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1'''Unmarked spoilers below!'''
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3[[AC:The Novel]]
4* The old man and baby survived because their bodies' pH wasn't normal. But pH can be affected by a ''lot'' of health conditions, including such mundane things as being ''on a diet''. Were there no diabetics in the entire town? No bulimic teens? Nobody who started to hyperventilate when they looked out their window and saw some of the neighbors keel over in the street?
5** The scientists who first survey the town quickly realize it didn't kill everyone in Piedmont immediately... some of them went 'quietly nuts' and committed suicide when Andromeda caused them brain damage rather than killing them by instantly clotting all of their blood. This was mostly people who would have health conditions that caused their pH to be out of the normal range, like diabetics.
6** Also, blood pH in humans is both A) self-correcting, and B) exists in a range rather than a discrete number (7.35 - 7.45). People on restrictive diets or with respiratory problems generally compensate - i.e. alter their circulating levels of either carbon dioxide (present in blood as carbonic acid) or bicarbonate - within minutes to days of a pH shift outside the normal range. (Look up "arterial blood gas interpretation" if you'd like the full details.) A hyperventilating adult will stop hyperventilating eventually, at which point the pH re-regulates and he/she is Andromeda bait. The baby survived because all he could ''do'' was cry, thus remaining alkalotic enough to stave off Andromeda. It's true that a diabetic currently in ketoacidotic or hyperosmolar hyperglycemic nonketotic states would survive an Andromeda exposure, but that individual would likely have died of their diabetes in very short order - they'd still be dead with everyone else, just not dead of Andromeda.
7** Blood pH was not the only factor. As shown by the experiments with the rats and anticoagulants, even if blood clotting doesn't occur or is dramatically slowed due to age/illness/metabolic issues, the massive intracranial hemorrhaging that would eventually result would either cause death directly, or from the suicidal and delusional behavior seen in the people of Piedmont.
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9[[AC:1971 Movie]]
10* Why do the scientists assume that all of the strain has mutated to a noninfectious state just because some of it might possibly have? (That Dutton and his lab rat survive a containment breach is hardly conclusive evidence. )
11** While Hall was unconscious from the gas and lasering, they had been monitoring the Piedmont supercolony rising into the atmosphere, and there had been no reports of as yet of strange deaths or occurrences while it was moving across the country.
12* Why did Hall and Stone order up the nuking believing nobody was still alive in the town? They didn't know how many people were there, nor did they account for everybody, nor did they search everywhere. Finding the baby was little more than luck and the old man found them.
13** The searching everywhere was implied; the book explicitly mentioned the scientists (Hall and Burton/Dutton in the book) checking every building in the town to verify that everyone was dead and how they died, after they recovered the satellite. Also from the novel, they had seen the old man walking around in the visual and infrared camera footage brought back from the plane flyover, so they knew ''someone'' was still alive down there; the baby was the surprise.
14* The five-minute self-destruct makes little to no sense on multiple levels. What if the "odd man" is asleep? He's supposed to wake up and assess the situation and make a decision that fast? That's just silly. Even if a self-destruct nuke were warranted (rather dubious), there's no way forcing a rash decision in five minutes makes sense. And for all those reasons, the odd man would almost certainly always cancel it, completely defeating the point. This is all compounded by the odd man not necessarily even understanding his role. I get that Crichton used this theme a lot but that doesn't mean it doesn't have to make sense.
15** The book shows that Stone, at least, considered the Odd Man Hypothesis a dubious concept in general, but was the only way the US government would agree to giving an automatically-activated nuclear weapon to civilian control.
16* How did the vultures survive, and why didn't the team notice this?
17** The organism isn't deadly once its inside a body, because it kills itself along with its host. The vultures came along after Andromeda was no longer active in the air or had already mutated to a nonlethal form. The team does notice this, but can't work out why it is important until late in the book.
18*** This isn't addressed in the film. They worry the birds will spread the infection, and they kill them, but it's never brought up again. This seems very strange considering the helicopter was prepared with poison for the birds, so they must have already been aware the vultures were there. (Nope. Having poison gas canisters is Standard Operating Procedure when investigating a bio-hazard event.)
19*** Edited out for pacing, possibly, or trying to make things somewhat more straightforward for the audience. Also, it's often assumed that the same organism exposed to different animals have different effects—at the time, they would've just simply thought that the vultures would be carriers without being directly affected. One hypothesis thrown out in the book was that rapid breathing would keep Andromeda out of one's lungs long enough to prevent it from taking hold, and that birds with their naturally high respiration rates wouldn't be affected by it.
20* All the rubber and plastic, etc. on the crashed airplane was gone, but there's a landing gear ''with a tire'' sticking out of the wreckage.
21** At the crash site, one of the techs mentions that there was no rubber on the plane, just a plastic called "Poly-Cron," which was consumed by the Andromeda bug. The tire, which the tech probably didn't think of as "on the plane," was made of ordinary rubber.
22* The big heart-stopping finale is solely due to the fact that Wildfire (which had been in operation for months) was set to blow up unless the nuke-deactivating key was inserted before the time ran out, but the deactivation terminals weren't all installed yet. Wouldn't that be considered ''remotely'' important?
23** While the facility has been operational for a while, it wasn't in full use until the events of the book. Since at least some of the terminals were functional, it was assumed that they could shove installing the rest to a lower priority. They thought they had much more time than they did.
24** The nuke is meant to prevent an accidental release of a horrible microbe. The deactivation key is only included so that one of the scientists intimately involved with the project can stop the process if he deems it necessary for some reason. The most likely scenario by far would be to prevent a false alarm from destroying the base. If a false alarm did end up destroying the base, then it would be a regrettable loss of life and property, of course, but the wider world would continue. In this case, the reason to stop the bomb is because [[spoiler: Andromeda feeds off of pure radiation, so an atomic blast would not only fail to destroy it, but accelerate its growth and mutations.]] This is an entirely unforeseeable complication for the designers and builders of Wildfire, so while in this particular situation the absence of deactivation stations is world-threatening, generally speaking it wouldn't be an issue, especially since the chances of anyone needing to deactivate the self-destruct before construction of the base is even complete is a MillionToOneChance.
25** OP is also forgetting that this is a staple of all of Crichton's works: the fallibility of man in regards to technology. From this to Jurassic Park, everyone believes that they've taken all the precautions needed and "the worst case" simply WON'T happen. In this case, Stone and the rest had absolute faith that they'd built the perfect laboratory to contain any microorganism encountered. From [=PolyCron=] gaskets to the glove box rooms to all the biochemical barriers and decontamination procedures... Nobody ever thought that the "last resort" would actually have to be used, hence why there were fewer than ideal number of stations when initially designed.
26* The old man asks for a cigarette while isolated in Wildfire, which Hall dismisses out of hand. Why didn't Hall consider the possibility that smoking might have been a factor in the old man surviving? For that matter, maybe they should have offered the old man Sterno. Hall DOES consider that him drinking Sterno could be a factor in his survival. In a very unusual situation like this with a completely mysterious pathogen, surely you want to change as few variables as possible. Hall does do this later when he realizes the baby went unfed for hours and forbids Karen feeding it.
27** Aside from the obvious issue of a flammable, unsterilized cigarette in an ultra-clean laboratory with pure oxygen nearby (as well as drinking methanol that cause blindness), this plays into the characterization of Hall. He's an MD, while the rest of the Wildfire team are research scientists; his first instinct is improving the health of patients under his care, while they would be more concerned with not changing lots of variables. You see this when the baby is discovered, as Hall wants to the feed the distressed kid, but Stone warns him that the baby being unfed may contributed to its survival, and they should take no chances until they're all back to Wildfire.
28* Kind of interesting the gender segregation during decontamination - it seems wasteful to have two separate decontamination areas, but there's a whole men/women system. You'd think with what was at stake they'd just run everyone through together.

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