Did you know there was film about a pandemic, and to stop it, it was (apparently, I might add) enough for the characters to let themselves get cooked to the point where their outer layer of epithelium has turned to ash?

I remember The Andromeda Strain. The cooking of the outer skin wasn’t to stop the pandemic, it was a decontamination effort inside the sterile labs. They figured out that to stop the Strain, they had to spray alkaline stuff on it. They figured this out because one of the only survivors of the town that first found the strain was an old wino who had pickled himself pretty good with sterno.

I saw The Andromeda Strain back in the 70’s and/or 80’s. A scary film.

A great novel by Michael Crichton, it was about an infectious agent that came on a meteorite from the Andromeda galaxy.

@zenvelo that’s some far fetched stuff. How would you identify a meteor as extragalactic to begin with, then pinpoint Andromeda specifically? Then there’s the problem of how it is that Andromeda which approaches us at 68 miles a second managed to propel a meteor that arrived here 4.5 billion years ahead of the galaxy itself?

@stanleybmanly Was this (common) knowledge in 1969, the year the book was published?

@stanleybmanly Hey, I didn’t write the novel, and it was mostly about fighting the virus than about how it got here. Plus, I read the book fifty years ago.

@rebbel It was known that the 2 galaxies are approaching one another, and the speed was estimated from the red shifts of Andromeda’s stars. By 1969 there were very few vital statistics concerning Andromeda yet to be discovered. The thing was too big, too close, and too similar to our own and was thus studied with an intensity second only to our own.

@zenvelo I’m not accusing you of manufacturing a flawed plot. I neglected reading the novel at the time of all the hype, and never saw the movie. The fact that I missed them both is a rather peculiar anomaly for me, since it’s the sort of stuff that I usually chase.

@stanleybmanly: So your favorite passion is astronomy? What about ufology? If it’s the latter, we could share our knowledge!

Thank you, @stanleybmanly, for that titbit!

The Andromeda Strain was a favorite movie when I was a kid. In our house we watched it every time it was on TV. The two moments I can still picture are the funny one with the woman scientist looking disgusted and throwing away the helmet after getting baked, and the drunk saying “squeeze”. Fondue night was a special event so Sterno was a familiar thing.

@luigirovatti Favorite passion? No. Not at this stage of my life. And from the nature of your questions here, well let’s just say I’m not surprised that you would ardently follow anything involving UFOs. Regretfully, I have little to share on the topic.