How Science Saved a Dream That ‘War of the Worlds’ Ruined

War of the Worlds merit the splash it made when it first came out , from both a dramatic and scientific point of view . It did , however , bust up my vernal ideas of infinite travel . fortuitously , science has recuperated them .

I learn about the legend of War of the Worlds well before I ever heard the plot . The idea that a well - produced but ill - advised radio play caused a honest destiny of America to all alternate out amused me . When I learn the first selection of the radio play , I was baffle . It seemed uncanny that anyone would consider that this could have happened in so brusque a time and that everyone involved was gibe with a microphone . It was later that I learned that the mass hysteria purportedly produced by the play was the real dramatic fiction . A few mass were terrified , but the play did n’t provoke the terror that newspapers at the metre , eager for headlines , reported . It was even by and by than that when I get to the end of the broadcast and realized what had killed the aliens .

My young thinker was stunned , and disappointed . Suddenly all the dreams I had of place travel in the hereafter , when humans could go to other worlds , were literally shrink - wrapped . Instead of boldly going where no one had gone before , humans would have to monitor foreign planets from a safe space , or go about eternally in blank suit of clothes , to our various worlds did n’t kill each other . I had recollect science wrecked everything .

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As it turns out , though , it does n’t . Some worry about exotic viruses , but most scientist fit that we ’re about as likely to captivate a computer virus from an alien as we are from a grasshopper . Viruses apply the host ’s DNA , and have to be accommodate to it . They ’ve been with us throughout our evolution , and so have conform to us as we have to them . That ’s not the case with unknown . There ’s no pragmatic hazard that a computer virus could hop world .

Bacteria , with their riding habit of living in extremely diverse shape , might have a better guessing at kill an alien . It would n’t have to sync up deoxyribonucleic acid with an alien , just encounter to blunder into perfect livelihood status . And there are a lot of bacterium out there . One of them has a good chance of being pernicious to aliens . Then again , many of them have been evince to be deadly to us , and we ’re still kicking around the planet . We share a space with all kinds of bacteria that could kill us , and have developed plenty of method acting with which to guard ourselves , heal ourselves , or just prevent specific exposure . Yes , there ’s a probability that alien might stumble on the perfect bacteria on our world – the one that they ’re utterly unprepared for biologically or sociologically . But there ’s no chance that they have n’t been dealing with bacteria on their own world . Whenever we spill the beans about finding spirit on Mars , the Moon , Enceladus , or nigh any other satellite , we babble out about come up microbic life with bacterium topping the list of likely germ . If anything , bacterial life is something our worlds are potential to have in uncouth . apparently , we ’d want to take rubber precautions , but next infinite travel does n’t have to be the anodyne travelling that I imagined it to be .

And so science keep , for me , a dreaming that fiction ruined . In our last show , we took a look at the reverse , figuring thing that science ruined for us . We talk ray guns , expose UFO footage , and magic prank involving toxic sludge . And just to make it complete , I take some of that sludge and rub it on my finger until they fume . Really .

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