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Old 09-18-2017, 12:32 PM   #1
Tom Mazanec
 
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Default IW quarantining

Wouldn't a world traveler (jumper or conveyor) have to be quarantined for the rest of his/her life? Otherwise, how could you be sure that he/she was not a carrier of a virus with the mortality and morbidity of smallpox or ebola and the contagious incubation period of HIV?
EDIT: And the infectivity of measles or influenza.

Last edited by Tom Mazanec; 09-21-2017 at 11:07 AM.
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Old 09-18-2017, 12:41 PM   #2
Kelly Pedersen
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

I'd guess the answer is "Because that's no way to run an interworld service". Risk management is always going to be a matter of weighing the danger of something happening against its probability. If an event is sufficiently unlikely, it doesn't make sense to spend huge amounts of resources trying to prevent it. In the case of a super-disease, well, the chance certainly exists, but the planners at Infinity have probably decided that it's low enough, and that worlds infected with it would be obvious enough, that shutting down interworld travel entirely over such a chance isn't worth the cost.
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Old 09-18-2017, 01:10 PM   #3
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Though someone might want to enforce it and even get supporters for this in the ranks of IW and boom! IW: Civil War.
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Old 09-18-2017, 01:16 PM   #4
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Default Re: IW quarantining

A simple flu bug from any time line more than about 10 years apart may be fairly nasty.
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Old 09-18-2017, 01:31 PM   #5
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Default Re: IW quarantining

And yet that sort of thing isn't considered in IW.

Why?

Because Infinite Worlds has its roots in time cops stories, and the base stories either ignored disease because the controlling organization had medicine that was just that good, or disease was ignored, or the diseases for your destination were well known and you could thus prepare.

Its also worth noting that in last half of the 20th century, it was assumed that technology had beat the snot out of disease and would continue to do so. We're starting to see that confidence wane now, but the source materiel just let protagonists walk all over old man plague.

Not to mention that such a setting would be boring.
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Old 09-18-2017, 01:48 PM   #6
Dargaron
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Going off of ericthered's point:

Any crosstime agency has access to not only their own (presumably advanced) medicinal expertise, but a near-limitless corpus of remedies and treatments from already-explored parallels. A pathogen might have resistance to every trick in the Homeline toolkit: but what about the one where Alexander the Great conquered the world, and medical science went in a completely different direction? Or the one where Elves cultivate a magic flower that cures all (really most) ailments?

As the crosstime agency explores more parallels, the chance of an incurable pathogen decreases dramatically. Any virus/bacteria/whatever that a crosstime agent brings back has to contend with the sum total of human medical knowledge, multiplied several times over. I pity the fool.
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Old 09-18-2017, 02:13 PM   #7
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Or Infinity's dark secret, the first dozen of so worlds that got wiped out by a home line cold.
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Old 09-18-2017, 08:39 PM   #8
malloyd
 
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Quote:
Originally Posted by Kelly Pedersen View Post
I'd guess the answer is "Because that's no way to run an interworld service". Risk management is always going to be a matter of weighing the danger of something happening against its probability.
More or less. You could equally well say you should never let them return at all, because you never know they aren't carrying the Sun-Extinguishing-Curse, a magical effect that causes any star that illuminates them to instantly go out. Or leave in the first place, since the conveyer jump to a timeline with different physical laws that might allow it to serve as a bridge to let a universe collapsing force to propagate back to its world of origin. In a setting with as much weird stuff as Infinite Worlds you don't *know* those aren't real risks.

It's likely enough anybody making the first trip to a particular world-line does have to observe a quarantine, but the odds of a really hazardous problem that wouldn't show in the traditional 40 days are frankly pretty low.
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Old 09-18-2017, 09:55 PM   #9
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Default Re: IW quarantining

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dargaron View Post
Going off of ericthered's point:

Any crosstime agency has access to not only their own (presumably advanced) medicinal expertise, but a near-limitless corpus of remedies and treatments from already-explored parallels. A pathogen might have resistance to every trick in the Homeline toolkit: but what about the one where Alexander the Great conquered the world, and medical science went in a completely different direction? Or the one where Elves cultivate a magic flower that cures all (really most) ailments?

As the crosstime agency explores more parallels, the chance of an incurable pathogen decreases dramatically. Any virus/bacteria/whatever that a crosstime agent brings back has to contend with the sum total of human medical knowledge, multiplied several times over. I pity the fool.
I don't.

One of the hard lessons of life, that has been reinforced over and over and over in history, is that Mother Nature Always Wins. No matter how smart you are, no matter how much you know, sooner or later you get that curve ball you just can't hit.

As eritthered noted, there was a common assumption that Man had conquered disease in the mid-20C. I picture Mother Nature laughing and thinking, "OK, lesson time again. Let's see...retroviruses and antibiotic tolerance, combined with lateral gene transfer, ought to sober them up...."

That said...

Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd View Post
It's likely enough anybody making the first trip to a particular world-line does have to observe a quarantine, but the odds of a really hazardous problem that wouldn't show in the traditional 40 days are frankly pretty low.
This^^^.

I would say that a long quarantine period might be SOP for the first visitor to a new time line, and a shorter one for subsequent visitors to new areas of that other Earth. Details would alter cases. An alter-Earth with high-speed travel and that's blended into a single world-society might not need the extra time for new areas, a primitive one where there isn't much contact between the continents and regions would probably call for the extra quarantine for new areas.

If there were signs that a given time-line was especially risky, you'd take extra precautions, of course.
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Old 09-18-2017, 10:10 PM   #10
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Default Re: IW quarantining

From a GMing point of view infiltrating a time line while wearing a biological warfare suit presents lots of interesting challenges for the players to overcome.

Hmm what about various alien visitors just being world jumpers in encounter suits....
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