07-11-2020, 06:31 PM | #31 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
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Dietary requirements and molecular drug targets are almost completely orthogonal. Even if we assume we won't be dealing with outright autotrophs it's perfectly realistic to be able to produce any given key biological feedstock from basic, common, and flexible starting materials. (Though it's probably realistic to expect naturally-evolved heterotrophic higher organisms to have accumulated some auxotrophies that are covered by their normal diet.) You could have an almost completely different biochemistry but use the exact same basic nutrients as a human, or you could (though probably not naturally) contrive to have almost completely human biochemistry but require a very special diet...even one that would be toxic or unnourishing to a normal human. While the notion of alien biochemistry tending to be randomly and accidentally inimical definitely has some pedigree in SF, I find it generally doubtful. Natural toxins are highly purposeful (in the sense that that applies to evolved features.) Our world is full of things that have been heavily selected to harm us or creatures similar to us. A biochemically different alien biota is full of things that have never in their entire evolutionary history had any possibility of being selected for ability to poison a Terran mammal. I'd be a lot less afraid to ingest any sort of alien sample than a random unidentified mushroom grabbed out of the woods. Immunology is more of a mystery box than toxicology, but if there was a convenient epitope that reliably killed humans with anaphylaxis I'd still say we'd be more likely to encounter it weaponized at home than randomly present in someone else's nature. (Which isn't to say that particular humans having or developing allergies to particular alien molecules would be unlikely.) If the description of the Martians I've found is correct, they did not and could not drink blood...they subsisted exclusively by transfusing blood from other species. To be a bit obvious, that's extremely weird. I'd think it suggests some major similarities of biochemistry (for them to be able to survive with a circulatory system full of human blood), and some major divergence (to be able to wring a useful amount of nourishment out of that...or to survive with a circulatory system full of non-human blood!)
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07-11-2020, 07:11 PM | #32 | |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
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07-11-2020, 07:19 PM | #33 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
I don't think "common source" does it. Humans and molluscs have a common source, a lot more recent than bacteria or the like, but we use hemoglobin and a lot of them use hemocyanin.
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07-11-2020, 08:56 PM | #34 |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
Being transfusion-compatible with both humans and at least one species of martian animal (livestock?) is a lot more of a stretch than just the coincidence of using (or tolerating) heme-based oxygen carriers. Martians are weird. Probably heavily engineered.
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07-12-2020, 05:45 AM | #35 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
Well, that's one way to approach it. But my own preference is to accept premises that have problems or no longer make sense in terms of present-day science, such as Lowellian "ancient, dying Mars" or the alchemical reanimation of dead tissues, as if they were true on their own terms, rather than trying to rationalize them in terms of present-day science. And after all, as far as GURPS mechanics is concerned, we don't need to come up with a scientific explanation; we just have to describe the observed facts game mechanically.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
07-12-2020, 12:52 PM | #36 | |
Join Date: Jul 2008
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
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My suggestion that an organism with no digestive organs that survives by technologically transfusing itself with alien blood didn't evolve to that state in nature is my own and I can't summon up the ghost of Wells to run it by him, but it seems entirely consistent with what we do know about them and within the scope of imagination at the time. I'm not sure what framework of late 19th century biochemistry you're suggesting we prefer for guiding our extrapolations. As far as I know there's zero canonical information about the consequences of dosing Martians with human drugs, so neither Unusual Biochemistry nor a lack of Unusual Biochemistry can be a matter of simply describing the observed facts.
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07-12-2020, 01:47 PM | #37 |
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Kentucky, USA
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
The War of the Worlds was written (1898) before the discovery of human blood groups (1901). So at the time it was written blood transfusion was risky and regarded as highly dubious. So the martian blood transfusions are as magical as the star trek warp drive.
As far as using Unusual Biochemistry, in my own games it tends to be restricted to strange mutant one-offs, things that don't have a proper medical tradition. For example, elves might have very different medicine than humans or orcs, but they don't have UB because they can go to an elven village to get proper medicine. That one elf who touched the Doom Crystal though, he has UB because who knows what will happen when he takes an elf aspirin.
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07-12-2020, 02:49 PM | #38 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: [Basic] Disadvantage of the Week: Unusual Biochemistry
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I'm not suggesting that "Martians have weird biology" is in any way contrary to Wells's point (nor am I discussing, here, what rule to use to represent it). I'm just saying that for us to say "Well, there would be problems of serum compatibility here, and you'd need elaborate genetic engineering to overcome them" is thinking in terms that weren't known when Wells wrote (compare the nearly contemporary Dracula, with Lucy receiving transfusions from several different untested donors and not having any problems); Wells wouldn't have been trying to avoid those issues in his narrative because they weren't well known. If I were representing this in game I wouldn't come up with some argument about biochemistry or immunology or genetics; I'd handwave the issue, as not in period. In GURPS terms, on one hand, I think that transfusing oneself with human blood is just a specialized form of eating; on the other, if you have to have blood, I'd call it Restricted Diet, probably Common (since the blood of virgins is Occasional). Being able to work with widely disparate blood sources is kind of like Universal Digestion, but kind of not, since it doesn't work with organic substances other than blood.
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