noise."Story Notes: Onto the Pony Planet Chapter 33 · 3:31am Nov 8th, 2018
As always, I’ll start by thanking my pre-readers: AShadowOfCygnus, metallusionismagic, MSPiper, and MrZJunior! Especially MSPiper; he found a rather significant continuity error that I somehow managed to completely miss, and thus saved me from having to make future reactions and a blog post explaining just how I’d managed to screw up.
This is gonna be one of those rare occasions where I actually have little to say. Not only was there not a lot of research that wound up going into this chapter, but perhaps the biggest bit of research one of my pre-readers actually did.
We’ll start off with the inflatable boat. One of the brands of inflatable is Zodiac, and like many other brand names, small rigid-hull inflatable boats are often called Zodiacs (at least in my part of the world) regardless of who actually manufactured it.
They’re available in all sorts of sizes and configurations, of course, but most people who just use them for ferrying stuff from a big boat to shore (and presumably in an emergency) often go with the smallest, simplest one.
These days, a lot of smaller boats have davits to hold them on the stern, but when I was a kid, I remember seeing some sailboats towing their Zodiac behind them as they went out into Lake Huron.
Demis is the name of the minotaur bull that Lyra hosted when she was a student at the conservatory. Y’all know by now that I’m not terribly good at coming up with names, so I figured that since I’d pretty much emptied the well when it came to semi-famous minotaur names, I ought to just go with something that sounded Greek.
And while I was at it, to narrow the search, I might as well find a name that was associated with a singer.
Thus we have Demis. Named after Demis Roussos, because he looked like the kind of guy who might have been a minotaur in a different life.
Baraq and Caelum are of course approximations by Dr. Dillamond as to what Viridian and Cerulean’s names are. One free internet to anyone who figures out the source of those names.
We’ve of course already met most of the professors. I’m reasonably sure I’ve blogged about Dr. Jaylen Cresida before, as well as Dr. Forsyth, Dr. Dillamond. Dr. Carter Clay is named after my theatre stagecraft professor, who wasn’t so good at scholarly stuff, but was a damned good welder. Dr. Sophia Yin is named after a famous veterinarian and animal behaviorist; Dr. Wight (who’s briefly mentioned) is more commonly known by the pseudonym of James Harriot.
Finally, we come to the last topic, the one that MSPiper did most of the research on. Namely, what killed the aliens in War of the Worlds?
I thought--and one of the characters says--that it was a virus. MSPiper pointed out that when the book was published, viruses hadn’t been discovered yet, and therefore it wasn’t a virus.
Being lazy, and already at my computer, I just googled it rather than drag up my print copy*, and decided that the mention of a ‘pathogen’ could have been a virus or a bacteria. MSPiper went above and beyond, and found several sections of text that specifically refer to bacteria:
[...] And scattered about it, some in their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians—dead!—slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; [...]
[...] But by virtue of this natural selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.[...]
Now, we could split hairs here. Since viruses hadn’t yet been discovered when Wells wrote the book, people of the time could have ascribed viral illnesses to bacteria.
We could also take exception to the idea that there are no bacteria in Mars. While I don’t know if we’ve discovered any just yet, to me at least it seems possible given the other harsh environments that bacteria can live in that there might very well be bacteria on Mars, although of course they would not be the same ones that exist on Earth.
Either way, the fact is that in the original text, it was bacteria. Full stop.
Also worth noting in the text that MSPiper found is the word putrefactive. That’s a nice old word that ought to be used more often, IMHO.
___________________________________
*my print copy was presumably at the end of one of the runs; there are places in the book where the typesetting has gone wrong, and the letters just kind of trail off the bottom of the page rather than being in a neat row like they should be.
EDIT: As is always the case with these, I forgot something important. Uncle Mike was helpful in discussing what obligations the professors had when dealing with a former crime scene. The basic gist of it is that the professors should indeed know better, and should turn any evidence over to the State Police or the FBI; however, since they’ve been at least informally folded into the investigation, they might get a legal pass on that.
Hrmmmmm
Uhh, no thanks. I get to see (and smell) enough putrefaction on the day job.
4964674
Okay, yeah, fair point. You get a pass on that word.
Personally, I think this is the most likely explanation. Alien diseases are potentially lethal to organisms that have never previously encountered them.
4964674
Also, I forgot to thank you in the blog post for giving me info about whether or not the professors were culpable for tampering with evidence. Said thank you has now been added.
Fiat Ivstitia rvat cælvm?
Pretty sure H.G. Wells is in the public domain now. Hit up Project Gutenberg.
https://xkcd.com/1589/
I'm pretty confident you callend him Thavros back then. It striked me 'cause I thought it was a reference to Homestuck.
4964674
Bones > CSI
If a court officer ever asks you if you watch CSI when selecting a jury, the best response is "Enough to know it's bullshit."
Still, has anyone thought to invite William Petersen to an actual Furfest or Anthrocon? Because 'that' episode is more amusing than offensive.
Why do the coasts get all the procedural dramas? It's time the Midwest gets an epic non-Fargo procedural show. NCIS Duluth would be pretty cool. I mean, Minneapolis and Detroit both have higher homicide rates than LA.
They are professors, but they're also human; the only difference between them and other people is how big the words are between "we shouldn't do this," and "let's do it anyway."
Having no linguistic experience we think it sounds Gaelic.
Edit: this of course, because Google says it's a Latin word, and we want to avoid a face-value assumption.
Oh my God that Lyra is so cute!
I guess lazy is one word. Another would be sensible, or efficient
In some ways, I've often felt like the concept of alien diseases being super fatal to organisms alien to that environment somewhat wrong. While its true that bacteria and viruses can and do crossover from other animals into us, every organism on earth shares a common evolutionary history, and often times something like a virus is using the same receptors, and same cellular machinery to make more of itself. Viruses and bacteria are all around us, and rarely do we actually end up sick from them.
Bacteria are perhaps more adaptable, its true, but even here there's limitations. Most bacteria aren't capable of behaving like pathogens, they usually require particular 'pathogenicity' islands, or virulence factors (often these can be things like the ability to stick to surfaces, or toxins). I would imagine it would be difficult for the bacteria to infect an alien too.
The generic term is rigid-hull inflatable boat, or RHIB.
Lyra is a fluffy pony and I want to hug her.
Thanks for updating this, Admiral, I've been waiting for it and it was worth the wait.
4964698
The War Of The Worlds is indeed on Project Gutenberg. If I
had wanted to cheathadn't wanted to take the excuse to dig out my family's copy from when I was a kid, I could've just pulled that up and used find to jump to all five of its mentions of bacteria in about thirty seconds. And I did just copy the quotes from there rather than typing them out, partly out oflazinessefficiency (thanks for the backup, 4964788!) and partly to make sure I didn't mess up the formatting (which ended up a bit moot since I then had to break it for clarity in the GDocs comment, but oh well).So in this case the credit in the blog post is a bit more laudatory than justified, as I already knew enough that (discounting the time from reading the text the old-fashioned way) the total research ended up taking about five minutes, since I pretty much just had to double-check a couple of things. But that's how research and credit seem to go: sometimes you do hardly any work and get a lot of credit, other times you spend an hour researching a single word and don't get any since nobody even has a chance to realize you did anything, and in the long run they tend to more-or-less even out.
4964727
Uhh... no offense, but I am a CSI IRL (more precisely, a Forensic Scientist - Latent Print Examiner, with secondary duty as a Forensic Crime Scene Analyst, by job title). But, yessir, I concur in your assessment of entertainment featuring police procedurals and forensic science - my family doesn't allow me to sit with them whilst they watch CSI or NCIS, any more than they allowed my late father-in-law (a physician) to sit with them while they watched ER or St. Elsewhere... They got tired of Charlie and I growling, "Bullshit!" (often in unison) when we saw something particularly idiotic...
4965162
Cool. Ever consider going to Anthrocon in uniform?
I've been in IT my entire life and CSI Cyber was pretty funny. A shame it was cancelled.
4964791
I think the chance that an alien pathogen is capable of infecting us is lower, but if one does then the chance of it being pandemic levels of dangerous is much much higher.
4965331
Everyone who hasn't seen The Andromeda Strain should check it out.
One of those rare cases where the movie is better than the book.
4965333
I haven't read the book or seen the original movie. I've only seen the 2008 miniseries, and spoilers: none of it is actually alien. I understand that's not the case in the original.
4965348
We don't talk about that POS.
4965057
*Polite nod of recognition*
4964685
In regards to the bacteria/virus thing, bacteria were the better choice as most viruses don't jump species.
Martians would had been perfectly safe against them.
4965333
That is extremely rare, except for Michael Crichton books.
4965204
Sadly, no. A) It's not something I'm into (not judging, you understand, just not into the anthropomorphic scene), so I'm not inclined to spend money on it; B) my agency has no sense of humor at all and takes an extremely dim view of wearing official clothing and equipment to social functions, except in line of duty.
Nothing stopping someone who isn't employed by an agency with no sense of humor from cosplaying someone like me, though.
Regarding Roman graffiti, even the low classes were fairly literate and well-educated; cheekily paraphrasing Vergil like shitty meme mutations these days and stuff.
sites.google.com/site/phersuminiatures/_/rsrc/1304506095415/galleries/monty-python---life-of-brian/01%20Romanes%20eunt%20domus%20large.jpg
If one reads the works of Wells, 1 thread running through them is the elimination of disease in the future or alternate universes (probably not possible, but a SciFiAuthor can dream). The Martians eliminated bacterial disease so long ago that they forgot that bacterial disease even exists. They came to Earth and found that they can breathe our air and feed on human blood, and did so while taking no precautions. They got sick and died.
4964688
It’s of course equally possible that they have no effect whatsoever, since whatever they target doesn’t exist on another planet.
I think it would be safer to assume potential lethality, but Mars bacteria might immediately die in our high-pressure atmosphere, or might only be able to eat rocks, or who knows what.
4964697
Not exactly . . . although that is a nice phrase.
I’m reasonably sure he is, too, and I did do some skimming of the text online, but that’s not as nice as having a proper book in my hands.
4964712
I think that was a different minotaur, but I’m not 100% sure. I might have forgotten . . . I think if he was named earlier, it was a long time ago.
4964740
Yeah, and since they’re already out there, they’d be fools to not do it. After all, if they don’t, someone else might.
4964741
One of them is in fact Latin (and Dan noticed that, too).
4964782
Isn’t she just? Fluffy Lyra.
4964788
It really depends on how prepared I am for a particular topic in terms of knowing where the right research materials are. Like, for horse harness questions, I’d get one of my print books ‘cause I know right where those are and can find the information faster than I can online. War of the Worlds, that’s in one of three different places, and I’m not sure which.
4964791
Yeah, as I recall most viruses are pretty specific and not able to cross species boundaries, at least not between diverse species, and like you point out, there’s a certain evolutionary commonality between all living species on Earth that probably wouldn’t be present with a completely alien species (or it might be; we don’t know . . . it could be that the building blocks of life on Earth are the only ones that work anywhere in the universe, although that seems really unlikely to me). As I recall, viruses are somewhat less adaptable than bacteria, but I might be wrong about that.
I think way back when, another reader and I were discussing chirality and what effect that might have. I think that in the case of this universe, ponies and humans would have to be reasonably similar, since otherwise Dale couldn’t eat any Equestrian food, which does to me--a rather ignorant layman--tip the scales towards the possibility of their being potential pathogen problems between species.
While I am very much not an expert, I’d figure that there are better odds of a bacteria doing something than a virus. From what I remember of how viruses work, things have to be pretty similar for the virus to have any luck at infection, whereas a bacteria might be able to thrive on (or in) something that’s close enough to what it’s used to.
4964805
Thank you! Correction added in the blog.
4964825
Lyra is a fluffy pony and everybody wants to hug her.
4965043
You’re welcome!
4966550
I can't remember the chapter, but it was a part narrated from Lyra's point of view and she "said" something like "That time with Tavros was an exception" while thinking about having relationship with other species. I may have been extrapolating it to be the minautors though, it really is far away in my memories. It is possible even it was in CSI rather then OPP.
4965057
I’ve found it’s the same is true when researching stuff for chapters, too. Some things it’s pretty easy to find or pretty easy to settle the debate; other times it takes hours upon hours to find something silly and mundane and it’s a detail that could probably have been skipped over anyway.
ETA: I’m theorizing about airship technology with another writer on Discord, and at one point all the esoteric knowledge I had about hard hat diving suits, trains, airplanes, and boats, all coalesced into one shining moment where I could instantly answer a question about how you’d control the pressure of the envelope automatically. It took me about ten seconds to answer the question, although said answer came after literally thousands of hours of research and experience.
4965331
I’d agree. Odds are it isn’t going to be dangerous at all to humans, no matter how dangerous it might be to ponies . . . but if it is dangerous to humans, than it’s going to be really, really bad.
4965631
Most don’t, yeah, but some do. From a modern-day standpoint, I think I’d be more worried about bacteria than viruses, but I also certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility that an alien virus could infect a human (or some other species).
4965727
As Simon and Garfunkel so wisely said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.
4966057
As I recall from my tenuous grasp of microbiology, if you wiped out all bacteria on Earth, you’d wipe out all life on Earth.
4966566
I think it was in CSI; I think that that’s something she might have said to Twilight when they were talking about how to prepare for her second trip to Earth. But I’m not 100% sure; I’d have to go back and look.
I do remember that there was a minotaur bull named Tarvos or Travos or something like that earlier on in the story--your memory isn’t wrong on that. I just don’t think it was Lyra’s temporary roommate, but I could very much be wrong about that.
4966579
Indeed, but Wells dreamed of wiping out disease and his books had disease-free futures, disease-free alternate Earths, and disease-free alien worlds.
4966582
He also had time machines, and we all know that you can’t build a machine that goes into the past because if you do, you’ll wind up as your own grandpa.