Doctor Who Musings - You Are What You Eat
Jun. 2nd, 2008 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vitruvian23Continuing my new trend of overanalyzing sf and fantasy stuff.... saw the latest Doctor Who ep, Silence In The Library, over the weekend, don't ask me how exactly considering I do live in the continental US.
Anyway, the monster of the week was....
Anyway, the monster of the week was....
called the Vashta Nerada, sort of microscopic 'piranhas of the air' that live mostly in shadows and darkness and can strip an animal (or human) carcass down to the bone in milliseconds. The Doctor of course identifies them, and when asked how one deals with this threat, he says something along the lines of them not really having a weakness like the Daleks and the Sontarans, so one just has to run.
Something strikes me as off about this, though. Okay, so these things are microscopic, they float in air, they are deterred but not stopped or damaged by light, but most importantly *they eat meat*. They don't eat the bone, they don't convert inorganic matter into more of themselves, and they also don't seem to excrete anything when they eat something. This would imply, to me at least, that the Vashta Nerada are in fact some kind of organic life form, in that they use or require the specific mix of organic chemicals in animal meat to make more of themselves, meet their energy requirements, or both. They're not simply converting matter into energy, since in that case they 'd be able to eat the bones, the structure of the library, and the planet itself just as easily. I don't *think* they're transmuting elements, since if that were the case they should be equally flexible in their dietary requirements. So, presumably they're breaking the meat down for chemical energy and building blocks for more Vashta Nerada. That would imply that the Vashta Nerada themselves, even if much smaller than animal cells or even viruses (maybe prion-sized), are themselves *composed* of the same constituent elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. as we are. Since they prey on animal flesh, they should presumably also be adapted to the same environments in which said animals can, you know, live - even if perhaps they have some kind of spore form for transmission through space. And *that* implies to me that they are probably held together the same way we are - with chemical bonds between their constitutent elements. Bonds that are vulnerable to all kinds of disruptive influences - i.e., many of the same things that kill us.
That is, unless the Doctor knows of previous failures, there's absolutely no reason to suppose that measures such as flame, microwaves, hard radiation, etc. would be ineffective in killing the Vashta Nerada. Heck, even certain sonic frequencies might be effective, hint, hint. And yes, we all know of the Doctor's distaste for guns and weapons in general, but neither did he ever imply that the VN were sapient or even sentient, so this would be more in the nature of fumigating one's house, or even applying antibiotics, surely.
Something strikes me as off about this, though. Okay, so these things are microscopic, they float in air, they are deterred but not stopped or damaged by light, but most importantly *they eat meat*. They don't eat the bone, they don't convert inorganic matter into more of themselves, and they also don't seem to excrete anything when they eat something. This would imply, to me at least, that the Vashta Nerada are in fact some kind of organic life form, in that they use or require the specific mix of organic chemicals in animal meat to make more of themselves, meet their energy requirements, or both. They're not simply converting matter into energy, since in that case they 'd be able to eat the bones, the structure of the library, and the planet itself just as easily. I don't *think* they're transmuting elements, since if that were the case they should be equally flexible in their dietary requirements. So, presumably they're breaking the meat down for chemical energy and building blocks for more Vashta Nerada. That would imply that the Vashta Nerada themselves, even if much smaller than animal cells or even viruses (maybe prion-sized), are themselves *composed* of the same constituent elements of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc. as we are. Since they prey on animal flesh, they should presumably also be adapted to the same environments in which said animals can, you know, live - even if perhaps they have some kind of spore form for transmission through space. And *that* implies to me that they are probably held together the same way we are - with chemical bonds between their constitutent elements. Bonds that are vulnerable to all kinds of disruptive influences - i.e., many of the same things that kill us.
That is, unless the Doctor knows of previous failures, there's absolutely no reason to suppose that measures such as flame, microwaves, hard radiation, etc. would be ineffective in killing the Vashta Nerada. Heck, even certain sonic frequencies might be effective, hint, hint. And yes, we all know of the Doctor's distaste for guns and weapons in general, but neither did he ever imply that the VN were sapient or even sentient, so this would be more in the nature of fumigating one's house, or even applying antibiotics, surely.
