[TrashMan]

Sorry, friend. Time to bone up on your history. I recommend 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. The Native Americans barely had any domesticated livestock, whereas the Eurasians lived close to pigs and cattle - disease incubators. It wasn't luck.

Oh? And living in a jungle with kazillion of bugs or runnign around forests and praries butt-naked is soooo healthy and clean.

Nothing hugely implausible about it. It's got a functioning ecosystem, an energy differential to exploit, and easy envisioned precursors.

Really? Doesn't look like that to me. You got a massive jellyfish/amoeba cross that's 99% made out of water, somehow controls gravity and EM, is inhabited by parasites that use heat/electricity as a weapon (and don't boil the living s*** out of it), is as big as a mountain and apparently undetectable.
And conveniently, it's also faster than a marine and it has just hte powers needed to sabotage his tools. not to mention that tehy are in vastly different size categories. a kilometer-long creature? Why not a planet-sized while you're at it?

Fair enough, I guess, though odds are that the best spacefarers in real life will mimic organic methods (von Neumann probes and so on). There are already organisms on Earth that survive in the vacuum of space.

Yeah. Spores. We are talking about living being that have propultion capabilities to travel across the stars, enter and exit planet atmosphere wihout burning up and surive the extreems of space.

[General Battuta]

Oh? And living in a jungle with kazillion of bugs or runnign around forests and praries butt-naked is soooo healthy and clean.

Actually, surprisingly, yeah, it is. You need big population concentrations to get pandemics moving. That means cities. And you need domesticated animals.

I recommend 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', by Jared Diamond. Made a huge splash when it was published.

Really? Doesn't look like that to me. You got a massive jellyfish/amoeba cross that's 99% made out of water, somehow controls gravity and EM, is inhabited by parasites that use heat/electricity as a weapon (and don't boil the living s*** out of it), is as big as a mountain and apparently undetectable.

On a low-gravity world, it can't control gravity, it doesn't have any parasites (just symbiotes - just like your body, friend), it was clearly stated to be adjusted to extremes of temperature, it's not at all undetectable. Plus, it's a work of fiction to illustrate a point: nature surprises.

And conveniently, it's also faster than a marine and it has just hte powers needed to sabotage his tools. not to mention that tehy are in vastly different size categories. a kilometer-long creature? Why not a planet-sized while you're at it?

It was absolutely a contrived example. *shrug* Nonetheless, it fits its environment. I know you didn't read it particularly closely, and I don't expect you to make any kind of good-faith argument to see my side of things, even though I've done so for you. It's a bit hurtful that I've taken pains to acknowledge all your good points and yet you just toss aside anything I say. So it goes with you, I guess.

Fair enough, I guess, though odds are that the best spacefarers in real life will mimic organic methods (von Neumann probes and so on). There are already organisms on Earth that survive in the vacuum of space.

Yeah. Spores. We are talking about living being that have propultion capabilities to travel across the stars, enter and exit planet atmosphere wihout burning up and surive the extreems of space.

Spores? Living tardigrades survived ten days in outer space (including direct exposure to the sun), returned to earth, and produced viable offspring.

They can even take 6000 atmospheres of pressure, as a bonus.

[NGTM-1R]

Oh, and my rant was more directed to large-scale implications (battles) rather than a single marine. In some universe you have races that travel from planet to planet in organic, living ships and wage war (like Zerg, the Tyranids) Now THAT is bull****.

Not to mention that coming up with a silly creature doesn't prove anything. I can come up with rifles that fire miniature black holes, and as such can devour any creature you can come up with. This really is going nowhere.

You're missing the point. The Zerg and Tyranids do not represent naturally evolved creatures. They have been channeled, directed, down certain paths, extremely rapidly. Nature cannot match human firepower because we can direct our efforts in this regard. The Zerg and the Tyranids can also direct their efforts towards this; in fact they've done considerably more directing towards the purpose of warfare than we have.

[StarSlayer]

Oh? And living in a jungle with kazillion of bugs or runnign around forests and praries butt-naked is soooo healthy and clean.

Actually, surprisingly, yeah, it is. You need big population concentrations to get pandemics moving. That means cities. And you need domesticated animals.

I recommend 'Guns, Germs, and Steel', by Jared Diamond. Made a huge splash when it was published.

Battuta speaks the truth, Europe was the right crucible to produce societies capable of crushing the rest of the world.  Among other factors the disease resilience and the pathogens they carried with them were devastating.  The diseases that where introduced to the native populations in South America raced up and down both continents wiping out much of the American Indian populations.  I believe their are records of the first colonizers of North America discovering community after community that had been completely wiped out by the plagues introduced from Europe.

[TrashMan]

Regarding the europe and american native thing - you saiyng the fact that we moved there (with our germs) en masse (into their population centers) while they stayed there didn't play a cruical factor?

***

Battuta, I do see your side of the argument. Don't think that I don't respect nature or that I'm not occasionaly awed by the things it comes up with. Quite the contrary.

I'm just saying that I don't belive any purely biological creature will ever be able to match technologyin warfare.
Tyranids? Zerg? I find them laughable. It doens't matter if evolution was directed or not - the whole premise of carpace and claws/acid spit that outperfom real armor and weapons makes me cringe.

While a claw that might pierce modern armor could be feasable, I REALLY doubt it any carpace could withstand the kind of weaponry we're talking about. Nevermind the range and precision.
Game balance and canon fluff or reality have often very little in common.
In varius animation from the same games it allways takes overwheling numbers for the Zerg/Tyranid to do anything.
And frankly, spamming bullets is cheaper and faster than spamming zerglings.

[General Battuta]

All right, I guess that's fair enough.

The Flood were, I think, the best example of how biology could overcome a technological civilization. They subsumed the knowledge and consciousness of their biological victims, but adapted their technology (including ships and weapons) to help spread.

[StarSlayer]

1)  Your assuming you have more bullets then the enemy has critters and that the enemy doesn't have the mentality of army ants.
2)  Humans are not infallible, in fact we are pretty arrogant and dumb sometimes.  Don't expect that we will apply the correct technology and tactics all the time.  One look at military history proves that without a shadow of doubt.

Sure humans can change tactics and deploy new weapons that will defeat an organic enemy but its absurd to assume technological superiority will win all the time every time.

The Battle of Yonkers from World War Z takes a few liberties with things I think, but the general ideas highlight how a conventional force might lose to organics.

[Flipside]

It's interesting to note that a very high percent of new 'super' materials are based on naturally occuring substances.

Now I'll admit, 'bigging up' doesn't always work in nature, but the thing about Tyranids, Zerg etc is that they are a combination of science and nature, you just only see the 'nature' side of it, but it's perfectly possible to have claws that can cut through steel, or even make spider-web that is incredibly strong, much stronger than steel cable, though, admittedly, I draw the line at internal energy weapons, the ability to spit acid that would eat through armour is not impossible if science is involved, since 'acid' is not a generic eat-all, it's simply a group of substances, so find the right substance and it would work, just as Hydrofloric acid will eat through it's glass container and yet is completely harmless to plastic ones.

[Vidmaster]

This topic has gone far from the original subject, hasn't it?
Well, three days before the Vault opens (for me), five for all non-Spearheads. I am already hyped. They really are right, screenshots are so last-century.

[carbine7]

Same here, since I'm now a Spearhead. Gert's offer of secret.....'stuff' enticed my enough to put up my $40.

[Vidmaster]

that secret stuff is INCREDIBLE!!!

Well, mission successful Vid, at least one more Spearhead or Frontliner recruited.

[TrashMan]

1)  Your assuming you have more bullets then the enemy has critters and that the enemy doesn't have the mentality of army ants.

Bullets don't need time to grow or nurturing. They are ready for action the second they step off the assembly line.
Drones, tanks? Same thing - you only need gas.
We allready have enough bullets to kill off the entire human population several times over.

So no. Despite what you've seen in Starcraft and Alien, an organism doesn't grow from a baby/larva stage to a ready warrior stage in minutes/hours.

Now I'll admit, 'bigging up' doesn't always work in nature, but the thing about Tyranids, Zerg etc is that they are a combination of science and nature, you just only see the 'nature' side of it, but it's perfectly possible to have claws that can cut through steel, or even make spider-web that is incredibly strong, much stronger than steel cable, though, admittedly, I draw the line at internal energy weapons, the ability to spit acid that would eat through armour is not impossible if science is involved, since 'acid' is not a generic eat-all, it's simply a group of substances, so find the right substance and it would work, just as Hydrofloric acid will eat through it's glass container and yet is completely harmless to plastic ones.

Dunno about claws that can punch trough solid steel. I can see them puncturing light armor if one thrusts with enough force, but heavy armor? No. From what I know about how claws/teeth/carpaces grow, I don't see how they can have the necessary strength.
Spitting acid is actually very believable (IIRC, there are a few animals that do that), but it would be severly limited by range and versatility (one type of acid).

[Flipside]

Exactly, acid that ate through kevlar armour would, in all likelihood be utterly useless against steel armour on vehicles, the kinds of substances required would need to break down the links between molecules in entirely different ways, there are substances that will eat through pretty much anything in time, but time is a crucial part of the equation.

As for punching through solid steel, well, this is where 'bigging up' comes in, there's a shrimp, for example, that can kick through 1/8 inch glass, and this thing is tiny, but if the shrimp was human sized, it probably wouldn't produce the same power-weight ratio, same with fleas, if they were human-size, they could jump over a sky-scraper, but hitting the ground again would kill them, so just taking direct examples from nature and 'bigging up' doesn't really play out all the time, but I do think it's possible, when being externally guided' to produce organic mechanisms that could do that, although, I suspect the trade offs would be considerable, a creature that could do that would probably be incapable of performing any other battlefield role, but then, you could say much the same for various elements in a technological army.

Technologies real strength would come through fliers, I think, although I'll accept organic vessels that could live in space, or even travel faster than light, I struggle thinking of an organic variant that could handle atmospheric combat at supersonic speeds as well as technological solutions, from certain points of view, space is easy compared to an atmosphere.

[Scotty]

So no. Despite what you've seen in Starcraft and Alien, an organism doesn't grow from a baby/larva stage to a ready warrior stage in minutes/hours.

From what we know on this tiny little ball of rock called Earth.  All your posts are is a blanket dismissal of anything that we could say to have a good discussion.  We don't KNOW that organisms will do that, but we sure as hell don't know they CAN'T either.

We allready have enough bullets to kill off the entire human population several times over.

There are also a gigantically large number of creatures that could kill people.  Enough to kill the entire human population several times over.  We just happen to be lucky that those things can and will eat things easier to get to than people.

Dunno about claws that can punch trough solid steel. I can see them puncturing light armor if one thrusts with enough force, but heavy armor? No. From what I know about how claws/teeth/carpaces grow, I don't see how they can have the necessary strength.
Spitting acid is actually very believable (IIRC, there are a few animals that do that), but it would be severly limited by range and versatility (one type of acid).

I assume you have seen Jurassic park.  Granted, those have been dead for a while, but they were that big back then.  With the teeth to go through cars to match.  Maybe they wouldn't be able to go through dedicated tank armor, but just about anything else crumples under that force, if not outright pierced.

One thing to note:  Anything that could be conceivably encountered off Earth would not be able to single-handedly lay the whup-ass on everything we have.  However, that's because we have a lot more than one thing.  I would not be surprised if one creature or another is spectacularly effective against one or more of our weapons of war.  However, we just need to use something else then.

To sum up and reiterate:  Technology != PWNZORS ALL LIFE.  "Aliens" may not be able to completely defeat a military by strictly organic means, but that isn't what we (Battuta and the rest) are trying to argue.  It could happen, and dismissing it out of hand would get people killed (or, at least, would if it ever happened).

[General Battuta]

1)  Your assuming you have more bullets then the enemy has critters and that the enemy doesn't have the mentality of army ants.

Bullets don't need time to grow or nurturing. They are ready for action the second they step off the assembly line.
Drones, tanks? Same thing - you only need gas.
We allready have enough bullets to kill off the entire human population several times over.

So no. Despite what you've seen in Starcraft and Alien, an organism doesn't grow from a baby/larva stage to a ready warrior stage in minutes/hours.

That's actually probably the worst argument against biology. If there's one area where biology trumps technology, it's manufacturing. Forget bullets per person, do you know how many bugs there are per person?

Your problem here is you're comparing a full-sized warrior to a bullet, when you should be comparing a warrior (Zergling, xenomorph, whatever) with human beings. Let's instead compare a bullet and its production mechanism with a bullet-sized attack organism that some hypothetical alien race uses as an area denial weapon against infantry.

A bullet is a great way to kill things. It's congealed energy. Fired from a gun, it's pretty reasonably lethal. And you can fire a lot of them with great accuracy. When it comes to elegance, not much beats the good ol' human bullet.

To make a bullet, you need to set up a factory, which takes days to months. You need to ship in refined materials, which in turn requires refining plants in other areas, as well as skilled labor (or good machines) to run them. Those in turn require raw materials from mines. All of this requires infrastructure and transportation, which probably requires roads. You then need to mate the bullet with its symbiote, the gun, which requires a whole 'nother set of infrastructure.

You then have to give the bullet and gun to a soldier, who's been raised from birth as a generalist and only recently been instructed on how to use his bullet and gun. Said soldier represents thousands of man-hours of investment, as well as thousands (millions?) of regular dollars. Your overall man-gun-bullet system requires a huge amount of effort, just to get that single bullet to the point where it's actually ready to use.

So, your big advantage is that once you have a factory up and running, and a secure flow of raw materials, you can make bullets really fast and in great volume. Your disadvantage is that production is centralized, and that each individual bullet has no capability to create any more bullets.

Now.

Meet the bullet bug. It's an insect-type critter - not very big. It eats biomatter and certain chemical compounds that it hunts for. It has a keen sense of smell, swarm behavior, decent vision, excellent navigation (like a bee!) and a number of substrains. It is asexual, and born pregnant. Our hypothetical Biotic Tech Enemy has designed it, but it works alone just fine.

Introduce a bullet bug to an area, and it immediately begans consuming biomass. When ready, it dies, producing live bullet bug 'larvae' that mature within a day. These hatch new bullet bugs. They consume biomass as well.

By simple exponential growth the bullet bugs rapidly enter the triple and quadruple digits. At this point, pheremone signals trigger gamete differentiation. Some newborn bullet bugs are specialists. They may gather chemical materials for the bullet bug swarm. They may develop acid sacs, hardened tips, gunpowder charges, noisemakers, explosive phosphorous compounds, burrowers, or an electromagnetic sense.

Throughout all this they continue to multiply - remember, they're born pregnant. Burrow specialists create underground hives so that the bullet bugs can feed on topsoil and move without easy detection, but these hives are non-centralized, and the majority of the bugs simply roam. Other bugs spit digestive compounds that render normally inedible materials useful to the bullet bug swarm. Solar bugs gather in enormous mats and convert sunlight into simple organics for feeding. Gas bugs metabolize compounds they're fed into toxic plumes (working, obviously, in large numbers.) Current bugs clamp onto power lines and sap electricity for more insidious broods, including lightning bugs that can actually work in swarms to carry considerable charge.

Now, the development of a good swarm requires a great deal of energy. But because each individual bullet bug is capable of feeding and reproducing, the effort is non-centralized and limited only by local resources.

In the meantime they engage in area denial behaviors. Some bullet bugs dig long tunnels in metal, wood, or concrete buildings. Gunpowder bullet bugs hide in these areas; they will explode when triggered, acting as improvised bullets. Other bugs deliver potent neurotoxins to unprotected enemies. Armored humans can be smeared in phosphorous compounds, and unless their armor is top-grade, they will be vulnerable to depolymerizing compounds or the destruction of their sensors. Flare bugs are the swarm's armor-piercing solution; they achieve physical contact with hostile armor and then ignite, much like anti-material grenades. Either that or digestion bugs can splat themselves on armor, releasing tailored solvents - oh, and the chemicals released from the dissolving armor by a successful solvent attack cue the rest of the swarm to amp up production of that particular solvent type. Adaptive anti-armor chemicals!

The simplest weapon of the swarm is sheer numbers. Due to rapid diversification and adaptation, they can be retarded but not eliminated through the deployment of toxins. The only effective countermeasure to their presence is fire (or possibly very high wind!)

All this, from a single bug, in a matter of days - without intelligence, preparation, or outside control.

Because, remember: DNA is the best damn storage medium there is. You can fit the information required for all these bullet bug variants into one little cell. That little bullet bug that drops in from space (oh, sure, they can survive in space too, they've got a vacuum strain, why not, it just hitches a ride in on a meteorite or whatever) is a frighteningly pluripotent weapon.

Now, I'd like to stress that these bugs are not particularly more effective than bullets. In a straight-up battle situation you can kill a lot more human beings firing bullets than firing bugs. But the bugs require no infrastructure to create. You can get millions of bugs in the same time that it takes you to just dig the hole that you're going to put a factory in. And while they don't work well against a crafty human foe with armored infantry and good tanks, well, neither do plain infantry bullets.

So, there you go. The bullet bug: an effective, economical, and competitive biological answer to the bullet. It has its own advantages and disadvantages. But, unlike a bullet, it requires no infrastructure, no training, no human element, no additional components, no storage area, no proper usage, and no serious investment of...anything. Drop a single bullet bug on an unready planet and you could take out an entire colony just by crop destruction.

Game over, man! Game over!

[Snail]

Nice read.

+1

[Scotty]

Seconded.  Creative, if not the most detailed.

[General Battuta]

You guys are spoiled if you want ten minute make-it-up-as-you-go splurges to be detailed. 

[NGTM-1R]

The flaw, of course, being that this is effectively the biological equivalent of grey-gooing a world.

[General Battuta]

How's that a flaw?