javcs wrote:Absolute lies.
I have eaten 100% chocolate before, it was awesome. Admittedly, since I got about a 1.5 pound block, I didn't eat it all in one go. And, in fact, I did just whack chunks of it off and eat them on occasion. Though I have to admit that after a few chunks of pure chocolate, I experimented with using it as a topping, and found it did quite well. It went awesome with a double chocolate fudge ice cream with dark chocolate syrup.
javcs wrote:In all honesty, I've started finding that a lot of milk chocolates are just too sugary and insufficiently chocolatey for my tastes.
I meant 'pure chocolate' a little less literally than that (I was referring to e.g. Hershey bars), but having tasted cocoa beans I am not impressed: any description other than 'bitter' is simply inaccurate. For common usage (ala candy bars) I recommend nothing above 70% (which is admittedly still a dark chocolate, rather than a milk or white). And bear in mind: I work in a health food store, I've tasted a fair amount of this stuff.
javcs wrote:Seriously, though, I hauled a block of 100% along for Thanksgiving one time, in addition to some whipping cream (you can make your own whipped cream)
Marshmallows as well, though I haven't looked up how.
Solemn wrote:Skin flora are not essential to your health; to my knowledge, the best thing that the nicest species do is take up space and thus keep other species of skin flora off, and give your immune system a workout whenever you get a breach in your skin. That is to say, they occupy space, and sometimes they fight you and die. (The worst things ordinary and normal human skin flora species can do? Eat the cartilage off of your bones, infect and permanently damage your brain, infect and permanently damage your heart, y'know, the works. You really don't want a lot of this stuff getting beneath the epidermis. Hell, most of us don't want it on the epidermis).
But without it, something
else would live there. Biological skin (human or otherwise) without skin flora is like aluminum without an oxidized layer: it'll have one pretty soon.
Solemn wrote:A small scout ship, as a sealed environment with a limited population expected to be in close quarters with one another for a very long period of time, could potentially be sterilized of human skin flora. Not with soap or showering, mind you, that does nothing, but some pretty harsh decontamination procedures--likely using future tech in ways I cannot even guess at--could be expected to eliminate human skin flora, for everyone on the Bellarmine, for the entire duration of the mission.
Bacteria are a common enough thing in the human body (some of them are even required for our bodies to correctly function) that you're going to get something living on your skin. The question is only what, and when it'll start living there.
Solemn wrote:In fact, it is conceivable that skin flora are eliminated on all ships for all human missions, which basically amounts to "only Earth-Humans experience body odor, acne, and various other grooming woes." So the TCA space colonists might have a "stinky Earthman" stereotype.
The first bit of this is, as I implied, highly unlikely. But the second bit? See my response on oral flora.
Solemn wrote:They might also want to get rid of oral flora. Cavities, bad breath, and a number of other inconveniences might not really be much of a a worry for Alex.
Some oral flora have recently been genetically modified to emit alcohol instead of whatever that acid is. They aren't approved for the market, due to 'unforeseeable consequences', but they're a lot more likely than trying to kill out all of your oral flora and then hope nothing replaces it: instead, the TCA is likely to kill it out
and then replace it themselves. That way you don't have to worry about what your crew will get infected with between missions.
It could even be a standard part of dental plans.
Solemn wrote:These issues plus the potential danger of being pathogenic to some species that we'd just made diplomatic contact with?
As you might have noticed, the Loroi in the medbay weren't all wearing biological exposure suits: to me, that's a pretty sure sign that the setting is a little less strict than you're worrying about.
Solemn wrote:And that's just considering the human side of the equation. Alex has been through a Loroi shipboard medical facility, and, limited though it might be, he's had cause enough to be impressed by their surgical abilities. Loroi medical decontamination might've eliminated his skin flora, and potentially any or all of the other parasitic, mutualistic, commensalistic etc. bacteria colonies feasting and excreting on the human body at all times; Alex has pretty clearly not had to deal with infected tissues of any kind.
The Loroi have no idea whether those bacteria might be necessary for Jardin's survival.
Solemn wrote:The Loroi might also not need to shower. Even if the original Soia had malodorous body flora, the Loroi are (probably) a designer species created in and meant to inhabit controlled environments; they might not have any body flora at all,
Highly unlikely, bacteria have a tendency to colonize, so...
Solemn wrote:or have body flora that was itself engineered to be non-pathogenic and inoffensive, and their own natural skin excreta might, as with humans, be inoffensive without flora metabolizing it into various more pungent molecules.
... this is pretty likely. By popping out your own designer micro-flora, you can reduce the chances of something
less polite taking up the job.
Solemn wrote:Absalom wrote:Should such predictions come to pass, we will surely see less of the boring solid-chocolate bars and more of the actually interesting ones that have other stuff mixed in.
Are you suggesting that the sky is in fact
not falling? Sir, that goes against everything I've read in any news article since 1996.
Shocking, I know!