From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jan 31 2002 - 01:03:38 MST
[Fred Duhly] Their world is a moebius loop and when they travel all the way
around, their bodies are reversed. They need some kind of chemical that can
no longer bond to the receptors because they are mirrors of what they should
be....
[Hermit] Fred Duhly got it.
[Hermit] Amino acids are "handed". For example, the amino acids on Earth are
all right-handed helii and the enzymes we use to process them have to match
this.
[Hermit] If we make the initial assumption that life would be similar to
that we have on Earth, and thus is can be expected that the Lapaloopans who
journeyed around their world would no longer be able to process food as
their enzymes would be flipped, but the amino acids in their food would not
be. Thus their bodies would excrete anything they ate without being able to
derive nutritional value from it. They would then weaken and starve to death
no matter how much they ate, or even if they were placed on a glucose drip
or the equivalent.
Well done and kind regards
Hermit
*Interesting that this formed the root of a story by A.C. Clarke in
[url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345430719/thehermit0d]Reach for
Tomorrow[/url] which was written before 1970 (except that he based his story
on a tri-toroid universe, rather than a Moebius planet). Nothing new under
the sun.
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