Deleted member 16657

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
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jFNuWgu.png


Look at this thing. There's no way around it - its a spider. A microscopic spider. Millions of them could fit on a pinhead. Billions of invisible spiders everywhere.

That's scary enough, until you realize these fuckers aren't just trying to bite you.

OYOEHgv.png


That's a whole lotta words to say IT FUCKING INJECTS ITSELF INTO YOU AND CANNIBALIZES YOUR BODY TO BIRTH HUNDREDS OF ITSELF. ALL OF WHICH TEAR YOU APART FROM THE INSIDE OUT AS THEY BURST OUT OF YOUR CORPSE TO CONTINUE THEIR RAMPAGE.

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Somehow, a fictional monstrous alien parasite is less terrifying than the actual thing. All I can think when watching Alien movies now is "at least its not a hundred of them popping out and turning him into a fine red mist."

Can you imagine if this fucking thing was a visible size? Imagine stepping out of the shower and seeing this fucking thing

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skittering down the hall towards you. You know it would be fucking ungodly fast too. Then when it latches on to you

ConfusedNiceHarborporpoise-small.gif


it plunges its needle-like tail into your flesh and ejects its genome directly into you. A few hours later

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Did I mention how they're not technically alive? They can't reproduce without hijacking an organism and turning them into a virus factory. They're just little protein machines with a DNA payload. Legit alien shit. They are an entire species of... Thing that solely procreates off the backs of other creatures and destroy them in the process. At the same time even if they killed all of us and they were the only ones left it wouldn't matter to them. They don't need to burrow into us to survive. They don't have any predators or prey. They don't live or die.

These little fuckers have claimed hundreds of millions of human lives.

They do it because they can.

In conclusion, what the actual fuck God. why do these monstrosities exist
 
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ChrisD

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,662
you made this for the gifs didn't you

(I try not to think too much on these things, because yeah the title aptly sums it up, and I freak myself out too easily.)
 

LebGuns

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,135
This is probably the best thing I have ever seen written about the T4 bacteriophage.
 

EloquentM

Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,631
Lol why do virus exist? They're not actually even living. Why do exist when their existence is literally just destruction lol.
 

Rodney McKay

Member
Oct 26, 2017
12,458
Even non-harmful microscopic things are pretty damn weird.

Forget what it's called, but the mechanism that replicated your dna is super weird:
https://m.imgur.com/gallery/Vcx14pg

Really hope Ant-Man 3 takes place largely in the micro realm, that stuff looks so wild that I'd love to see more $$$ CG budget do it justice.
 

Akira86

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,640
i would call them the closest thing we have to extraterrestrial life. like they're just, something else. I bet life exists elsewhere in the universe in some form like a virus.

just some practical building blocks that have a goal to replicate and adapt to accomplish that goal.
 

Funky Papa

Member
Oct 28, 2017
4,694
People still think this is a belt.

i would call them the closest thing we have to extraterrestrial life. like they're just, something else. I bet life exists elsewhere in the universe in some form like a virus.
My high school biology teacher would go APESHIT if anybody said that viruses were "alive". He'd have the most amusing (and enlightening, I loved that man) monologues about life and what it entails.

Good times.

I never pursued a career in biology or natural sciences (much to my frustration), but I owe so much to him and his love for all things tiny and weird and nasty. Viruses rock. Prions are the ones that give me the heebie jeebies.
 

Akira86

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,640
My high school biology teacher would go APESHIT if anybody said that viruses were "alive". He'd have the most amusing (and enlightening, I loved that man) monologues about life and what it entails.
I'm sure he was a cool dude. But if we found virus-like structures of a non-terrestrial origin, what would he say about them? Not get into the philosophical discussion of what life is, I hope.
 

Typhon

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,225
From my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong) bacteriophage can only infect bacteria and are harmless to humans.
 

Unknownlight

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 2, 2017
10,687
My high school biology teacher would go APESHIT if anybody said that viruses were "alive". He'd have the most amusing (and enlightening, I loved that man) monologues about life and what it entails.

Why exactly are viruses not considered "life", anyway? Intuitively, I would define life as anything with autonomy with the goal of reproduction. Why is that definition wrong?
 

Unknownlight

One Winged Slayer
Member
Nov 2, 2017
10,687

Thanks. When I think about it, my own definition would mean that a self-replicating computer program could be considered "alive".

Reading that article, it doesn't really seem like there's any definitive "thing" that you can point to determine if something is alive or not. It seems more like scientists decided it by intuitively separating things in the world into the categories "alive" and "not alive" and then they made big lists of everything that was common to all items within the groups.
 

hateradio

Member
Oct 28, 2017
8,805
welcome, nowhere
It's also crazy that pre-historic viruses were massive.


Also, viruses can modify your DNA and give you cancer.


They're so weird.

We use such kind of viruses for gene modifications.
So we partially tamed theme!
We haven't tamed them yet.

However, scientists have managed to get the body to be able to defend against a variety of them better, and we have discovered vaccinations for various kinds. We have a long way to go before we completely eradicate viruses or have vaccines for all of them.

Using virus structures to transmit and modify genes is pretty awesome though.
 

Box

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
6,629
Lancashire
Christ I'd run into the ocean to get away...

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...and then back again to get away.

Let's face it. We are walking talking petri dishes, and everywhere we look it is crawling with all sorts of crazy shit.
 

astroturfing

Member
Nov 1, 2017
6,592
Suomi Finland
yeah they are like replicators from Stargate or something.

its disturbing that something exists that isn't quite alive, but not dead either. viruses are stuck in a limbo between being non-life matter and becoming alive.. for billions and billions of years. they'll probably never quite make it there themselves, so they incorporate themselves into the DNA of things that are actually alive, like bacteria, and us.

how much of our DNA has a viral origin again, was it as high as 40% or..?