I had a thought this morning on the way to work, and this is a place to jot it down...so if you don't mind, I'll just go ahead and get this out of my "retention" area:

Alien life. I saw a movie on the Sci-Fi channel and it was about people growing corn in Alaska (using hydroponics). I can't remember the name of the movie. Premise was that aliens were infected with an organism that killed plant life on Earth (instantaneously). I'm pretty sure that that is why they had the corn fields, to be able to give the image of all these plants dieing as a human infected with the pathogen walked by.

What brought this up? Apparently in the UK they did a survey about who should be the ambassador to meet & greet alien life and Ozzie Osborn won with 26% (seems appropriate to me).

Anyway that got me thinking about alien life, and then it got me thinking about that movie on the Sci-Fi channel (it was quite good). Then I pondered our exploration on Mars (what kind of infection could be brought down from there). Then it was - "oh - only nutty people think that there will be any kind of catastrophic infectious agent from outer space." Then I thought about it again. Multi-cellular organisms (per evolution) are ipso-facto indicators of bacteria/single cellular organisms. Well, we have plenty nasty bugs here on the Earth (which means that contamination infection could work both ways) that we have a hard time dealing with (South America/Cortez...duh). So, why wouldn't aliens be a walking (or locomoting) highly infectious disease ridden organisms?

No reason for that to not be true. Of course there is the whole "well, their biology will be different from ours (we can only hope) in a significant way that would make it unlikely that stuff that grows on/in them will find us hospitable (and our stuff find them hospitable)." I think that that is a Pollyanna view point, because if they can visit Earth, and breath our atmosphere, that is a strong indication that they have a similar biological system to ours - enough to make any infectious agent (even benign to them) something that may find humans or some other species on Earth a nice place to live.

The point of the Sci-Fi movie was that the scientists infected themselves because they would not wait for a signal coming out of the "pod" to be translated (Let's open it NOW!). Of course the message was "DO NOT OPEN." The message was translated too late, and the site had to be sterilized with nukes. Point? Don't be rushing in thinking that you know everything that there is to know, when there are large indicators that you don't know diddly squat.

I'm done. Thanks. :D