Overused Silly Sci-Fi Science.

[Latinandgreek]

Originally Posted by Iphinome

Tvtropes will ruin your life....

Oh no. You mentioned the tvtropes site... My day is shot - it is a sweet, sweet addiction!

[WT Sharpe]

In one of the Space Odyssey books, Arther C. Clark describes an astronaut being eaten by an alien life form. A few minutes later, the alien regurgitates the astronaut, and promptly dies. The other aliens of the same species then leave the astronauts alone, having seen what happened to their comrade. Obviously the DNA was totally incompatible.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by VydorScope

Star Trek theorizes that all alliens in their universe share a common ancestor. Some modern scientist today believe life on earth was seeded from space, via a comet or something. So I could easily see how some would say that the Star Trek idea is possible/reasonable. In that case, then the vast majority of popular sci fi writers are vindicated.

I believe the theory exists in religion as well; its called "panspermia."

I seriously hope MobileRead doesn't have a censorbot that's going to freak out over a certain particle inside that word.

Anyway, its the idea that the "seeds of life" (trigger Beavis & Butthead reaction) were scattered all over the known and unknown universe by some thing. Its also a way to write creationist sci-fi if you wanted to, by having the god of your choice do the seeding.

[b0ned0me]

Originally Posted by Ekaros

Relative speeds haven't been too much thought... Or I haven't red anything yet...

Try Neal Asher's 'Polity' series, in which much interstellar travel revolves around 'runcibles' which are massive teleportation stations. They are massive because they need to not only fling travellers in and out of hyperspace, but also to inject/absorb the kinetic energy of the travellers. E.g. someone coming 'in' from further out in the galactic arm will have a huge vector from the relative motion of their solar system, in addition to whatever vector they picked up from the orbit of the planet they left. Runcibles that have to handle a lot of 'inbound' traffic are put on frozen worlds so they can be thawed out and terraformed with the energy dumped from the runcible buffers. Runcible mishaps result in travellers being directly converted to several megatons worth of pure energy.
Also, you can establish runcible links backward or forward in time, but this is not recommended since they start to drain the 'real' universe of energy, and release it all again when the link is severed.

[QuantumIguana]

Alien life would almost certainly be alien to the point that viruses couldn't infect them even if they did share some chemical processes. We share some of the same chemical processes with plants, but no plant virus is ever going to infect a human. A gulf exists between plants and humans, even though both are distantly related. Even if an alien looked like us, they would be quite different.

The panspermia hypothesis is plausible, but even if it turns out to be true, life on the two planets would have a common ancestor as distant as bacteria. This might lead to greater similarity between life on the two planets than if life had begun separately, but they would still be quite alien.

[altworld]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Of course, the fly in Well's ointment was that no microbes of any type had ever evolved on Mars; a rather fantastic proposal. That the Martians could have been destroyed by Earth bacteria which was foreign to their systems is perfectly reasonable, but for a species to have evolved on a planet where no bacterial life of any kind had evolved is a stretch.

Weren't the Invaders from Mars actually implied to have invaded Mars first? Or am I getting something mixed up here?

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by altworld

Weren't the Invaders from Mars actually implied to have invaded Mars first? Or am I getting something mixed up here?

I don't recall that, but it wouldn't solve the problem of why there was no microbial life of any kind in their systems. pushes the question to another planet.

[altworld]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I don't recall that, but it wouldn't solve the problem of why there was no microbial life of any kind in their systems. I only pushes the question to another planet.

Perhaps it was a MacGuffin? A plot device used to stop the unstoppable when a writer writes himself into a corner against an relentless implacable foe.

[dworth]

IIRC Wells was drawing comparisons between what happened to indigenous populations when they encountered European colonial powers, except that he turned the tables and had the conquerors wiped out by viruses, rather than the conquered (having previously turned the tables on the British Empire by having it conquered in a matter of days by alien invaders wielding superior technology).

Fantastic book. I'd love it if someone did a faithful, big budget film adaptation rather than yet again setting it in the modern day US.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by altworld

Perhaps it was a MacGuffin? A plot device used to stop the unstoppable when a writer writes himself into a corner against an relentless implacable foe.

Thanks for that. I had to look up the definition of a MacGuffin.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by dworth

IIRC Wells was drawing comparisons between what happened to indigenous populations when they encountered European colonial powers, except that he turned the tables and had the conquerors wiped out by viruses, rather than the conquered (having previously turned the tables on the British Empire by having it conquered in a matter of days by alien invaders wielding superior technology).

Fantastic book. I'd love it if someone did a faithful, big budget film adaptation rather than yet again setting it in the modern day US.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

You're still assuming aliens would be, well... alien. I'm not saying it is a terrible assumption but our experience suggests the opposite isn't a terrible assumption either.

But our "experience" doesn't extend beyond this planet. I don't think we can assume aliens would be like us, just because "us" is the only life-form we know.

Originally Posted by altworld

Weren't the Invaders from Mars actually implied to have invaded Mars first? Or am I getting something mixed up here?

That wasn't in Wells' original book (and I don't recall such an implication in the Thomas Edison Conquers Mars "sequel").

[Penforhire]

My argument is there should not be a strong bias either way, or in context of this thread either trope (like us/totally unlike us) is valid. We do have some related experience in surveying other planets and in that we're not seeing radio emissions from nearby stars.

As some of our great philosophers already postulated, life is either extremely rare, it gets squashed by some force/other, or we're living in a simulation. Okay, there is another anthropomorphic answer, we just 'arrived' sooner than all those other intelligent aliens we haven't discovered. I just find that more unlikely than to say life really is just that rare.

[WT Sharpe]

Given that the Universe has been around for around 14 billion years, I don't think it's likely that we're the first to achieve our level of technology. Given that we've so far found no trace of any other civilization, I do think it highly likely that technological societies can only advance so far before they self-destruct.

As to the idea that we're living in a computer simulation; well, it does explain a lot. Like why my drink glass was on the bookcase when I distinctly remember leaving it on the counter.

[VydorScope]

I personally believe that IF life is out there, it would be exceedingly rare. The universe is a very dangerous place with huge sections of it being routinely sterilized by one cosmic scale event or another. While I typed this message for example another GRB has gonne off and wiped out a section of a galaxy. Had it be in the Milkway, you would not be reading this message right now...