System 13

I finished watching Emancipation the other day, the episode of Stargate SG-1 that was bugging me. I bitched about it already here. After finishing Emancipation, I moved on to the next episode, the Broca Divide.

While the Broca Divide still had descendents of ancient peoples from earth speaking English, it didn’t bother me as much. I was too caught up in the interesting plot line to really care much about the language.

The Broca Divide episode brings up an interesting question. What if the alien species that we finally make contact with has built up an immunity to a disease over the centuries? A disease that we have absolutely no immunity to whatsoever? What if the entire population of earth dies like the Native Americans died when Europeans came to the North American continent, bringing disease with them? (By the way, yes, I realize that all of the Native Americans didn’t die to disease. Just a sizeable chunk of them. But the analogy serves its purpose well enough.)

That’d be a pretty crappy bit of luck, eh? Years and years, searching for other life in the universe, to be wiped out by, what to them, may be on par with the common cold.

Damn. That would suck.

Of course, it could go the other way. We could finally find other intelligent life in the universe, and give them our common cold, wiping them out. Not quite as dramatic as an all out invasion, is it?

“Man wipes out entire alien race by sneezing on them.”

Oh, and speaking of Stargate… it appears there’s no rush in me getting caught up. The SCI FI channel is not renewing Stargate SG-1 for an 11th season.

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