Intergalactic disease among humans

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by ULFGARD

Of course, in a mildly realistic campaign, they would have had to find translators for pretty much everyone they encountered.

Yeah that's one thing that always struck me about the show as it completely ignores one of the basic premises of the film (and the entire reason Jackson is even there). That bugged me almost as much as the completely bizarre changes to O'Neil; rendering him, IMO, unrecognizable as the same character. Between these two it took me forever to like the show.

[dcarson]

If I ever run a Stargate campaign the assumption will be that all the human planets speak gao'uld. Some places the language has drifted enough that you use the accented rules. A few planets managed to revert to a mangled version of whatever language their ancestors spoke before they were taken but even then you will find enough that also speak gao'uld to get by. So reasonable skill in gao'uld will be required for all first contact/exploration team members.

[teviet]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Yeah that's one thing that always struck me about the show as it completely ignores one of the basic premises of the film (and the entire reason Jackson is even there). That bugged me almost as much as the completely bizarre changes to O'Neil; rendering him, IMO, unrecognizable as the same character. Between these two it took me forever to like the show.

Bugged me for a while too, but eventually I partitioned it away as dramatic necessity or imposition from outside the 4th wall, like rubber-suit humanoid aliens, or English-speaking movie-Nazis. That is, what "really" happens is that they're all speaking their own language, or Goa'uld, and Daniel or Teal'c is translating, but we're watching the substantially-equivalent abridged version of the story.

And, as DPC points out, they do address these things in some episodes; basically saying "We know that this is an issue, and we've thought of ways of dealing with it, we just don't want to spend every freakin' episode dealing with it".

TeV

[Lord Carnifex]

It would seem to pretty well parallel humans living on different continents being exposed to different diseases. As I recall, Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas and brought syphilis back with them.

I'd expect interstellar disease transmission would be similar. If the seperate ecosystems are compatible enough for humans to eat the food and survive, then they're probably compatible enough for diseases to evolve that can infect humans.

So humans show up on a planet, move in, and come down with local diseases. Either the disease is nasty enough to kill them all off, or it becomes part of their day to day life.* If they're in regular conyact with humans onother worlds, there's a good chance that they'll infect those other worlds.

Worlds that don't interactwith other worlds likely will have reduced immunity to offworld diseases, and will have diseases to which other worlds have little or no immunity.

*It may be important to note that there's a certain evolutionary pressure for a disease to kill off too many of its hosts too quickly. Diseases that do don't get a chance to propagate themselves and die off. Usually, either a disease dosen't kill people (Human rhinovirus), doesn't kill everybody (bubonic plague) or takes a while to kill the host (HIV). A disease that kills 100% of people within a few days isn't going to be spread and will die off itself.