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Old 04-20-2020, 06:58 PM   #41
maximara
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Sumter, SC
Default Re: [Star Trek like] number of planets and sapients

Quote:
Originally Posted by isf View Post
Possibly, that is pretty speculative. ST has progenitor/Preservers that have seeded terran life across the galaxy.
Microbes and viruses mutate at an insane rate and that is your biggest danger. Read Plagues and Peoples (1976) by William H. McNeill as it goes into the then brand new fundamentals regarding this and how they effected history on our own planet.

From Andromeda Strain:
"After consultation with astronomers and evolutionary theories, the Wildfire group concluded that bacteria could come from three sources [...]

The first was the most obvious-- an organism, from another planet or galaxy, which had the protection to survive the extremes of temperature and vacuum that existed in space."

Second, Earth organisms that left the surface of the earth eons ago.

"And if there were organisms out there, and if they had departed from the baking crust of the earth long before the first men appeared, then they would be foreign to man. No immunity, no adaptation, no antibodies would have been developed. They would be primitive aliens to modern man, in the same way that the shark, a primitive fish unchanged for a hundred million years, was alien and dangerous to modern man, invading the oceans for the first time."

"The third source of contamination, the third of the vectors, was at the same time the most likely and the most troublesome. This was contemporary earth organisms, taken into space by inadequately sterilized spacecraft. Once in space, the organisms would be exposed to harsh radiation, weightlessness, and other environmental forces that might exert a mutagenic effect, altering the organisms" So that when they came down, they would be different."


Quote:
Originally Posted by isf View Post
Yes, but ST like TL^ changes this for the most part. I do want to have a plausible non-TL^ base to then change as needed tough.
This is why I low-ball Star Trek Original Series to TL9^ - once you throw out the superscience that is more or less where the tech you are left with is at. Cranking Star Trek up to TL11^ is, IMNSHO, just being lazy...or not being that knowledgable about the material in the TOS show.
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Last edited by maximara; 04-20-2020 at 07:34 PM.
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