This is in response to Magnus'es post (http://cocobear80.blogspot.com/2008/03/need-advice-of-warlock.html)
Well, its a good question. Lets put it this way .. nature has intended that the strong will survive and the weak perish. For you to get powers like the cat so that you can drink from drains and garbage cans you need to eat and drink from drains and garbage ... if you survive, you'll get stronger .. If you don't survive .. well you tried and that has to count for something.
Short term wise, the cat probably has a well developed immune system fine tuned through hundreds of near death experiences with contaminated food and water. Long term wise, evolution plays an important role in determining the hardiness of a creature to a disease. It's a fact that most mongrels fare better against diseases compared to those pure breed animals which has lots of genetic diseases, weaknesses and such. These mongrels will then inherit their "toughness" to the next generation.
Its funny but the reason why we humans can't drink the same shit that cats do lies simply in the fact that we have gotten better at procuring better sources of water. Our caveman ancestors probably won't miss a beat if asked to gulp down a bottle of raw sewage water. If you're thinking that evolution can't make that much of a differece .. think again. The original "humans" (our genetic ancestors) were never omnivores, they ate vegetables only. Meat if ingested will not digest properly and will end up becoming toxic and might make them very ill. Through persistance and the strong desire to eat meat (yes Magnus, what you feel regarding meat is not a product of your own twisted mind, it's genetically inherited) we humans have acclimatised our bodies to process meat and tap into a rich warehouse of proteins (that is why we need meat). If memory serves me right, through evolution, the human body had developed approximately 35 different types of enzymes which is required to process meat and to get rid of the toxic byproducts of it .... this is a very complicated process and probably took thousands of years to reach the point where we are now. Our ability to eat meat is one of the main driving reasons that allowed us to climb up all the way to the top of the food chain, so effort wise .. it was well worth it.
Now for the question of wheater we can duplicate this "hardiness" into humans to allow them to become stronger. There are a few suggestions I can make and I'll outline them here :
1) Eat sewage . If you survive, repeat. You'll eventually get used to it and develop an immunity. The idea is to get sick so that you'll build an immunity
2) Probiotics such as Lactobacillus from Vitagen and yoghurt and stuff does help, it doesnt make you stronger par say but instead what happens is that you will have an extra bunch of "good" bacteria in your stomach that either directly kills "bad" bacterias, compete with food with the "bad" bacteria in your stomach so that they don't get too strong or helps your body to trigger antibodies without giving you any disease symptoms.
3) Genetically modify humans to tolerate contaminated food. Needless to say, our level of technology hasn't reached this point yet and we will have to do it the old classical way. Have lots of children and force them to eat garbage. The survivors have lots of kids of their own and make them eat garbage either ... kind of like animal breeding.
4) Take vaccines/medicines to give you a stronger immunity - this is easier said than done owing to the fact that when Mr Kitty downs a litre of longkang water the amount and variety of bacteria in it will be pretty impposible to count. We can probably develop some kind of vaccine for some of the major ones but not all. Remember, our body does protect us from a lot of different bacterium. We just don't notice it cause most of it gets destroyed before we show symptoms.
5) We can probably get Mr Kitty to down the polluted water and then extract the antibodies produced and then inject it into us to give us a temporary amount of protection. The success level of this is hard to predict as I have no idea how the immune system will work with kitty antibodies .. it might actually make you sick as the antibodies might attack your own system .. Kitty pwnage !
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Crisis Core kicks ass ! It's sort of real time combat but it feels just right for a Final Fantasy game nothing like the atrocious XII. You only control 1 guy though , no party. I'll review it properly when i've played it a little bit more |
At 9:55 AM,
Thanks Warlock. So basically living the good life turns us into pussies (and I'm not talking about stray cats anymore ^_^)
In response to your solutions:
1) None of us are gonna be eating sewage or drinking drainwater anytime soon =P
2) This is pretty feasible. So one possibility is probiotics. Vitagen and all those drinks are pretty bad since there's a hefty amount of sugar in them, but the are tons of lactobasilus supplements available in capsule form too.
3) Weapon X. Just let me get my techno-organic alien armor and become immortal, then I'll start modifying my 4 horsemen (I'll let you be Pestilence, Siriuz can be War and wield a flaming mouse to smash people with). On the kids...well I'm not ready to be put in the slammer for child abuse just yet
4)I suppose vaccines would require a massive amount of time and money so its not feasible to personally do that.
5)Same problem as 4 plus the possibility of kitty pwnage.
Regarding the eating of meat, it began once humans learned to cook meat with fire. Our bodies lack the ability to digest meat in its natural form even today (which is not the case with fruit, veggies and insects/grubs). Even with the thousands of years of adaptation (apparently evolution requires you to become a new species) we still are unable to consume meat unless cooked.
but you're right about protein consumption, we're much larger than people of olden times due to our larger protein intake (trust me we're bigger than most knights were back in the day apparently.
But coming back to our only viable form of development, the consumption of probiotics. So one alternative is "good bacteria" fro capsules, yoghurt and those cultured milk drinks. Is there anything else we could consume? Mind you I'm not talking about getting the runs from eating chilli and such but food poisoning/vomiting/fever etc.
Does Crisis Core have way cool summons? I can't bring myself to look at videos of them cos it would be massive spoilers, but I have heard they're not ingame but FMV summons instead.
At 10:32 AM,
So far in Crisis Core, I haven't been able to summon anything yet. It's more like a limit break than a summon where I cast the same ability that the summons use (FMV cutscene).. still at the beginning so might not have seen any summoning yet. Will review later.
If your worried about the sugar in Vitgen try the new extra low sugar vitagen.
At 12:19 PM,
I've actually been checking and the capsules are far more efficient and pretty cheap as well.
Crisis Core looks tight though, except I dunno the combat looks a bit clunky from the videos I've seen, I guess you can show me on Saturday ^_^