starship-design: Re: We need habitats

[Timothy van der Linden <TLG.van.der.Linden@tip.nl>]

Hello Kyle,

You wrote:
>After all, why risk a mission, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, to
>go to another star system if we aren't going to set up a colony there. As
>far as bio-contaminants, well maybe. But think of this: the proteins
>(if any) are probably different than ours, and thus probably won't have much
>of an effect on aliens (us).

Their proteins may be different, but it's quite likely that they use
several of the basic amino-acids that construct our proteins. Alien
bacteria may not care how our proteins in total look like, they will "chew"
on us and break the proteins down to basic amino-acids.
As long as we or our body can't kill the alien bacteria effectively, we are
out of luck.

Timothy

Sheliak@huizen.dds.nl