Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: Zero_Messiah on April 10, 2011, 02:20:58 PM
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This topic was specifically created to point out one of the more extreme moments in Animorphs where even 'normal' suspension of disbelief is unlikely.
That is, how nearly every alien that ever goes to Earth, does not encounter any problems.
Andalites enter the earth and are completely unaffected by the different composition of air. They eat the grass of earth with no side effects.
Hork Bajir, same thing. They don't need a special mixture of air (despite being raised to live on a planet which got hit by a meteor) nor do they have problems with earth trees (though admittedly, they taste worse than homeworld trees).
The Yeerks are probably the only one who ever has problems as a result of earth; they go insane from instant oatmeal, and chlorine burns away their protective slime. But that's it.
The worst violator of this, would be Visser Three. He morphs aliens which are dangerous, but more importantly, are from other planets. Planets that they were built to live on; transporting those aliens into earth's enviroment and not getting any sort of biological problems is extremely implausible (yes, the entire series is implausible, I get it, but if they did so much research into animals, they'd probably should have realized animals don't do well outside of their natural habitat, nevermind their natural planet)
The group goes into Leera in book 18, and miraculously, are unaffected by the composition of water and air.
You may think this is a small issue, but even plants on earth have areas that they can grow in, and anywhere else, they literally die. And plants are simple when compared to biological animals, whom have gone through millions of years of evolution to live in a very specific type of enviroment; Earth.
So wouldn't it be extremely unlikely that Visser Three often morphs a random creature (because really, it's not like he makes an active decision on which to pick; he just decides what's deadly enough for this situation and proceeds to morph into it) and doesn't slowly keel over when he realizes that the creature he morphed was probably not built to live on another planet? (You could even argue that there is no reason for him to morph, considering how his andalite form was probably the most dangerous battle morph he could have ever chosen)
It's not like this issue is completely ignored by the authors, either. Marco has morphed trout (freshwater fish) in seawater, and he proceeds to slowly die. he manages to demorph later. Meanwhile, the aliens who have absolutely no biological defenses to earth's disease and elemental composition literally just stroll through without so much as a cough. Ax doesn't get any human diseases, despite his sanitary conditions. He doesn't even get animal diseases. It would have been soo easy for him to get rabies, and that would have been an Ax I did not want to meet.
Does this ualify as a KASU, or just immense suspension of disbelief?
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This is actually a very good point, although since it's a common thing in many sci-fi I think it qualifies as suspension of disbelief. You are right though, as it's incredibly unlikely that the ratio of oxygen to other gases is almost identical on all these worlds. Even more unlikely is the lack of alien bacteria affecting humans and Earth bacteria affecting aliens.
However, it is possible that Ax's infected Tria gland problem (see #29) was a result of being exposed to various Earth bacteria for a prolonged period of time. Very few other Andalites have spent as much time on Earth as he has after all (Visser Three is usually in orbit).
As you said, Yeerks are harmed by chlorinated water, but so were the Hork-Bajir hosts in Visser when they tried to drink from a recently cleaned swimming pool.
It would've been very interesting to see more of this kind of this in the series though. Perhaps a Hork-Bajir/Taxxon being temporarily disabled by a common infection or finding out Andalites are allergic to a particular Earth plant. It's certainly worth considering for a fanfic.
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....mmmm, a little of both and neither me thinks.
Lots of animals are specialist, and thrive best in certain areas, but a lot can still survive almost anywhere. Doves will dwell on mountain tops and cities and deserts, high altitude mammals can be brought down and reared in shore-side zoos, you'll even find some toads out in the desert. Thing is most of the time when we think about animals in an environment, we think about specialized for that environment, but for the most part species are generalist: they have theri favorite areas, but they can still exist pretty much anywhere within a certain scope, even if they are a bit uncomfortable.
Yeerks being endoparasites-well once you get over the fact that they can infest most brains-the environment is no biggie.
The hork-bajir where built to sustain a liveable environment-the Arn probably had to set up the trees, but added the Hork-bajir as cultivators.
Ax does get sick the one time-maybe it's just good general immunity, but the same factors that make him vulnerable may also help him: plenty of diseases are specials, and wouldn't do anything to the wrong host.
V3 does bring up an annoying issue, but again, we only see his morphs for intervals measured in minutes-who knows how they're requirements are really meet.
For me, the suspension comes into the fact of everything being life as we know it. Everything is DNA based (except the Venber, but the ones we see are hybrids) so there are some qualifiers, but KA plays it up that the requirements for life are the same everywhere with specializations needed for marcoenvironments (salt water vs fresh vs land-and most of what we get is terrestrial) which always irked me. Assuming their was no seed spreader before the pemalites and the ellimist, Andalites are more closely related to andalite world grass then any earth animal-and the necessity and repetition of forms being so...understandable and earth-like seems unduly limiting to me.
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You'd be pretty surprised what kinds of conditions life can survive in. Did you know that they brought back a piece of equipment that had gone to the moon and stayed there for at least three years (I think it was actually longer than that, but I don't remember for sure), tested it, and found living bacteria on it? Granted, bacteria are a lot sturdier than most vertebrate life, but it goes to show that life will always surprise you.
I highly doubt that the Animorphs aliens are as survivable as bacteria, but they may or may not be better equipped than earth vertebrates. Hork-bajir, in particular, were genetically engineered to survive on a planet with a recovering atmosphere, so you'd think they'd be able to cope with some pretty big fluctuations in atmospheric composition.
There's also a theory which says that multicellular life owes its existence to the presence of oxygen in earth's atmosphere. I'm not really clear on why that ought to be the case, but it is true that there is a curious correlation between when oxygen showed up in earth's atmosphere, and when multicellular life showed up very shortly afterwards. Correlation doesn't imply causation and all that, but it's still an interesting coincidence. And if it is true, then multicellular life (which all Animorphs aliens clearly are) has at least one common environmental necessity: oxygen. And most of earth's other gases are either nonreactive enough, or present in small enough quantities, or so ubiquitous in the universe that if they were poisonous to you then you couldn't live anywhere, that it's at least conceivable that any alien could at least theoretically adjust to the mix of gases in earth's atmosphere without too many negative effects.
The plant situation, however, is a little harder to explain away. You'd think that earth grass would be different enough from Andalite grass to have no nutritive value to an Andalite, wouldn't you? Other than saying that they're probably both carbon-based, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when you're trying to derive nutrition from something.
Oh, man, something I just thought of. You guys realize that most earth grass is laced with silicon crystals, right? To discourage herbivores from eating it (which is why most herbivores need such fast-growing teeth, because they get worn down so fast from all the silicon in the grass), right? Well, I'm betting that Andalite grass probably doesn't have that feature, except in the event of an extremely far-fetched coincidence. That . . . must have taken Ax some time to get used to. :P
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I thought about this a few times, too, actually. I guess I just wrote it off as a coincidence.
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Ignoring that Ax can breathe and sustain himself on Earth despite possible atmospheric differences, living for such an extended time on Earth as an alien should expose him to so many diseases or infections that it is too easily overlooked/ignored. Arguably you could say he had "vaccinations" but you can make anything up to cover for the implausibility of aliens living on a foreign planet. Even on the same planet there are many cases where the immune system just can't handle diseases. Europeans brought over the common cold killing many Native Americans. Imagine the diseases that can be shared from extraterrestrial life.
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On the subject of diseases: I highly doubt that earth diseases could even affect an alien immune system at all, except maybe in rare cases. Diseases that affect humans do so because they evolved alongside humans. Humans cannot get the same diseases that, say, cows do. Mostly, of course. There are exceptions to everything.
The reason that populations are vulnerable to foreign diseases is because those diseases evolved alongside similar organisms (like Europeans and Native Americans), whereas the other organisms' immune system had no analog of that disease to evolve to cope with.
Alien bodies would be so different from earth bodies that most disease organisms probably couldn't even survive inside them, and even if they could, they might not be able to do any damage. For example, what would an organism that lives in the bloodstreams of animals do, if presented with a creature whose blood had a completely different chemical composition than anything found on earth?
Of course, if there were any disease organism that could survive and cause damage inside an alien body, it would cause massive damage, since the alien's immune system would be utterly bewildered by said disease. Hence, why, when Ax finally did get sick in book #29, he got so sick that he needed brain surgery.
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Ah that's a good point the unlikelihood of diseases crossing over to different species but the way I reasoned was that Earth has millions of species of animals which all suffer from diseases at some point in their lives whether from infectious bacteria, fungi, parasites or viruses etc. Normally micro-organisms happily coexist with their larger counterparts because of evolution. I think your point is related more towards diseases that we know to affect us or animals we know of.
An alien in a foreign environment will be exposed for the first time to the multitude of micro-organisms that their planet would not have. Diseases emerge when a new host body exists that has no resistance to the infectious organisms. I would provide an example of War of the Worlds however that's a sci-fi too I can't really provide a real life example! Micro-organisms can die/not survive in a host but then a new one will inevitably try to take it's place. Unless the alien has a very advanced adaptive immunity they cannot survive for very long in an alien environment. If there were many Andalite's on earth then over time the ones that had the best adaptive immunity would produce offspring who would like you said evolve with and cope with the diseases that will affect them. On their own I wouldn't expect them to survive for very long.
In the case of genetically created aliens such as the Hork Bajir it's possible they could be designed in such a way to be resistant to infectious agents but the Yeerks, Andalites, Taxxons themselves would succumb very quickly to it's not so seemingly hostile environment unless their original/home environment had evolved extremely (almost identically) similarly to Earth's which is very very unlikely.
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There are issues besides merely diseases.
Also, Ax getting sick in book 29 was an andalite disease.... which should actually not be a disease but a problem that andalites face. From what we are told, the tria gland collects disease organisms into itself (how this is biologically possible is unknown) and when it ruptures (due to inflammation), the diseases are spread throughout the body and Ax proceeds to die, since the part affected most quickly would be his brain (tria gland was at the back of his head).
This actually doesn't make sense, since;
Morphing does not transfer disease unless it's a genetic disease.
Morphing would have sent the tria gland into Z-Space; the progression of the organisms would have either be held still and or killed, since morphing does not 'return them' back.
But more to the point.
One issue that should have been noted is the indifference in gravity; the reference is only made once to Erek who says that the Chee were creaed in a gravity four times stronger than Earth's.
For the hork bajir, and the andalites however, the gravity difference should have been noticeable. Hork Bajir live in a shattered planet; it's gravity would have to be a lot less than a full planet's. Unless the HB homeworld was so huge that even when shattered, it held a gravity stronger than Earth, the majority of the aliens in the series should have problems with just day to day walking.
And if you say they may have lived on a world whose gravity was stronger, therefore, they would be unaffected by earth's weaker gravity, there are side effects of reduced gravity; mainly that there is reduced load on the bones, which results in excess bone being shed to conserve the body's energy. Translated; the aliens would have gotten weaker over time. A visual example exists in the pixar movie, Wall-E. The humans have lived so long in an artifical gravity that they've all become fat, and their bones are barely able to support themselves; they have to use hover chairs to get around.
Unless the Yeerks altered the planet's gravity (which I would have think the rest of the world would have noticed) the aliens should probably have encountered some problems.
Furthermore, the argument that diseases wouldn't survive constantly in an unexposed alien body sounds right, except that this simply gives the aliens a ticking timer; they have at best, extremely high resistance to the disease at first, but with continued exposure and subsequent success over the bacteria, bacteria mutates. Diseases that andalites, hork bajir and yeerks/taxxons may have been extremely resistant to at first would eventually mutate due to their constant exposure to a foreign body; bacteria adapts much quicker than normal evolution, and this is why when you take anti-biotics, you are asked to complete the course; failure to do so may allow the remaining disease organisms to become resistant to the anti-biotics, such that the next time they attack the body, Ax may just collapse and die.
Mutating diseases is why the world is still plagued by illness; this is why when someone suffers an illness in childhood which is later controlled, when it breaks out again years later(such as when they are old and have a weakened immune system) the effects would be vastly more significant than the original disease.
And 3 years is a lot of time, time which they are spent pretty much in all over the world, in other planets, touching foreign aliens and morphing animals. Any of them could have fallen sick, and really, if they had, that was pretty much game-end for the animorphs. Ax being sick can't be cured; there are no andalite doctors. any of the animorphs get sick, and they go to the hospital. subsequent anomalies with their blood reports will force the yeerks to discover who they are; if they decide not to get a doctor, the affected animorph may very well die.
Aside from the gravity and the realistic possibility of disease mutation, there is also the problem of the atmospheric difference. Someone brought up that earth animals are hardy and can last in eviroments they are not built for; this usually only applies to habitat; no animal has been built to survive breathing a completely different form of air than what it was evolved to breathe on. No animal (ithout genetic manipulation) ever will. It would be like asking a human to start breathing nitrogen gas and still be able to walk, talk and perform as if he were breathing oxygen.
Animals on a planet are built to survive typically on that planet alone. And some rare cases exist where the animal is built to survive in a very specific type of habitat; this is why beached whales die despite being created on earth; they were evolved exclusively to live in an enviroment where their mass would not kill them. A beached whale is so heavy on land that it cannot actualy move itself.
Ultimately, it just makes it so that earth seems to be a natural 'safe zone' for all aliens; they will never have to worry about dying from anything other than a twitchy tail blade or dracon beam/shredder fire or starvation. And of course, wild animal attacks.
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I agree with virtually all of that but RYTX is right that animals usually can handle different environments. The example of a beached whale is pretty extreme since there are very few examples of purely aquatic based lifeforms being out of their habitat. From our limited understanding of science we can work out the bare essentials for carbon based life. Oxygen's purpose is for respiration and only in very different organisms such as certain plants/bacteria do they have other methods of getting energy to live. Humans living in different areas across the globe are perfect examples of how it's definitely possible to survive eg Nepal high altitude (low air density) compared to the more normal slightly above sea level.
Also agree with gravity to a certain extent. It is possible for plants to live and grow in space where there is no artificial gravity for extended periods of time. I think the longest time an astronaut has been living in space is 2 years obviously they would need to do certain exercises and there would be discomfort returning to Earth ground level gravity but it is possible to survive for extended periods. People adapt but the disease issue isn't something that can be so easily shrugged off. Like you said one hospital trip with blood analysis then they would be screwed as per plot.
The books could have included more scenarios like this in but it would have taken away time for the plot. In all sci-fi there are limits to realism and that just can't be helped if you want to have a good story too.
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Does this ualify as a KASU, or just immense suspension of disbelief?
I'm going to go with the ladder. Because you also have to believe that Lauren and Chapman were getting adequate nourishment from the liquified grass supplements they were eating when Alloran, Elfangor and Arbron were transporting them to Earth.
Then there's the fact that the Yeerks are transporting human hosts off world (including but not limited to Visser One's host body) with no complications. It isn't just air and salt you have to worry about. It's concentration of the planet's radiation from their unique position in their respective solar systems. (From what I understand of the Hork-Bajir's home system, the Animorphs' skin should have been redder than my bare behind the day I first learned to use the F-word)
As for Visser Three's morphs, I always worked it out that he was never in morph for that long. So even if the aliens were suffering any sort of ill effects, he would be out of morph long before it would actually start to kill the animal.
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Hmm...what about the Veleek? :valeek:
It was from a gaseous environment, with lower gravity, gliding on the clouds of a planet that could float in H2O.
Then it came to earth, and it was just as versatile... :shrug:
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Wasn't it mutated? I'd need to reread anyway...
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I don't think all of these "problems" are quite as far-fetched as they first appear.
1) Diseases
Even if diseases did miraculously mutate to affect aliens, it wouldn't necessarily spell disaster. Remember, aliens own alien technology. How much you want to bet that yeerks have advanced medicine? At the very least they could probably walk through a biofilter and zap whatever is giving them problems. Ax would have the biggest risk, since he is living out in the middle of nowhere with no readily available healthcare. But he is one person who doesn't have a lot of contact with others in his natural form.
2) Environments and Gravity
This one seems like it would cause a lot of problems until you examine it more closely. Then you realize it makes perfect sense for Andalites, Yeerks, Taxxons, Hork-bajir, Arn, Leerans, and Humans to all have similar planet types. Here is why.
The story starts with the andalites. They have space travel and explore places, many of them uninhabitable. But then they come across this planet that isn't pretty, but it has technically livable conditions, including an ecosystem. Since they can survive there, they land and discover the yeerks. The yeerks steal andalite ships and go out into the galaxy to seerch for hosts.
And do you think the yeerks would search for species to infest that live on planets that can't support a yeerk pool? No. They actively search for places with terrains that are at least mildly comparable to their homeworld. Similar gravity and air and whatnot. We don't hear much about all the worlds the yeerks had to pass up because they were unsuitable. We only hear of the ones that were, where the yeerks began invasions. Earth, Leera, the taxxon and hork-bajir homeworlds. All places where all the species can and have survived, albeit with varying comfortability.
As for Visser Three's morphs, the visser himself had to be able to share the creature's environment at least long enough to acquire it. Also, keep in mind that you can throw a human into the middle of the ocean and they can survive for two hours. No human could live out in the ocean for long, but they don't have to. Just a couple hours. So it isn't hard to believe that the visser can morph critters when the bodies aren't expected to live out their entire lifespan in that location.
3) Food
Would you be surprised if a human could get nourishment from eating an andalite? If to Ax, andalite grass = grade A steak, then earth grass might = tofu. They might not be equal, but both can give sustenance.
I probably forgot some stuff I was going to say, but that's all I'm going to type for right now.
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I went cross eyed by the third post..............a nd the reason pretty much everything can survive on earth is because of PLOT CONVENIENCE! If everything happened naturally then there would be no series. They proabably would have been killed first mission, visser three would drop dead, nad the hork bjair would lose fights against regular humans. Plot convenience people. plot convenience. It exists for our own good.
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Wasn't it mutated? I'd need to reread anyway...
Think it was just trained to track morphing energy and feed on the ship's.
But as for other stuff, that is a good point, the Yeerks, their host, and the andalites where military-and presumably pretty advanced: they should have the ability and the wit to scout out a place they head out to and stir up a few inoculations. How many military campgins have been ruined on earth by disease? hopefully the mighty aliens figured that out
And-personal opinion-I like to think every now and then that at least some of V3 morphs came from a skrit na zoo. Now how those things manage to keep so many species from all over.... :)
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And-personal opinion-I like to think every now and then that at least some of V3 morphs came from a skrit na zoo. Now how those things manage to keep so many species from all over.... :)
lol personally I would go travelling/exploring more just to get as many morphs as possible. There are whole chunks of his life before he had the Earth mission. I can imagine when he's stationed on a new planet, sending Hork-Bajir controllers hunting for powerful morphs to bring him just to acquire. He doesn't seem like the self-risking type!
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They would have to have a lot of inoculations. They would need to discover one that would cure Hork Bajir, another that would cure Taxxons, one for their own yeerk bodies, one for the Gedds, one for any Leerans nearby, and one for Visser Three himself. There is no such thing as a cure-all for the same disease since, each disease affects each species differently. Hork Bajir may have been more susceptible to certain diseases than a taxxon, or the taxxons could be affected by a taxxon only virus that doesn't cross contaminate. Considering the vast number of Yeerk manpower, it's a bit unlikely that the Yeerks medically screens their troops.
This would be because they only infest healthy host bodies, but this just filters out genetical disease; there are many acquired illnesses one can get in a lifetime, and Hork Bajir... like Andalites... have no immunity built up to survive earth based disease. Once the virus mutates, the Hork Bajir controllers could be further wiped out by plague.
The Yeerks may have advanced medicine, but we've seen that not every controller gets the same treatment; higher ranks obtain better treatment and better priveleges. Also, I'm pretty sure that medicine requires materials, and the yeerks don't have free health care. If there was a sudden plague, or disease that spread throughout the cotrollers, the Yeerks are probably not going to start inoculating everyone (assumign they find a cure) They would shave off a large part of non consequential controllers, and save those that they could (or need).
And seriously, the invasion would be pretty hammered, if the Yeerks had to spend probably months just to get every controller a dose.
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How do you give an injecting to a taxon if it buurst if you poke it with a sharp fingernail.
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How do you give an injecting to a taxon if it buurst if you poke it with a sharp fingernail.
That reminds me, unsuitable environments have been shown to have severe effects in a couple of situations. Taxxons become like wet paper in an aquatic environment. And when they went to the arctic, Ax almost froze to death in just a few minutes. Not to mention the whole, "yeerks could never survive on any planet but their homeworld without artificial kendronas," thing.
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Andalites are known to have technology that gives an organism "powers" of some sort just by touching a device.
imagine if you will, that before the morphing technology was invented, and before Seerow met the Yeerks, a similar type of device existed in andalite technology. the "green box", if you will, just to give it a name and an image. touch your hand to this green box, and you get "adaptation power" where your body automatically adjusts to any planet's atmosphere and gravity. hopefully there's no veleek type creature that feeds off of adaptation energy on the planet you go to, or you'll have to be careful.
Seerow's kindness ends up transferring this tech to the yeerks.
ta da!
it's possible that the green box, or maybe even, dare I suggest, a purple box, could give you super immune power. But I have a different theory for Ax and Visser 3 (and then I'd have to leave the Hork Bajir up to some crazy trick of the Arn)
I suggest the Andalite immune system is different than ours, but in some way superior. The tria gland is super awesome, and it gathers diseases no matter what they are or what planet they're from... as has been noted, no one knows how the tria gland is even possible, so who's to say it's not just totally amazing. but it gets overloaded, especially after handling so many new human diseases, and bursts on ax (let's assume it burst in Visser 3 at some point too... say when Alloran was caged, Visser 3 takes on a different host and uses the andalite knowledge he has from Alloran to perform surgery on his own host body)... basically, human diseases are going to put a strain on the tria gland, which was dealt with by ax and we can then assume it might've happened at some point with Alloran's body.
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Except that entire incident made no sense with the established rules of morphing.
For example, how can Ax have gotten sick while in human morph? His traia gland obviously isn't part of the human body, it should have been in Z-Space, yet Ax first manifests symptoms at a school dance.
Next example, why does demorphing/remorphing not remove the disease? From what we know, yamphut is a medical complication when the gland collects too much disease organisms. Said disease organisms are by no means genetic, and they should have left the body whenever Ax morphs/demorphs, since they don't originate from Ax in the first place. But Ax remains fevered despite demorphing to andalite. This seems to imply that the problem is genetical (since morphing heals injuries from DNA) rather than acquired (which yamphut is explicitly said to be)
Also, just to point out something, the traia gland never bursts. If it bursts, said andalite dies, since the disease organisms are released into the body, and more importantly, is directly behind the brain, indicating that it would be the first affected organ.
Also, if Ax had yamphut, what he was suffering would be due to the inflammation of his traia gland; the disease is by no means 'contagious'. This would be like suffering from appendicitis and subsequently making everyone else around you sick. For the four animorphs to get sick means that whatever affected them had mutated to affect humans... and hawks. This would be a super virus, and more importantly, it would have affected everyone else around the animorphs. Rachel's mom, her two sisters, Jake's entire family, Marco's dad. And they would spread it to everyone else they'd meet, and you'd get an epidemic.
More importantly, it is confusing because yamphut seems to affect only one person (Ax. You need a traia gland to suffer from it). Of course, there is a plausible explanation, in that Ax was suffering from yamphut, yamphut being a symptom. What Ax is actually suffering from (as well as the animorphs) is an unknown disease, however the only reason As would die from it is because said disease is being contained by his traia gland, which is being worked to death and is about to rupture as a result. The animorphs however, get sick since they don't have such a gland to do work for them.
It raises a lot more questions than it answer, though it would explain the reason why an inflammatory condition can affect 3 kids and a bird.
It still wouldn't answer how demorphing/remorphing doesn';t fix it (and because Ax promptly regrows his Traia gland the next time he morphs and demorphs). If the problem was really the traia gland and not some unknown disease, Ax doesn't actuall solve the problem, since the problem is with his traia gland (ie. genetic) and that eventually it's going to happen again. Since it never does however, it backs up the theory that it wasn't his traia gland that caused him, 3 kids and 1 bird to get sick. It was another disease, which
we are never told where Ax had gotten from. (maybe at the school dance? spiked punch?)
I'm not buying the green box theory, or the purple box theory (though there IS a pruple box, which was used to contain a certain visser) partially because it was never established, and is a little bit too convenient. ("The aliens have morphing technology; OF COURSE THEY HAVE ADAPTATION TECHNOLOGY")
Not to mention, Seerow's Kindness was explicitly giving the yeerks portable kandrona generators. That was it.
You could argue that Visser 3 never gets it because lo and behold, he's Visser 3 with a large amoun of resources. Even if he needs a special daikyu radish that is only grown once every two years to cure his traia gland problem, he'd get it.
The Hork Bajir being immune to disease of Earth is unlikely, considering how the Arn would have to be super knowledgeable on earth disease, and be able to cure an entire species working for them against it, implying they expect their hork bajir to someday reach a planet with this disease. Unless there were generations of inbreeding the seers, this wouldn't happen.
Arn #1: "Hey, Arn #2, should we inoculate them against disease from a planet called Earth roughly millions of light years away?"
Arn #2: "Sure, arn #1, wouldn't want our Hork bajir getting sick when they head to earth for a vacation." *playful punch*
Arn #1: "Oh, you." *laughs*
Arn #2: "I try, I try." *kisses Arn #1*
Arn #1: "..."
Arn #2: "... too soon?"
But in any case, my original purpose was just to point this out. Having done that, I shall let this topic rest.
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from what i remember the disease in itslef was part of morphing. And since they didnt have the tri gland they only had colds.
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ahhh yeah maybe I was going the wrong direction in the yamphut thing. but my point is, you're assuming their immune system has to be like an earth immune system... maybe their immune system is so good it is able to handle unknown diseases. or else there was a... say... orange box (since you're right, purple's already taken lol)
but the "green box" idea i totally stand by. seerow's kindness results in the yeerks getting everything, because they stole it. if such a green box existed, it'd def be on any ship, the yeerks would have it. not established, but it's a good enough explanation to me: simply put, the Andalite's tech was advanced enough to make sure they could go on nearly any planet and be able to adapt to the atmosphere and gravity, and maybe even disease. they have tech that alters organisms on such fundamental level (giving them the power to morph is pretty crazy), so it's totally feasible; and even feasible that it'd never come up... maybe instead of being a box, it's something that you automatically pass through in going on any andalite or yeerk ship, so the animorphs got treated w/out knowing it.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that if someone brought the issue up w/ KA, and someone else offered this green box idea, she'd just blink and be like, "uh, yeah, what that person said."
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The idea of multiple boxes of various colours, with different functions, sort of cheapens the blue box...It was a unique piece of technology. To assume that the Andalites made things like it would be, to me, taking away some of the magic.
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I agree with mason on that one.
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The idea of multiple boxes of various colours, with different functions, sort of cheapens the blue box...It was a unique piece of technology. To assume that the Andalites made things like it would be, to me, taking away some of the magic.
Plus it kinda steals from the whole Superman universe (various colored kryptonites) and Applegate was having enough trouble with the Star Trek comparrisons.
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yep that borg reference was a little too obvious
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The idea of multiple boxes of various colours, with different functions, sort of cheapens the blue box...It was a unique piece of technology. To assume that the Andalites made things like it would be, to me, taking away some of the magic.
Plus it kinda steals from the whole Superman universe (various colored kryptonites) and Applegate was having enough trouble with the Star Trek comparrisons.
Yup agree about cheapening the blue box. The kryptonite thing was the first thing to pop in my head. I didn't know about Applegate having problems with Star Trek (Borg) references. I mean the Borg Cube is a space ship whereas the morphing cube is powers of sizes smaller and gives morphing abilities rather than house cybernetic organisms.
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Yup agree about cheapening the blue box. The kryptonite thing was the first thing to pop in my head. I didn't know about Applegate having problems with Star Trek (Borg) references. I mean the Borg Cube is a space ship whereas the morphing cube is powers of sizes smaller and gives morphing abilities rather than house cybernetic organisms.
I'm going to assume the Borg comment (from BlazingAngel) was in reference to The One "assimilating" Ax and other species into a collective of sorts.
But the other references are pretty blatant.
Ellimist is compared to Q.
The Yeerks are similar to the parasite in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, etc.
And it wasn't that she was having trouble with them as such, but there were plenty of people, (My mother included) who caught on to them.
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I personally never knew star trek so I couldn't care less no matter how much she ripped off of it.
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Not to mention, if the blue box was that powerful, the andalites would have been so strong that a partnership with earth would have been completely unfeasible. It's one thing to start a relationship based on love for food, but no andalite would trade away all the tech of any value to Earth just for food.
hell, it's even explicitly stated that the andalites refused to transfer weapons technology. Letting the humans defy physics and biology, and essentially making them as strong as they are would take away the only advantage the andalites had over them.
Most of the reason why humans are limited to earth is that we cannot survive off it. (unless it's Leera, or the Hork Bajir World/Taxxon World, which is apparently cool with human biology)
If we were capable of living life in another place, ANY place (due to your hypothetical rainbow assorted boxes) we'd become a far more deadlier force than the Yeerks, who even admit that we outnumber them greatly. Visser One (original) puts it succintly; if every human on earth fired one bullet at the yeerks, even if they missed 90% of the time, the yeerks would still lose. Andalites would be no different (unless they glassed the planet from space, which I'm pretty sure their civilized people would never stand for) since apparently, they advocate fighting a war without compromising your morals (which effectively makes the homeworld a huge collection of cassies).
But if all the andalites were refusing to trade was Shredder Technology, I'm pretty sure that's all they have (aside from large breakthroughs in science and technology).
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lol I always found that amusing Andalites and human food ^^
If Andalites gave all their tech to us the universe would be a VERY unsafe place. I don't think it even need be weapons technology. If anything we humans have shown ourselves to be very very imaginative when it comes to technology. I'm sure even giving us (or assisting us in learning) z-space technology we'd be able to create a weapon from it even though the intention is for travel.
In too many ways I think we're not ready for interplanetary travel/colonisation. I would rather advocate technology or education that will help improve our own planet first before starting somewhere else and destroying that place. Of course if an asteroid that was about to destroy Earth then heads our way and we only have Earth as our home then I'd be pretty much blamed for wiping out mankind.
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well, my point was basically that the andalites could have tech that solves this problem that the yeerks would have... I was using the many colored boxes because I was comparing it with the blue box tech, since it gives people some kind of power. who knows what it'd really be. it wouldn't make them invincible or anything, just make them capable of adapting to different environments and atmospheres. it's no more unfeasible IMO than a universal translator for any language that develops anywhere in the universe...
I'm not suggesting that the andalites are giving away that tech, but it could be an essential part of their atmospheric systems on their spacecraft could give people that adapting power... ehh, either that, or all the planets we are talking about are somehow M-class...
the whole disease issue, I'd go with more of an explanation someone else said here that earth diseases weren't designed to attack these types of organisms and that is why they don't harm them. ie the aliens are so different, that they're not in danger from diseases designed to attack earth creatures.
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The key point of diseases was that they mutate and extended stays in a foreign environment with no change in the immune system means a disease WILL get through and kill the alien in the foreign environment. It's only a matter of time unless you stay in a clean room forever. Also diseases (at least in a natural environment) aren't designed they just evolve like every other organism on Earth. A virus finds fresh meat it'll definitely try to grow there, if the new meat rejects and fights off the virus then a new virus will try to take it's place. Extended stays in foreign environments unless the species stays there and reproduces (then their offspring may have the better immunity) or their technology is good enough usually results in new diseases evolving.
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assuming alien meat is like earth meat... assuming diseases are able to surive within an alien bloodstream long enough to even mutate. who knows how alien physiology works? what if andalite blood is somehow poisonous to any/all earth diseases... or what if they have an immune system that is highly advanced... say their equivalent of white blood cells have perfect accuracy in determining what is or is not a foreign object? or maybe their health tech includes some form of nanobot white blood cells programmed to know everything that is in the body and can easily destroy anything that is not from that body.
andalites have been around much longer than humans, I imagine they could've evolved some type of near perfect immune system that doesn't just adapt to diseases it recognizes, but can perfectly distinguish what is or is not a foreign body...
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Until humans can learn to keep peace with each other I dont think their will be many ships traded, but they will help us to become less "backward" Quote from Ax: "No,no,no, thats not how gravity works at all!"
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Evolution is based on the idea that a biological organism will adapt over time and through multiple generations to reach a state that is ideal for their survival.
Unless Andalites lived in a homeworld extremely similar to Earth, and encountered diseases that also exist on Earth, and eventually evolved to be resistant to such diseases, they would have no immunity to the disease, And If they did do all that, then andalites should also exist on Earth (not at the moment, but in the distant future?) And no, I don't mean exist as in Andalites from other worlds moving to Earth, but that a horse or donkey or so on will eventually mutate and evolve to become an andalite.
Which is pretty unlikely; completely different species here.
Diseases are apparent everywhere on Earth. An alien entity comes to earth, breathes earth air, lives in earth woods, eats earth grass, and drinks earth water, and has to contend with being bitten by earth parasites (fleas, mosquitoes, etc.) which are presumably carriers of earth bacteria.
Even if the andalite system may not be a ideal place for earth bound bacteria, bacteria mutate (ie. 'evolve', if you want) faster than animals, and Ax's immune system does not. It's a simple analogy of an infinite and never ending stream of water against a thick wall. The wall might hold at first, but it's going to erode over time, and unlike bacteria, it doesn't 'renew itself'. Meanwhile, the water will keep eroding the wall, and to hasten the speed, the water will gain in acidity over time.
Essentially, at one point you'll be spraying hydrochloric acide over the wall, and the moment you get a hole, however small, the immune system is screwed.
while Andalites may have lived far longer than humans (may, because we don't actually know the origins of andalites and when it was) your immune system does not evolve to block 'all' disease/viruses. It evolves to be resistant against the viruses or illnesses that it constantly faces. You cannot 'evolve' to be resistant against something you have never encountered. And it would be pretty much impossible for the viruses on earth to exist elsewhere, because viruses are essentially microanimals; they only exist in a certain way on a certain planet, because they've evolved to be on that planet, which is why you won't find tigers on Venus, bears on Mars and other such things. Fauna are often planet exclusive, and diseases and illnesses are no different.
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yeah our immune system doesn't work that way. but we don't know how the andalite immune system works... they could be so differently designed that earth diseases are simply unable to affect them. you're assuming that andalites have a similar type of immune system that must adapt to diseases as it encounters them; what if they never had anything like that, but instead had an immune system that basically "knows" every inch of the body so well, that anything foreign is immediately killed off by the immune system.
alien immune systems don't have to work the way our immune systems work. the whole tria gland thing is proof of that.
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No offence but by that argument the entire topic can be resolved by saying: Aliens find Earth tolerable because they just don't have to work the way we expect alien bodies to work in a foreign environment.
Tbh, the last few posts have just been repeating EXACTLY the same things really. Excuse my lack of patience with circular repetition.
Until the time when good reasoning or a fresh point of view arrives!
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No offence but by that argument the entire topic can be resolved by saying: Aliens find Earth tolerable because they just don't have to work the way we expect alien bodies to work in a foreign environment.
well... yeah, that's the jist of it. good enough eplanation for me. if the alien immune system isn't reactive like ours, then it could very easily fend off any earth diseases and their mutations would be futile.
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yeah our immune system doesn't work that way. but we don't know how the andalite immune system works... they could be so differently designed that earth diseases are simply unable to affect them. you're assuming that andalites have a similar type of immune system that must adapt to diseases as it encounters them; what if they never had anything like that, but instead had an immune system that basically "knows" every inch of the body so well, that anything foreign is immediately killed off by the immune system.
alien immune systems don't have to work the way our immune systems work. the whole tria gland thing is proof of that.
if that were the case it would instantly destroy any morph they aquired. rachel being allergic to the crocodile morph, and ax being able to explain it in such terms means that their immune system is at least vaguely similar to ours.
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good point. but of course one might just say the morphing tech would be designed to work with andalite immune systems.
but yeah, that does make this explanation much more of a stretch. ah well, no one ever said KA was good at a consistent universe, just an awesome one.
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The awesomeness made up for every single plot error and scientific overlook.