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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

There's a concept in domestication that it's not always clear in a symbiotic relationship as to which party is in 'control' of the relationship, especially when one party gets a huge boost in reproductive rates from the other. Did humans domesticate dogs, or did dogs domesticate humans?

Viruses are specialized. They won't attack aliens. Bacteria might. It's the fungi in many respects that are the masters of this planet. If we manage to destroy ourselves so badly that we take out most multicellular organisms as well, it'll be the fungi that rebuild the ecology.

It'll probably be the fungi that the aliens have to worry about too.

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Viruses will attack anything they can successfully reproduce in, they have absolutely no preferences. They are binary, they survive and thrive or they don't. That's why some viruses can sucessfully jump species, and some can't, some viruses are able to survive in multiple hosts through dumb luck. Yes, they all need specific types of conditions in their hosts to survive, but they don't care if it's a big, a dog, a human, or an alien. If it gets what it needs, it'll go there.

Note: I'm not saying viruses don't have conditions they need met, they do, obviously. I'm saying they can attack an alien just as likely as they can a human.

Viruses have evolved to hijack DNA- I'd find it highly unlikely a truly alien biology would be susceptible to earth viruses. Maybe some truly primitive precursor virus may have been able to, but I'd think any of those would be long gone.

We have no idea if they'll be DNA based or not, but there's a nonzero chance they might. If Earth found DNA the easiest path, so might another world.

DNA is "translated" from code to proteins using codons. There's a very good chance that the codons used would be completely different from our own, disrupting viral replication.

But will the alien viruses attack us?

If they operate on a chemical/biological structure that humans have then yes. Just nobody go designing viruses for hypothetical aliens, ok?

We don't really know whether other forms of life would use proteins, or make the same ones the same way we do.

Both of those things are important to all of the viruses we have experience with.

Proteins are just groups of amino acids which occur in stellar nebulae. It could easily be a widely used building block of life.

I'm saying they can attack an alien just as likely as they can a human.

For that to be true, you need some governing rule of life, not 'could easily be a widely used'.

(You'll note, I phrased my other reply in terms of us not knowing)

Yes, viruses don't care. But at the same time, I am doubtful that they could.

This is one of the things that I like about the expanse series. When people first start moving out to alien ecosystems, they specifically go into how alien viruses etc are probably not going to be a problem. The metaphor they use is "mining" basically. Where they're not concerned that people will get infected, but they're concerned that some organism will find out that people are full of some resource that the organism can use.

And in fact they bump into some sort of algae that lives in the atmosphere that really likes the saline mixture that makes up most of the liquid in our bodies.

I’ve never heard of the Expanse series but your mining comment is both terrifying and intriguing! DuckDuckGo tells me it’s both a series of novels and a Syfy TV series - I’m curious which one (or perhaps both?) you’re referring to so I can add it to my read and/or watch list.

They both tell more or less the same story (the show is based on the books) but I believe they were referring to the tv show.

I experienced the Expanse by watching the first season, binging all the books because I was impatient, then watching the rest with my partner.

I feel I've gotten the best of both by doing that.

I prefer the books but the episodes I saw were all really good. I think I watched to seasson 3.

The series is streaming on Amazon Prime, FYI

> which party is in 'control' of the relationship

Any one taking care of a cat knows this well.

It's the toxoplasmosis in control, right?

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