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Alien Meals; Dare we partake?
Topic Started: Feb 23 2010, 04:46 PM (1,937 Views)
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Are you plausible?

Okay, in an extraterrestrial restaurant you seat yourself to a nice meal of steak and taters, but when the plate comes to you the steak is marbled green and purple and the taters are striped red and orange. Your waiter insists that it hasn't gone bad or anything, so you come to the conclusion that it's not from Earth.

In seriousness, I'm wondering about the odds of actually finding something edible on another planet. What kind of factors need to be considered when thinking of whether humans can rely on a planet's nutritional resources?
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agatharights
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Sounds delicious. I'll take some to go.
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Are you plausible?

Very good points from everyone. It really does seem to be based on many factors, and not a good idea to eat out of an alien's bowl.

I must admit my "restaurant" scenario was little more than a hypothetical to introduce the topic. So let's consider another situation. Humans colonize a planet replete with alien life (we could use Nereus for an example, if you wish). Is it worth any effort to determine if the colonists can subsist on native plant and animal life, or should they scour some land clean and develop their own range land?
Take a look at my exobiology subforum of the planet Nereus!

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T.Neo
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Yes, it is worth the effort to see if humans could survive off of native foodstuffs. It's always valuable to have a widely available source of food that can be found in the local environment and farmed.

If not as a staple food, at least as a backup (say, someone getting stuck in a Nerean wilderness without rations). Or perhaps as a delicacy.

Either way I'd still have most of the food grown with Terran biology (probably by methods a tad more hi-tech then the usual farming; "in-vitro" development of meat and hydroponic plant growth come to mind). And if exploitation of local bioresources is done on a wide scale, care must be taken to avoid damage to the ecosystem.

I'd say that every part of every potential food organism would have to be screened for toxicity etc. Here on Earth, it's more of a "what you can't eat", barring cultural and personal tastes. On Nereus, say, it would be what you could eat, which would be determined by what has been tested for safety issues.
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agatharights
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It's always worth it to try the native fare!
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lamna
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Alien compounds are the wildcard, however, since they're just that- alien. They could kill you, feed you or do nothing to you, or they could have narcotic or medicating effects. Alien life could be a huge boost to the production of medications. Or people could get high on regular and ubiquitous foodstuffs (think Prawns and catfood here). It might be very hard to control.
By the time we have to deal with Xenos I expect we will have realized you can't control what chemicals people want to put into themselves.

Speaking of incompatible foods, I remember reading Echoes of Honor how this was used for a prison planet for people who need to be disappeared might be useful in the future and so are not killed. The life on the planet was almost completely incompatible with humans so all the Guards needed to do was dump prisoners in camps without fences, if they needed to the guards could just cut off food to the camps and they would starve. Only the false-potato was somewhat edible and it caused neurological damage. Impossible to escape from, unless you are Honor Harrington, but that's a different story.

It's always worth trying native foods, you don't know how well Terran plants and animals will live on the planet.
Edited by lamna, Feb 24 2010, 05:02 PM.
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Are nipples or genitals necessary, lamna?
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T.Neo
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Well, you might be able to control it here, but not on a world where almost every leaf or crawling critter has either the power to kill you or make you high.

The difficulties of food animal and plant survival are ones I worked around with artificial production techniques, but even if you wished to grow food naturally out in the open air, nutrients would probably be the only real problem unless the atmosphere was significantly different to our own (in which case humans would have to wear rebreathers and live in positive-pressure habitats with breathable air).

Perhaps herbivorous food animals could be fed on a feed grown in algae vats or something like that.

Plants might also have different requirements to humans (getting sunburnt due to longer rotation periods etc).

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Are you plausible?

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unless the atmosphere was significantly different to our own

In the case of Nereus, the atmosphere is breathable by humans (most of the major differences in atmosphere is a high saturation of noble gasses, mostly neon). But while many of my own thoughts are about Nereus as a matter of course, I don't want to limit the discussion to my one pet planet. This project should remain general enough that it doesn't just devolve into another topic about Nereus. ;)

My initial thought is that if an atmosphere is appreciably different from Earth's (enough to warrant a breathing apparatus), then I's say the chances of finding edible native life would drastically decline.

It seems pretty well established here that finding compatible food sources on an alien planet is pretty much a crap shoot, based on the chance developments of molecular structure and chemical composition. It's also been stated that humans would have incentive to search for edible natives. So for these terran colonists, would there be a good place to start looking? For example, are simpler life forms more likely to be edible (plant life, anneloids, insectoids), or will the more complex life forms be a better starting point as a potential source of nutrition?
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T.Neo
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At the risk of going off-topic, a higher concentration of Neon should not affect humans. Xenon might, because it has odd anesthetic properties, but as long as the oxygen level is high enough it should be fine.

As for unbreathable atmosphere limiting the possibility of edible native life, it shouldn't be an issue. For example, most seafood respirates in an environment would kill humans pretty quickly. As long as no toxins from the atmosphere are dissolved within the tissue in a way that could be harmful, it should be edible depending on chemical composition etc.

As for starting to look for edible organisms, anywhere is a good bet. Organisms that are in the local vicinity, are easy to catch/farm, have a relatively prodigious reproductive rate and are relatively unintelligent (for ethical reasons). ALL forms of life will have novel chemicals within them, regardless of appearance or lifestyle.

Then a series of tests would have to be conducted. After preliminary assesments of toxins and nutritional value, animal testing using rats would probably be required to see how the mammalian digestive system reacted to the organism. Then limited testing on humans could occur, and it would be worked up from there.

So yeah, it would be a lengthy process at best, you certainly wouldn't walk onto a planet and eat organisms at random.
Edited by T.Neo, Feb 25 2010, 02:53 PM.
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Length process, but worth it in the end.
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Ddraig Goch
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So yeah, it would be a lengthy process at best, you certainly wouldn't walk onto a planet and eat organisms at random.
I would.....

Not sure if this is on topic or not (doesn't really answer the question), but from the Star Wars Universe, the Nuna (a short, rolly-poly game bird from Naboo) was apparently spread throughout the galaxy as a food source. However, whilst some races could eat it, others couldn't, and some were even allergic to it.

Whilst I agree that, if we ever do colonise other planets, we will need to bring some of our own Terran food with us, keeping livestock and crops would be a problem. Assuming that Terran biochemistry is poisonous to the species of a newly colonised world, then predators that try to eat our livestock, and herbivores that try to eat our crops, would die. There could even be serious loss of biodiversity in the immediate area.
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T.Neo
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I would.....


I wouldn't consume any random cocktail of potentially deadly or narcotic complex organic substances. ;)

As for farming, we don't want native organisms consuming our crops or livestock anyway. Deterrants such as electric fences would be helpful.
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lamna
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Well to be slightly safer you should go for stuff that is low on the food chain, and they are less likely to accumulate toxins. However, avoid filter feeders.
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Are nipples or genitals necessary, lamna?
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T.Neo
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As I already stated, what is toxic to you might be mundane to local life. ANY organism could harbour a deadly poison.
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Are you plausible?

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At the risk of going off-topic, a higher concentration of Neon should not affect humans. Xenon might, because it has odd anesthetic properties, but as long as the oxygen level is high enough it should be fine.

It's mostly neon, with some traces of argon slightly higher than what's found on Earth. Xenon is not anywhere as prolific, and the oxygen level of the atmosphere is roughly 19%, which is within breathable range. So no worries there.

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As for starting to look for edible organisms, anywhere is a good bet. Organisms that are in the local vicinity, are easy to catch/farm, have a relatively prodigious reproductive rate and are relatively unintelligent (for ethical reasons). ALL forms of life will have novel chemicals within them, regardless of appearance or lifestyle.

So husbandry is the next big consideration, then. Find something that's not only edible, but with a potential for domestication. Plants and herbivores would be my first target, not only because a herbivore stores more energy from its food than a carnivore, but herbivores, by and large, lead more docile lifestyles. Try starting a flag raptor ranch, for example...

And it certainly would be a lengthy process, nothing to be jumped into with hungry abandon. Colonists would have to subsist on terran food sources until a reliable native staple could be established.

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There could even be serious loss of biodiversity in the immediate area.

I'd almost say that's par for the course in this scenario, Ddraig Goch. History shows that animals introduced into new ecosystems are either quickly smothered and extinguished or wreak havoc on the native life until an equilibrium is reestablished.

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I wouldn't consume any random cocktail of potentially deadly or narcotic complex organic substances. ;)

And yet people do it for fun... :ermm:

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Deterrants such as electric fences would be helpful.

I agree. You would want to segregate terran stock from the native life as much as possible. If your new home is populated with big toothed sauroids, build your fences tall and electrified, and keep fat, grasping computer programmers away from the control switch, or else your goats (and probably even some of your colonists) might find life abruptly over.

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ANY organism could harbour a deadly poison.

Which is why even alien browsers might be a poor option for ranching.
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Since aliens would no doubt be subject to different gravitational, atmospheric, and chemical stimuli than us, it'd probably taste pretty strange.

But terrible? Maybe not.
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