Mass Effect's Quarians -- Was Bioware thinking of RL?

[Dhalin]

This is something that hit me today, while I was thinking at work.

For those of you who never played the Mass Effect games (if you like RPGs and Sci-Fi, you need to!), it is this Babylon5-type game that involves lots of alien races.

One of those races, is this race of real skinny people called "Quarians".

Quarians lived on a planet (or several, not sure which) and they thrived until they made a race of near-sentient machines. They weren't trying to accomplish true AI (AI is against galactic law in that world), they were trying for something Mass Effect's universe calls "VI" (virtual intelligence).

They kept adding more and more complex programs to these machines, and the inevitable happened -- they became sentient and the Quarians got worried, and planned to shut them all down.

The machines obviously reacted very violently and it led to a bloody war, forcing the Quarians to flee their homeworld in a fleet of ships, any ships they could grab ahold of (Gee, this sounds like Battlestar: Galactica to me lol).

So now, they roam the stars in this huge fleet of ships.

Along the way, they made these ships so clean and free of viruses that their own immune systems began to weaken over time, making it necessary for them to wear sealed biosuits 24/7 -- they can never take off their suits unless absolutely necessary and even then they have to load themselves up with as many *powerful* antibiotics as possible and even then they usually come down with nasty infections.

So, I ask you -- is Bioware making fun of (or perhaps trying to warn us?) humans IRL with this?

We keep putting antibacterial stuff in everything, we keep trying to scrub everything cleaner, cleaner, cleaner and we're trying to be "germ-free" (this is, of course, 100% impossible) in everything we do.

At work, every winter, I see lots of people that get sick every other day, they're constantly coming in and buying loads of cold medicines, and loading up on AB soaps, shampoos, whatever else...

Meanwhile, I myself, have very rarely paid much attention to antibacterial stuff and I almost never get sick. I get like one or two colds a year and a few sniffles here and there. That's it.

So what do you think? Is Bioware onto something here?

[Frith-Rae]

Actually, its the opposite that happens mostly IRL.

It isn't somuch that all this antibactierial stuff is actually making our environment cleaner, to the point where our immune systems can't handle it.

I think its more to the fact that it kills off the "easily killed/lower on the evoultionary totem pole" virii and bactierii () and only results in superbacteria and superviruses. They evolve far faster than we can keep up with, and they WILL evolve to surivive our "antibaciteral" onslaught. Leaving nothing but problems that will ONLY be dealt with, with high strength antibiotics.

So those people washing everything down with alcohol-laced soap, really only succeed it leaving the extra-strong stuff behind to make them sick with .

Just like when we're told to finish off our antibiotics, because not doing so can leave the super-bacteria behind that is now immune to the antibiotics we were using.

As I learned when I got sick three different times over 6 weeks this past Spring (yea allergies) every two weeks - new type of infection - new antibiotic. :/

(And that plotline is certainly not exclusive to battlestar...lol).

[Frith-Rae]

Semi-on-topic..

I Actually think WALL-E was a much more accurate portrayal/warning about our where our current society could be headed more than we're all weakening our immune systems .