How to protect yourself against alien microbes without a space suit?

Question

One of the main problems when dealing with alien life would be that of microbes. Having evolved under completely different circumstances, first contact between any two different alien species could prove fatal for either side, since each one of them would most likely carry alien microbes. Even if some of the microbes were harmless to one of the species, the other one would probably have no immunity against them.

Now, one of the most obvious and practical solutions would be the use of a space suit, since it won't only protect from microbial infections but also from the differences in the environment. In many sci-fi shows, you see aliens and humans interacting with one another, sometimes for the first time, or even exploring a completely foreign planet without ever setting foot there, without the use of a suit or anything that could protect them or the environment around them from microbes.

My question is, how could that be achieved for real? Could there be some kind of medical technology that protects both sides from the exchange in germs on first contact? If so, what could it be?

Answer 1

If we judge from the position of realism, then it's more likely that you'll catch a virus from a tree rather than an alien - your DNA has more in common with a banana than any alien out there.

So things that left are microbes and microorganisms. Even if they won't eat your body directly, they can snag up nutrients, or mess up your functions with their excretions (Imagine if you had contracted microbe that eats sugars and poops out arsenic)

What's the possible solution to that?

Aliens have artificial immune and microbiota systems.

In my story aliens were faced with the problem of microbiota cross-contamination while dealing with each other. Even if bacteria have no ill effect on the crew, it can devastate a biosphere it's introduced to if it begins to outcompete natives and starving them out by gobbling up all the microelements they need, while itself being incompatible with the local biosphere for it to make use of the new invasive species. This will cut off the food chain at the very root, which will destabilize and destroy the entire ecosystem in very short order (I stumbled upon that problem being highlighted in the Rifters trilogy by Peter Watts, by the way).

The ships themselves are routinely sterilized by a variety of methods to ensure no bacteria gets carried from a planet to a planet, but this still leaves another vector of contamination: the crew itself. Even if you bathe in alcohol disinfectant every hour, there's still about a quarter of a kilogram of bacteria living inside you. The problem? You can't just kill them off, they're symbiotic and vital for our functioning, mainly the gut microflora.

So what to do? My aliens went with the augmentation route. They have a large variety of implants that take on the role of the body's natural immune, digestive, and a few other systems without compromising health, basically filling themselves up with nanotechnology - the implants themselves aren't nanotechnological, but they can manufacture and distribute nanoagents and microscopic robots for various purposes. This results in the aliens being basically sterile-clean inside and out at any time (and the poop doesn't smell too). Any bacteria that gets in is almost immediately targeted and destroyed by a computer-controlled artificial immune system, and any bits of these systems that end up outside of the body become inert pieces of indigestible material with zero impact on the local ecology, as they lose both the control signal and energy supply of the host. what's great about this system is that it also improves the overall health of the individuum as a side-effect (getting sick is virtually impossible now, and even some health conditions can be targeted and fixed before they'll become an issue).

Answer 2

There are a couple factors that must be considered when we are talking about first contact. Without a doubt the handwavium used in many sci-fi series to allow aliens to communicate, to not infect each other, and to have even remotely similar biologies is just that-handwavium; after all, the mathematical chances of alien life being biologically compatible, or being life at all, are vanishingly small. In all reality, even trips to the moon or to the ISS involve quarantine afterwards to evaluate the astronauts for radiation, sickness, gravity acclimation, etc. Microbes are of utmost importance, but with the low chance of biological compatibility, the larger worries would be toxins, as they could potentially be poisonous or highly radioactive, or even (much more remotely) possibly be carrying prions that would corrupt proteins rather than a direct biological attack.

For a thought study on how unlikely it is for them to be biologically compatible with us, the simplest cell in known existence has around (don't quote me on this) 32 individual proteins; basically these chains create necessary amino acids needed for life. All proteins come in two configurations, R and L depending on orientation, and in our world, all biology uses the L configuration. In a perfect primordial soup, made of only those 32 proteins in a solute/liquid base and energized to chain together in some way (like the Miller Urey Experiment), the chance of coming up with the same configuration of proteins is 1:(32!/2) or 1:2.6313084e+35/2. In non math terms, the chance of having even a simple infectious microbe based on our biology evolve in another system is less likely than if the entire solar system could be filled with monkeys solving rubik's cubes and coming up with the answer at the same moment by random chance.

With that said, our paranoid Earth governments will be suiting us up without question. Hey, maybe we'll look cooler...

Answer 3

In fact, nothing is likely to happen to you. Yes, in science fiction there is often a plot point, which consists in the fact that aliens who have not previously met terrestrial bacteria will suffer from simple diseases against which they have no immunity. This stereotype is associated with the first colonists of America and the catastrophe with smallpox and typhus that happened because of this, to which local residents who had never met these diseases were subjected. But the conquistadors and the Aztecs were of the same species. According to Seth Shostak, a senior engineer at the SETI project, bacteria are limited to the life forms with which they are associated with biochemistry.

Our microbes have evolved to survive with our unique DNA. Even viral and bacterial infections that infect one species on our planet are rarely transmitted to another. Dogs don't get the flu, for example. Any alien life form is likely to be immune to Earth diseases, so don't count on a War of the Worlds-style solution to the problem.