oracle AIs in their boxes. It will likely be circulated when it is non-embarassing enough. Basically we describe a taxonomy of approaches to the problem and show why they are insufficient to guarantee anything.

Hmm, if you want to keep intelligence in a box, how about a title like "thinking inside the box"?

Thunderwave wrote:

Of course with all this "Alien microbes will KILL YOU" talk that's floating around, why not have it do other effects? Weird stuff that's ultimately harmless but might put people out of sorts until they can explain it. Say a Ruster morph (and it only affects Rusters) comes in contact with an alien microbe/venom/thing and his skin turns purple. Each morph type has it's own genetics, so in theory something could affect them all differently. What turns a Ruster purple might give a Bouncer a minor rash, cause a Neotenic to have explosive diarrhea, and cause a Fury to exude a weird pheromone that makes them VERY attractive to the local equivalent to a howler monkey. Have fun with it.

In "Fires of heaven", the EABA SFRPG, they have an effect caused by some alien spores that give certain humans psionic powers, but at the cost of eventual mental degeneration.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Quincey Forder wrote:

Another possible thing crashers may encounter is shapeless sentience, like living energy field, or conscious gazeous life forms, beings made of water or soil.

But how would they recognize it? IMO, most likely the cloud off of Corse is something like this.

I don't think so; the text implied pretty heavily that it's a part of the ETI's computronium network.

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Or maybe a macro-consciousness, like Eywa in Avatar, Nozoma Zekot in Star Wars, the Festum in Fefner Of The Azure (Soukyuu No Fefner), or Mogo in Green Lantern.

Bluewood and Moravec may be like this.

hi hi Another nitpick is that planets that are tidal locked would not have strong winds due to thermal differences. Granted there may be some other strange phenomenon causing the brisk winds on Sunrise, perhaps like how solar winds interact with Venus' upper atmosphere, but if the planet Earth were to become tide locked with the sun, we'd experience a gentle 3 mile an hour breeze (give or take) due to temperature gradient. Planetary rotation is the primary cause of surface wind.

I don't have [i]Gatecrashing[/i], but I've been dealing with the alien microbe business by treating it as a myth in 99.9998% of cases. There are maybe two or three planets in the galaxy that might have developed a species similar enough to humans (probably less similar than a koala, but still primatial enough) that it also has bacteria/viruses that may be of concern to transhumans. It requires some concession to the anthropic principle that Homo sapiens represents a naturally favorable path for evolution to take in producing a sapient species, but not ludicrously so, I like to think. Once one of these planets is encountered, precautions having relaxed in the face of the monotony of fearing such an improbability, you can imagine the panic that ensues. See the USA post-9/11 in regards to terrorism and multiply it by H+. Whewee! I won't touch time travel, though. At least, not into the past. Especially not now that string theory is looking less probable in light of the LHC. As far as I'm concerned, you [i]need[/i] string theory, and M-theory by extension, before 'travel into the past' can mean a damned thing.

icekatze wrote:

Another nitpick is that planets that are tidal locked would not have strong winds due to thermal differences. Granted there may be some other strange phenomenon causing the brisk winds on Sunrise, perhaps like how solar winds interact with Venus' upper atmosphere, but if the planet Earth were to become tide locked with the sun, we'd experience a gentle 3 mile an hour breeze (give or take) due to temperature gradient. Planetary rotation is the primary cause of surface wind.

This is not really true. See for example this paper, http://james.agu.org/index.php/JAMES/article/viewArticle/37 http://james.agu.org/index.php/JAMES/article/viewFile/37/111 which simulates what happens on water worlds. You get some fierce winds like on Venus. On a world with continents things get more complicated, of course. http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~tmerlis/animations.html http://weirdsciences.net/2010/10/25/on-the-habitability-of-gliese-581g-r... Climate and weather are weird.

hi hi Maybe I'm missing something, but those links you posted seem to be confirming my statement. "large-scale circulation cells transport fluid across hemispheric scales at speeds 1 m/s, comparable to typical wind speeds on Earth." So I was a little bit off, the wind speed would be a gentle breeze of about 2.23693629 miles per hour. I took some meteorology in college, it involves lots of calculus, but it isn't so weird as to be totally unpredictable.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

A minor nitpick, on p.39 regarding xenomicrobiology - the odds of anything on an alien planet even being compatible with us is very unlikely.

That's true, but there are both lots of the little buggers and lots of their species even on Earth. When you combine 5×10^30 little gene-swapping mutation machines (to use an approximate terrestrial bacterial population) with exposure to humans, you have lots of potential candidates to win "very unlikely," "miniscule," and "almost impossible" contests. Now, I'm not saying that your average explorer should fear coming down with a dozen new germs when stepping onto an alien planet, but the risk is not 0 when you're dealing with so many species of adaptable organisms. And, actually, I'd worry more about long-term exposure than an explorer passing through a planet. A colony gives germs decades rather than hours to adapt.

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I don't expect the designers to be rocket scientists (not that rocket science is that hard...)

I do have a guy with a masters of space systems engineering in my gaming group, though I don't regularly throw him fact checking questions. I can run some of the basic rocket science numbers myself, and did catch a problem with fuel volume-vs-ship volume in the basic book. (I don't know if the comments were incorporated, though. I've had some difficulty getting comments through.) The article on time travel is one of the trickier ones to review. There's a difference between truly checking for factual errors (relatively simple) and taking a strategic look at "does this article strategically fit into the larger picture of the book?" Spotting issues that players might wave off as "a strawman" when it's not fundamentally wrong can be tricky.