Lovecraft was right

[polaris93]

Could humans live on alien worlds the way they have on Earth from the beginnings of the hominid lineage?

Well, within the Solar System, so far there is just one world capable of supporting our kind of life -- Earth itself. But we could plant bases and even underground colonies on the Moon and Mars, even now -- it's only a matter of going through

Comments

[dexeron]

Clarke touches on this in 2061: the crash survivors on Europa bury one of their number at sea; some crazy shark creature eats the body. Later, the creature is seen thrashing about before dying: they realize then that fishing for their food is a bad idea, because of the incompatable body chemistries

[polaris93]

Hey, I wrote that as a stupid joke.

[brezhnev]

I figure that there will be many potentially Earthlike planets out there in which life hasn't developed yet. The atmospheres will likely be based on CO2, as it is for Venus, Mars (what's left of it), and Earth in earlier times. That, of course, is a job for blue green algae.

As for alien critters eating us, it is possible. But it's also possible that their bacteria just doesn't like us (and vice versa) because of chirality. If not, we might be especially susceptible to alien bugs because we've never been exposed to them before. But just as likely, their bugs wouldn't have evolved to take advantage of the vulnerabilities our cells have. An alien virus that tried to take over a cell of an earthly organism just wouldn't be able to hijack the cell mechanisms to reproduce itself, because whatever cellular exploits it uses would be incompatible; sort of like a PC virus having no effect on Mac OS.

[polaris93]

Hey, that whole thing was (mostly) a joke, with me setting it all up for the punchline. You're right, though: life on the rare Earth-like world (that is, as compared to Earth right now) would have evolved from different roots than Earthly life has. Therefore its microbes probably couldn't even begin to get a toehold into us, and the few that did could easily be slam-dunked by our immune systems. As for its larger life-forms, imagine the lethal allergic reaction one might have after eating part or all of a terrestrial organism! (I particularly recall Larry Niven's character Louis Wu telling somebody about the Gummidgy Reacher that died of such a reaction after tearing a strip from his hide -- that would happen far more often than not in Close Encounters of the Fifth kind, i.e., We Go Out There and Stake Claims.) On the other hand, you just never know, do you?