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starship-design: Re: Bugs again



Andrew wrote:

>It's clearly in the virus' worst interests to kill it's host off, which is
>why most deadly virii or bateria are mutations of "nuisance" diseases,
>which rarely killed, merely incapacitate/annoy.

Of course this balance has evolved over milions of years. On another planet
we are likely to be totally out of balance.

>The other sort of deadly virii are the sort I mentioned earlier, which come
>from other creatures.  These are badly adapted to living in their new
>hosts, and some tend to cause massive damage because of this.  So if the
>alien diseases were -just- compatable enough (eg, used to living in blood
>cells of a certain creature) then they would most probably prove fatal for
us.

But aren't we more hostile to these bacteria, as they are to us? Afterall,
they are strange to us, and we are strange to them. Except we have a
numerical advantage: our body has many many more cells to attack.
I've asked a similar question before. Who's likely to be attacked most
badly, the small critter in our big alien body, or we?

Timothy