Thread:Mr.Robbo/@comment-5870856-20150126033221

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''All good questions. Thanks for the interest, by the way; I often worry that some of the more in-depth pages are tediously boring.

Yes, I plan to add animals, though I've been procrastinating a lot recently so it could take some time. The reason I started with boring plants is because I wanted to design the ecosystem from the bottom of the food chain up (for reasons that escape me now).

Yes, Pheidippides does reach Quinoa. In fact, the whole site is meant to be written from the point of view of a human inhabitant of Quinoa (note the 'more information' section at the bottom of the Pheidippides page, which alludes to settlements on the planet). In time, the whole 'Colony' section will be devoted to the society founded by the descendants of the colonists.

Earth diseases are deadly to Quinoan life and vice versa. This is because of 'dead end hosts'. Basically, if you catch, for example, a cold, the cold pathogen will want to use your body (the host) as much as possible in order to infect more hosts and spread. If the same pathogen were to infect a Quinoan life form, the two biologies would be incompatible and the cold would not be able to use the Quinoan life form to spread; the life form would be a 'dead end host'. The pathogen would have no reason to keep the host alive as long as a normal host. The dead end host would also not have been adapted to deal with this unusual disease; hence a common cold could be deadly to Quinoan life, as their immune systems simply wouldn't know what to do.

The same is true for harmless Quinoan diseases infecting Earth life. The original colonists had to develop vaccines to help them develop immunity.

Anyway, if you have any other questions or comments, I suggest you use my message wall, as I'm sure Suppy would appreciate us not clogging up the comments on his blog posts with unrelated matters.''

I get that Pheidippides made it, but I'm just not sure in what form. Did it land on the planet, or did it go into orbit and people got to the surface via shuttles or something? Is there anything recognizable left of it, or was the vast majority of the spaceship destroyed en route?

Makes sense regarding diseases. This reminds me of the ending of The War of the Worlds, where the Martians are defeated by their inability to cope with terrestrial bacteria.

One thing I found really engaging about the site is the obvious passion both you and your fictitious naturalist put into it. It's quite obvious you love doing this, and you're good at it, too. I feel like an amateur reading your stuff!

An amateurish question - if Quinoan life contains iron, which is a heavier element than carbon, wouldn't it be harder for them to achieve lift/flight, even with the aid of hydrogen? 