So I’m watching Steven Spielberg’s remake of The War of the Worlds, and it’s a pretty good movie with great special effects up to the point where the creepy guy with the shotgun invites Tom Cruise and his daughter to take shelter in the basement. [Warning: spoiler follows. –C.A.] After that you know exactly what’s going to happen (icky confrontation with creepy guy, aliens succumb to deadly earth diseases). While waiting for this to play out, I got to thinking: How likely is it that invaders from space would be vulnerable to terrestrial microbes? I know Native Americans were wiped out by smallpox and so on, but they were the same species as European colonists. Animals get lots of diseases we don’t get or get only in mild form (distemper, hoof-and-mouth disease). OK, the movie’s fiction, but is there any reason to think earthly bacteria and viruses would be able to get their hooks into a species from another planet? –Diane, Beulah, Michigan
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From a technical standpoint let’s say it’s not out of the question. As a practical matter, however, no. I feel it’s important that the populace be made aware of this, or at least the subset thereof capable of grasping the truly big picture: If you’re looking to save humankind’s butt in the coming intergalactic conflict, don’t put your faith in the germs.
But here’s the thing. H.G. Wells’s work reflects the leading scientific thinking of its day. WOTW is said to have originated in a discussion Wells had with his brother about the fate of the aboriginal Tasmanians, who were devastated by European diseases. Germ theory had been confirmed only a couple decades before Wells wrote his book; Europeans were just beginning to grasp that the catastrophe they had visited on the rest of the world was less a function of their guns than of their microorganisms. Given that context, the fictional notion of aliens brought low by microbes made sense.
