Grrl Power #690 – Götterdämmermcguffins
I hope that top panel is legible. I didn’t want to try and typeset all that text so I hand wrote it. While my handwriting is kind of neat… not like, 18th century calligrapher neat, granted, but usually it’s pretty legible – though some of the lettering size is a little inconsistent. I’ll make the double sized page a public post over at Patreon so if you’re having to squint a little too much, you can check it out there.
Now that I think about it, it’s a little weird that Cora is the first one to put this together. (I’m not saying she’s right, but it’s a fair guess.) Dabbler probably suspects it but never brought it up.
Keep in mind that the “Nth” as she calls them are entirely hypothetical, and even if they did exist, some of their activities could be mistaken for the Tier 3 guys. You know, the Vorlons, Reapers, even Precursors. Guys who have some amazing tech but are still banging around in spaceships. Or… are spaceships, in the case of the Reapers.
According to Dabbler, the Nth aren’t necessarily ascended, like, energy beings, but they have technology so advanced that it’s unrecognizable as technology, and according to her theory, tend to work in ways that aren’t detectable via normal examination. Like, they’ve never shown up and been all “Yo I’m basically the Beyonder and I can kill a galaxy with a wave of my hand.” Because if they had… well, then they wouldn’t be hypothetical, would they?
Anyway, Dabbler will probably talk about them at some point when Sydney gets back and asks about them.
I mean if she gets back! No, it’s totally when.
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Maybe all the cryptic prophecies that are passed on from the ascended elder races are actually nothing more than the ramblings of drunken Nth Space Wizards who stumbled into our brane on their way home from the Space Wizard tavern.
Maybe they’re brane-damaged.
Oh! That’s a good one!
They really need to find a way to avoid drain bamage.
Or the Nth are just bored and they’ve taken to trolling.
come ‘ere, come ‘ere ittle mortal *hic*, I wanna tell ya sumtin, all ya gotta do…*hic*…is love one another…that’s all man, just love one another, don’t fight ober…like…stupid stuff right…easy peezy my main…whataa.you are…mortal man thing *hic*
-swigs space rum-
oh…and like…don’t eat clams…they’re like snot in a shell…like gross…or bugs…don’t eat bugs…and…um/…like…love each other…don’t eat dirty stuff…and…um…oh right….just…like…don’t eat from the wrong side of a banana and only butter the top side of toast *hic* not the bottom side, got me?
Um…what else…oh crap look at the time…but um…like just do dat stuffin I says to ya and like…ya don’t um…anna I come back ere…I’ll um…smash the mountains, burn the sky, and make the dead rise up to eat ya…but like *hic* *swigs space rum*, I’m all about love, love ya man…
-gets up after 3000 year hangover nap to find a citation in the mail-
{Fine for interfering with cultural development of a primitive world resulting in genocidal ideological wars]
Dah hell?
This is my new favorite comment.
Dabbler would have mentioned it. Not to worry.
Dabbler wasn’t able to figure out much about the orbs, and doesn’t yet know that it can make aetherium causeways.
Dabbler has observed a few things that suggest they are Nth tech. Oddly enough the biggest hint was probably the fact that Sydney can use them at all.
Not that they would latch on to her mind you. That she figured out what they do and how to properly activate and control them. Just for an example: How the hell did Sydney use the Flight Orb the first time? There’s no visible interface, no direct feedback, no explanation of what it does or how to activate the thing. But she did it anyway. From what we’ve seen it was easy for her to do so. Perfectly intuitive. She just touched it and “Welp, now I know how to fly.”
And that kind of interface? It’s insane. Like, “Holy Grail of Engineering” level insane. A device that causes any sentient being to instinctively know what it does and how to activate it just by picking it up? Yeah. That’s straight up Clarktech.
Remember when Sona got to see the upgrade grid? That’s another tip about how powerful the spheres actually were
Holy Carp. Just realized: what if the upgrade progression on those things is logarithmic?
I actually believe the point system is to help train the person who is using them.
Its like a built in training that lets the user slowly learn over time how to use each orb and all the niffy tricks it has.
Well he’s been hinting at it.
Her first unlock is Basicaly a teleport or blink spell.
While Her second unlock is a seemingly underpowered burst mode compared to the original tank slicing beam, her third unlock quadrupled her relative flight speed.
I saw a picture, may have been a vote incentive, that shows Sydney in the Florida Keys rising up above the waves with a surprised expression on her face, holding the flight orb (it being the first orb she touched). All the other orbs are bursting out of the ocean, heading toward her. So, she “figured it out” because it was the first button she pressed. And there ARE buttons, that activate when each orb is touched.
So I can definitely say that Sydney, upon discovering the touch activated interface, would say “I wonder what THIS button does?”
By the time the comic starts the flashback, Sydney has had the orbs for several days or even weeks. She had dodged a multitude of queries from her co-worker at the comic shop; that didn’t all happen in one day. So yeah, with touch interface and a little time, I pretty sure she picked up on it all.
It’s really not more complex than your average smart phone.
A good sign of something being really advanced is when it breaches that threshold from
simple complexity
to
complex simplicity.
At the start of the comic, she had had the orbs for about three months. See:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/167
If I was a super advanced alien with control over space and time, I’d totally go fuck with the talking apes.
Not like I’d have anything else to do with my time. Beyond super games.
I’d probably just create a few Solar Systems and fill each one with creatures and cultures from my wildest fantasies.
Then whenever I started to feel responsible for them, I’d probably just take a few quotes from The Bible to help with guidance and moral structure
Literally, God on a daily basis.
Guess that’s one interpretation, except he actually wrote The Bible (as in, no real evidence to the contrary)
Plenty of evidence to show it was written by humans.
Maybe it was put into their heads by another Nth entity plagiarising their holy book.
More like it’s the alien equivalent of Grimms Fairy Tales, poorly translated.
Not the place for this conversation, but there is zero evidence that any “God” ever wrote anything and plenty that none did and that every “Holy” book ever written was done so by men (specifically) for the purpose of dividing “us” from “them” and giving “us” a reason to persecute “them.” and feel good about having done so.
Despite what various religions have been twisted into most started with honest good intentions.
The ones that weren’t strong “us vs them”s got conquered and destroyed by the ones that were. So we got left with the imperialist shitdingus religions in the end.
Most religions were started with good intentions. There are a few that were obviously power-plays as their start, and a few that might have been.
Actually, there is ONE example of something being attributed as written directly by the Hand of God & He gave it to Moses. Ten basic rules for civilized behavior, but carried serious enough emphasis that people thereafter have considered those rules to be written in stone.
But who’s word do we have that they were written by God?
He went into the mountains, where there is plenty of stone.
He was away for 40 days, enough time to carve them.
He went alone, no witnesses.
Not to mention that the whole thing could easily be a story made up by man.
You left out the part where he deliberately broke the original Commandments and then returned for the backup copy
Which set? Or rather, which subset of the ones that all contain more than 10 rules?
Plus, of the popular 10, only 7 are actually relevant to everyday life and contradicted without major divine consequences before and after they got handed out.
Plus plus, the story is dated later than some very similar, non-religious laws from the same general area (e.g. code of Hammurabi)
Not to mention that the guy got lost for multiple years on a walk that should have taken a few months at max in the same story.
The reason they wander for 40 years (originally, the word we have now for ’40’ meant ‘many’, no specific number) was because there was a dispute when they got to the Promised Land, so they wandered until that original generation died, and then they found they had been going in circles all that time and the Promised Land was just two days’ journey away
Considering that there are older moral codes then those ten rules that have led to growing civilizations that didn’t lead them to commit genocide on multiple occasions, I’m really suspecious about those 10 rules being divinely inspired (or if being divinely inspired, being evidence that the being inspiring them is a douche.)
I mean, seriously, get rid of the flowerly language, and the rules are:
1. “Hey, don’t you dare get a second opinion; don’t question me, boy!”
2. “Don’t talk back to me, don’t make fun of me, boy!”
3. “Don’t muck about on my day off.”
4. “Don’t talk back to your mum and dad. No, I don’t care if they beat you or sell you off to somebody.”
5. “Don’t cheat on my little girls.”
6. “Hey, Oh yea, killing someone is bad. You probably shouldn’t do it. Why is it only 6th on the list? Because your mom was a cheater!”
7. “Hey, keep your hands to your own stuff.”
8. “Don’t you dare tell me Jimmy did something when it was you who did it.”
9. “Hey, what’d I say about no cheating? Don’t help her cheat either!”
10. “Hey, I already told you not to take other people’s stuff, but don’t even think about it!”
Seriously, it sounds like a list a drunk uncle-in-law who’s trying to come up with a good moral list would come up with. As far as moral codes, it’s pretty lousy. The hippocratic oath, “Do no harm” is, in 3 words, infinitely better, and applies to a much broader scope of human experience.
The problem with the Hypocrites Oath, is, more times than not, they actually end up causing more harm
Hey, careful which quotes from that tome you use!
“Ok, so we can totally wage war on the Crab Warriors of Oh-zeta-nine, and enslave or wipe them and their children out, but the are crustaceans, so we can’t eat them!”
“It says here ‘Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.’ but.. uh… we have scales, not fur?”
Hey, stop complaining! I mean, if your deity gives you a bunch of commandments that are followed by default, enjoy.
Me, I like the “Thou shalt have bilateral symmetry” commandment. It’s my favorite, but “Thou shalt breath whilst alive” is a close second.
lol
Rick already did that for his sociopath of a daughter :)
Rick forgot to put food in Froopyland!
Poor Tommy had to rely on systematic incest and cannibalism to survive…
1) It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
2) This gets me wondering. Didnt Beth push Tommy into the honey swamp? Honey… which is edible food. And there was water too, which you cant drown in? So…. Tommy had food and water but resorted to incestuous cannibalism anyway.
Honey is not suitable for long term consumption nor is it nutrition-rich
I refuse to hear of this anti-honey propaganda.:) You’ve probably been paid off by the High Fructose Corn Syrup lobby. Fiends.
However honey actually does contain nutrients,organic acids, antioxidants, flavinoids, has high caloric intake…. so you could actually survive on it ‘technically.’ Plus I’m assuming that none of the plants in Froopyland are poisonous since Rick made it child-safe.
Sure you’ll probably have protein deficiency health problems but sort of amazed Tommy went straight to the whole ‘screw animals and eat the kids’ option.
Tommy you sick, sick SOB. :)
In my opinion the bible does not always have the best quotes. For example the “You can’t escape me. Where ever someone prays to a god of his choice, he actually prays to me” from the Bhagavad Gita sounds much better than the “When you pray to an other god I will kill you. Hear me? I’ll kill you!” from the bible.
You should read the Quantum Vibe webcomic, the ‘Assimulation’ chapter.
And this made me think about Adventures of God (A manhwua that I read on webtoons).
“Fucking with talking apes’ WOULD be super games …
Oh, you mean like the super game of “I know! Let’s hand one of these primitives the 7 orbs of teaching our children how to warp space and time” and see what happens. Should be amusing.
‘Teasers are usually rich kids with nothing to do. They cruise around looking for planets which haven’t made interstellar contact yet and buzz them.’
‘Buzz them?’ Arthur began to feel that Ford was enjoying making life difficult for him.
‘Yeah,’ said Ford, ‘they buzz them. They find some isolated spot with very few people around, then land right by some poor unsuspecting soul whom no one’s ever going to believe and them strut up and down in front of him wearing silly antennae on their head and making beep beep noises. Rather childish really.’
Source: The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
Check out Quantum Vibe, some of the characters end up in a galaxy that their teleport drive stops working in but fictional warp drive does work and is populated with a myriad of sentient species suspiciously similar to fictional cultures from Star Trek. They end up finding out nigh-omnipotent beings caught some episodes of Star Trek and decided to modify an entire galaxy around it as an RPG, because they figured that was better than the alternatives like engaging in cosmic wars of destruction.
I honestly suspect this sort of thing to be the twist ending of some anime series like (Overlord) and (That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime).
The fantasy worlds look, feel, and obey the same rules *mostly* as games from their own world, but are flesh and blood real. Would not be surprised if it was (We saw, thought it looked fun, made our own version, took a few genre savvy humans and put them in to mix things up).
Still, that’s nothing compared to Brockian Ultra-Cricket.
That probably [i]is[/i] super games. I mean, depending on how you look at it, that’s the Sims, Tropico, SimCity, Civilization, StarCraft, etc.
not [, use
and in case \ (\\) is needed, use \.
Sooner or later, we’ll figure out the tags here.
That…was not the way I expected it to fail.
HTML tags, not BBCode tags on this site. Sorry, my bad.
(I really should just stick to Markdown tags – even when they don’t work, people understand them.)
Some of the tags usable here are listed at the bottom of the comments column…
and NationStates?
This is my favorite alien uplift scene, although I also love this take on it. Clearly we are reaching the tipping point.
We’re the Nth version of an ant farm.
I guess you could call it a “Nth farm”. I’ll just see myself out….
Teach the apes Scrabble. It’s the only way to find the Question hidden in their minds..
That would explain the 2016 American elections. XD
Okay it seems that bad translations AKA Babelfish is one of the big reasons why cryptic advice is so cryptic.
Also I love how Cora deflates Sydney’s Power Trip by suggesting that her Tech may be too good for her own good because it could potentially lead to the world being under siege and besiege by people who want her technology.
Sydney is a genre savvy hero.
If she thought the orbs would bring catastrophic attention to Earth,
she would never go back.
We know full well that she returns the Earth. Genre savvy are not she’s not quite willing to leave her home planet behind in fact she doesn’t even know for sure that her orbs are the tech that Cora is referring to do just knows they’re op as she doesn’t know what.
Solution… join an intergalactic peacekeeping force. Then the target is considered the homeground for any war-causers with Earth just being a valuable member’s house.
Girl power GXP? Well I can’t say that it wouldn’t be interesting but I think Tenchi already corner to market for that sort of thing
It’s also possible that the so called advanced races are just bored trolls who like being vague just to mess with the recently evolved to create a language.
Maybe it’s a gaming achievement. ; troll the developing race bonus achievement cause them to set up a religion based upon your trolling.
That would explain a lot.
counts number of world religions A lot of a lot.
Yeah, that would definetly explain a lot but i really hope they dont need more achievements, we dont need any more religions popping up.
I’m more convinced than ever that Cora is a Latexian (living inflatable doll or something similar) and her hardlight suit is actually to keep her from ragdolling around. All four of Cora’s faces in this strip look like she’s wobbling between them.
Yep…. f’ggn called it!!! just like I said in the previous page “caveman wielding Promethean fire too advance even for high tech aliens”….
Also… A space wizard is technically describes the Jedi accurately when you think about.
I got less Jedi and more Phantasy Star IV (I am the Grand Light and I imprisoned the Profound Darkness inside the sun of your system, It occasionally will try to reach out, and each of your inhabited planets is a lock to that prison….but I’m sort of busy with…stuff..so you heroes…yeah I’ll just tell you about it and let you take care of it)
that sort of thing, inspired me to write stories about Ultra tech magic space sorceresses who are really just screwing about, or have their own personal agendas thinking in terms of billions of years, but their “games” endanger the lives of mortal beings on a regular basis. Like I got the feeling the Light and Darkness in the series were less (mortal enemies) and more like *bet you, you can’t break out, you use monsters to try and break out, and I’ll send divine messengers and manipulate the ideologies of the mortals to try and keep you imprisoned and let’s see how long it takes you to break out.
On this general theme, have you read Roger Zelazny’s story ‘The Game of Blood and Dust’?
______________________________________________________________
There’s another possible explanation for so many alien-to-each-other species having similar looks (and sometimes even mutual fertility!), and that’s an aspect of what Pratchett called ‘morphic resonance’. Because the first sapient beings looked basically like that, they (without knowing it at the time) simply set a pattern that Reality then copied over & over. I think that DC Comics have used this explanation, at least sometimes, with the Malthusians [and thus their offshoots, the ‘Guardians of the Universe’ and the Zamarons] as the originals…
That sounds like you’re anthropomorphizes the anthropic princple.
See, like so many of you, I’ve often wanted to use both of those anthro- words in the same sentence.
You owe us an anthro-apology.
So what’s the difference? Isn’t anthropology just a specific form of apology already?
;)
Babylon 5’s Technomages are literally space wizards.
More like space illusionists. Their technology isn’t quite at Vorlon level.
Jedi are not wizards – they are psionics. They use telekinetics, telepathy (limited), telempathy and precognition. Not that they are very powerful. Not compared to the Talents from Anne McCaffrey’s “Tower and the Hive” books… Or the metapsychics from Julian Mays books.
This comparison depends entirely on which books and comics are considered cannon. Some of the feats attributed to the Sith of Old would easily reach up into that range.
Granted – I sadly never really got into the expanded universe books. Although now that I reconsider – the Sith in say KOTOR II probably had comparable power.
Still… the Talents could straight up teleport, use telepathy and telekinetics across interstellar distances and had sophisticated mind control. Meanwhile the metapsychics… could do most of the same things and (AFAIR) created a near galaxy wide hive-mind like network of psi-minds.
As cool as Jedi are, they always seem to not really use their full potential.
Much as I like AM’s books I felt the Hive and Tower books were a bit too much. The Riding Pegasus books (their pre FTL precursors) on the other hand I loved.
Stories about Tier three or more individuals are very hit or miss.
There isn’t much the metapsychics in Julian May’s Milieu series couldn’t do. Depending on your specialties (and that’s not even counting having access to one of the eventually illegal cerebro-enhancement machines) you could restructure matter at the atomic level even creating organic matter and living creatures, produce shields capable of shrugging off energy weapons that could literally shear the tops off of mountains, restructure minds and heal almost any injury and more. About the only thing that they COULDN’T do was teleport; only the insane character Felice, Mark Remillard (who managed to analyze Felice’s instinctive use of the power and learn how to replicate it) and maybe his later companion Elizabeth Orm could teleport. Everyone else had to use technology for teleportation which caused increasing amounts of pain the greater the distance you traveled as a result of the transition through the Upsilon Field into their version of Subspace.
Yeah, on the Galactic Milieu scale, the most powerful Jedi and Sith in canon would barely rank Master-class. Jack the Bodiless would scare the piss out of Vader or Palpatine.
Palpatine could summon Force Storms, and used one to devastate the surface of Coruscant. And did so from the planet Byss several thousand light years away. But that’s no longer canon.
Canon Jedi and Sith are no longer as powerful as they used to be.
And a great big Slonshal for that reference. Of course, characters like Elizabeth who are reluctant to use their powers offensively nicely balance people like Marc. Where do you think I got the avatar name from? ever since I read that series….
Oh, and the Tanu are the progenitors of the fae…OP is in their blood. well…minds.
Not upsetting Sydney…
FORESHADOWING!
Could explain why her large friends on the last planet were wanting to shred her. They recognised it.
If they thought that they could take her then both them and the orbs are probably only super advanced.
Not necessarily, people still shoot at Superman even knowing who Superman is.
Got to have that *maybe I’ll be the lucky one*
Yay, new comic to read just before going to sleep! *cuddles it & curls up on its lap, preventing it from going anywhere, mwahahahaaa, miew!*
So, the knowledge that whole planets could get nuked over gets discussed in the middle of a street for the second strip in the row.
I call that ‘Star Trek security’. Some little known side effects of the Eugenics wars include the great upholstery shortages (have you ever seen less comfortable “beds”?) and a species-wide mutation causing humanity to forget how to put passwords on computers and locks on doors.
Tragic, really. The result is the inability to prevent the bad guys from boarding and taking the ship(s).
The computer knows it’s you.
“Computer, locate Commander Wexler.”
“Commander Wexler is currently in holosuite A with Lieutenant Grady, sixty gallons of whipped cream and…OH MY GOD! (Sound of retching)
The security isn’t bad actually, assuming you trust the designers of the world. You can see anyone close enough to be eavesdropping easily, and 99% percent of the conversations around you are useless to any outsider listening in, so as long as you aren’t a subject of interest you’re unlikely to be sought out. Even if you are sought out you have visual in most directions far enough to be assured of no one employing spy devices. (Hence why you have to trust the builders/designers/admins of the world – they could put the devices in the walls.)
Plus they didn’t know they were going to be having a security-revelant conversation when they started the conversation.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Any insufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun.
Any insufficiently advanced magic looks like cheap special effects made with mirrors and bright lights.
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!!!
What’s with the quotation marks, who said that?
ME!
“What’s with the quotation marks? Who said that?”
“ME!”
“Agatha Heterodyne”
“–GIIIIRRRRRL GEEEENIUS!”
“And her companions, Zeetha, lost princess of lost Skifander.”
“Hey!”
“And Krosp, the Emperor of Cats,”
“Hmphf.”
“And Othar Trygvasson–”
“–GENTLEMAAAAN ADVENTURER!!”
There is a branch of Wicca that claims magik is a science, and eventually we will be able to do what the ancients could do, again. Knowledge can only be hidden for so long, the truth wants to be known, etc. etc.
I used to be part of that tradition until they found out my rapid healing was a genetic thing and not magik.
To be fair, genetics is hidden knowledge. If you really do heal more rapidly than other people, hit up a geneticist and you may be a source for some new brand of healing drugs for the world.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Barry Gehm
Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it.
Florence Ambrose
Mark Stanley, actually. Florence Ambrose is the character who he had say it.
“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology” – Dr Who (Battlefield)
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE!
-Agatha Hetrodyne (Phil and Kaja Foglio)
Maxim 24: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a big gun. –Howard Tayler
Any magically advanced sufficiency is technologically distinguished.
Therefore, magic is indistinguishable with a big gun.
Also, sufficiently advanced magic iss indistinguishable from being a god.
Therefore, having REALY REALLY REALLY advanced technology is indistinguishable from being a god.
Any technology you cannot explain is comedy gold.
A laser beam can kill you. But so can a large rock to the head.
Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Rick Cook’s 1st Law: Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Climate covfefe. :-)
I’d say Sydney’s Orbs are even above the Nth. They were placed there by the ultimate being known as Dave B that literally (and literarily) decides on every single move of every single being in that multiverse’s existence. Why else would women display their nursing sacks so readily? ;-)
Not sure about the Alt text – “Götterdämmerung” would mean “Gods dawn” – So a Mc
GMuffin that is so good that it rises the gods from their slumber?It usually translates to “god damn”
It means “twilight of the gods”. It implies pretty much the exact opposite. TvTropes has a good summary: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Gotterdammerung
Sydney’s McGuffin brings all the gods to the yard.
This is my second favorite comment this time around.
Dämmerung works both as dawn and dusk. In this context it would be dusk of the gods. Like Ragnarok, Apocalypse, end of the world.
To quote the late great Terry Pratchett, “Red sky at night, the city’s alight”.
-Keep to themselves: create the basis for “magic”, manipulate reality to the extend of programming the laws of physics of pocket dimensions designed to ever expand into proper universes *as games that take on a life of their own*, either just out of curiosity, something to do, personal playgrounds.
-Get ideological: decide to “help” younger races…but their perception of “life” and “help” involves manipulating the very cycle of reincarnation by guiding the eternal aspects of life and creating their own Hells, Heavens, Lands of the Dead, and spread them across the multiverse to the point that even the “angels”, “demons” and “gods” who regard themselves as magical beings aren’t even aware that their Great Goddesses are actually in space ships and their eternal realms of paradise and perdition are located inside sub-space crystals.
-Get serious with each other….(The War that Never Was), *nothing says…oh crap like that of eternal beings not capable of actually being destroyed trying to actually hurt each other and imprison one another…
If we use Tenchi Muyo as an example:
The Jurains would be right at that edge between Space Empire and Ascendence as they can create pocket dimensions the size of continents on the inside, have ships able to destroy planets, and physics breaking tech that is handheld…granted part of this is because they were shown favoritism by an Omnipotent entity disguising its self as tech.
the precursors of Tenchi Muyo looked like they got into that ascension level…and ended up on Tsunami, Tokimi, and Washu’s bad sides in the process. The tech by comparison though that Tsunami, Washu, and Tokimi create for themselves would be in that Nth degree…just one First Generation Ship, Ryo-Ohki, or Tokimi’s guards could single handedly take out every major empire in the galaxy with little effort.
But yeah, you always see major fighting over any scrap of tech from those last two levels. Wormhole weapons, that mech from Tenchi Muyo GXP, the Galactic Leyline from Outlaw Star (which was described as a library by the aliens that made it but is so advanced it has the side effect of granting god hood on mortals who try to use it).
Part of the Inferverse that my own (Seven Sisters) created has a physical interface that is supposed to produce an avatar body for the player, but mortals are so…not the target player…that it accidently destroys their physical bodies and forces them to fully physically exist in the Inferverse as their avatar (my take on the trapped in a video game like world and granted super powers trope; being that it IS a game, just not one meant for humans or anything with a physical flesh and blood body was meant to interface with). On that same note, having someone think they found the secret of immortality and god like power as a super vampire only to be told they basically turned themselves into a Boss in a video game as far as the creators of that “ancient relic of power”.
correction to myself, the vampire thing wasn’t the worst *WTF*, it was The Eternal World, a personal playground universe for the Amana modeled after human fantasy *but existing outside of the regular multiverse so was both inspired by and resulted in inspiring various realities’ fantasy genre*, the “Eternal Gods” of many mortal worlds who parented numerous immortals, gods, demi-gods, demons, and heroes; realizing after encountering more “sci-fi” level civilizations and noticing the similarities that their own world “The Divine Realms” were actually just the connected MMO Sandbox worlds of even higher beings than themselves. That’s right oh all powerful king of the gods of the planet Homnes…you are just an NPC artificial DOLL designed to last, father future programs, and perpetuate the player environment….granted this ended badly for the players…well inconvenienced THEM relatively speaking.
If memory serves, the Dimensional Cannon of the Tenchiverse was something you used if you wanted to destroy a small galaxy. And yes, it gets fired in one of the movies. Some baddies you don’t mess around with.
There’s a lot of motives for securing superior technology.
‘Don’t blow me up, or i’ll Blow you up too’ – mutual assured destruction.
‘My shield fu is stronger than your gun fu’ – nya nya can’t hurt me
‘You annoy me, go away’ – death to any who earn my notice.
‘That’s a might fine lawn, neighbor’ – your lawn is greener and shal become my lawn, fences be damned.
‘That’s a might fine lawn, other neighbor’ – your lawn is greener – but a hot plasma bath can fix that.
‘You crazy fool, no guns for you!’ – I don’t understand how you reason, nor what your motives are – you having means to harm me scares me.
‘All eggs must be opened from the fat end!’ – death to the narrow end heretics!
Etc, etc, etc.
Throw alien cultures into the mix, true blue and orange morality type stuff, and you’ll find no shortage of people willing to kill to get an advantage, be it to secure control over their own destiny, or just to have a shiny. The ‘I don’t understand you’ card will play a major role – and has done so historically. WWII is probably a good example of that, what with how Japan was provoked into attacking the US by the US itself, and how actual ROE in the different theaters were different.
Tenchi Muyo in Love, its one of the two movies of the (Tenchi Universe) continuity. But in any continuity the Jurains tend to be at the high end of technological military power, heck in the first OVA Mihoshi has a device that just manifests stuff and dropping it by accident sent her to “the other side” of a twin parallel ship; supposedly her cube’s multi-space interface interacted with that of the ship she was on.
But yeah, that “we don’t understand them” is always an issue. Like the example I gave, super ultra-tech beings that don’t have physical bodies think they are “helping” by interfering with the natural cycle of soul consciousness transference from one life to another by providing pocket dimensions where people can “burn off” their negative personality aspects or “calm down” from a previous life so their subconscious connection to the eternal self doesn’t too strongly influence their next life. As they believe the purpose of reincarnation is so these “young eternals” can experience life with a constant fresh start.
Meanwhile the mortals…and soul bodies trapped in Hell, who get wind of this interpret it as “bored gods playing with human lives”. As neither really understands the perspective of the other.
heck using Babylon 5 as an example the Shadows started massive wars because they believed conflict was the driving force for younger races to develop and grow, and without it would stagnate and die off. The Vorlons…well it was never 100% clear, but the Vorlons weren’t really the opposite, just more control freaks about how to go about causing the conflict, they preferred more ideological conflicts and pitting races against each other rather than directly attacking younger races and making followers out of entire races…just the theological leaders of those species *the M’bari didn’t even think to question the Vorlons till pretty far into the war, realizing they didn’t really understand or care about them*
The Vorlons didn’t go in for starting wars – where the Shadows were big believers in evolution through natural selection, the Vorlons were all about the intelligent design – their idea of improving lesser races was to abduct individuals and mess with their genes…
Of course, by the time of Babylon 5, the Vorlons had had enough of the Shadows popping up every few thousand years to cause chaos and see who was capable of surviving, so when Sheridan broke the unwritten ROE, the Vorlons took it as an excuse to break them themselves, and mobilise their war fleet (rather than sponsoring younger races in proxy battles).
“Do not meddle in the affairs of Vorlons..for they are angry, and too quickly subtle.”
“They say god works in mysterious ways”
“He’s a con man next to the Vorlon.”
Goes from funny to Harsher in Hindsight when later on its revealed that Vorlons basically gave us and/or hijacked our idea of god to make sure we’d like them.
It’s obviously when since this is still a flashback
It means “twilight of the gods”. It implies pretty much the exact opposite. TvTropes has a good summary: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Gotterdammerung
Thats upsetting…… as always you have a penchant for the understatement Sydney
Maybe I’m underestimating the power level of the orbs – and granted they’re nowhere CLOSE to being fully unlocked – but I’d have a hard time selling them as Nth level. They seem high-end, definitely closer to ascendance-level than space empire, but they don’t do *impossible* stuff.
Like the Aetherium Causeway ability – sure, they’re clearly more advanced than anything Cora has dealt with but mostly because they’re so tiny. There are those who can open causeways like that – they just need capitol ships, is all.
What I’m thinking is, for me to say “Oh, yeah, that’s totally Nth level tech right there” is an artifact which transcends physics and reality as other races understand it. Something which Cora or Dabbler would look at and say “No, that’s Literally Impossible. It cannot be done, we have proven it from many angles, if that was possible our universe would come apart at the- oh, you’re doing it and it’s working. I am not happy with this.”
But!
Nth level tech may not be the most terribly useful. Let’s think about the space gun in the hands of cavemen idea. Or, hell, let’s just give one of our Cro-Magnon ancestors a nice Kalashnikov. Y’know, solid gun. Can put out some real firepower… um, briefly. Then it runs out of bullets. Give them more bullets? Even an AK fails *eventually*, and they have no way to fix it. And it’s still only one gun, composed of materials they not only can’t reproduce but don’t even have the means to comprehend. It’d be a cool toy which made one monkey super powerful for a little while.
I think Nth-level stuff would be like that, unless it happened to be something which fundamentally and permanently altered the universe. But mostly likely it would be a cool toy which is too far from anyone else’s tech to be understood much less reproduced.
More useful – and more prone to starting serious wars – would be some neat tech which is well beyond what’s currently available but can be understood, analyzed, and integrated into existing infrastructure. Think less “giving a gun to a caveman” and more “Oh, look, they’re mounting phaser banks on F-22s. That’s not gonna change the balance of power or anything.”
But there’s no reason to worry about that. It’s not like anyone has small, super-powerful items which are vastly more advanced than anything else available but still existing in that same paradigm.
I see what you mean and to a certain degree, agree with the idea you are presenting here. Except the falling apart stuff, ephemeral life forms may be fine with their stuff breaking down or being made useless in short order but eternal beings may want their stuff to keep working for significantly longer periods of time.
But that said, the issue here is you are looking at the orbs as a weapon and imaging what a Nth level, or ultra tech civilization gun would be like.
Sydney’s orbs may not so far do anything terribly beyond the norm for say magic, the latest unlock being the one major exception so far. But what sets them apart really is how they interact with the world around them, what could they be made of, what is powering them, how does the interface really work with them?
There is the theory that the orbs aren’t weapons or a super advanced tool kit, but a toy. That they aren’t the ultra tech civilization’s guns or super important star gates or cosmic cube, infinity gems, reality bypass admin tool wand, or whatever…but are that civilization’s version of a tiger electronics game, Gameboy, or some such thing. If its a toy, then its functions being basic, dumbed down, user friendly, yet have a physics defying structure, power source, means or adhering to her and levitation, would make sense.
Their fundamentals are beyond what should be possible at their size, and reasonably expected power sources *energy and/or magic* but what they can do isn’t something extreme like an ultimate nullifier because they aren’t really a weapon or serious tool from the perspective of their creator, but a kids’ toy.
Well, I don’t think it matters if the orbs are weapons or whatever. If you’d prefer, view it as the difference between one ship in a space empire being given the ability to travel anywhere instantaneously vs. that same space empire stumbling across the knowledge to triple the speed of all their ships. The key factor is whether it’s reproducible or not.
Now, if the orbs are Nth level baubles, then no, they’d likely not be reproducible: at least from our model of technology that kind of stuff is so streamlined it’s probably HARDER to learn from than the MacGuffin ubertech. I mean, there’s no way you’d be able to figure out how radio waves work from taking apart a cell phone. You’d throw away the antenna and probably make the battery explode. So if that’s the case, yeah maybe Nth.
Of course the big question, and the one that contextualizes the rest, is how they got to Earth. The orbs are simply unheard of not just from an Earth context, but also for those like Dabbler and Cora, who would know if they were common knowledge anywhere. Which implies either that they are incredibly rare, or that their creators almost never use them in a context where they’d be seen (e.g., cars are super common, but if your frame of reference is a place without paved roads you’d never guess that).
If we *do* want to continue with the hinted notion that these are Nth-level tech, they could be Exotic in origin, from a universe deeply unlike our own. A visitor from some other universe might observe our universe, note that the laws of physics are different, and create the orbs as a convenient way to interact with this universe. Then, having created their handy tools for exploring this new universe they wandered around, apparently checked out Fracture Station, decided to see this backwater sex tourism joint… and got eaten by a moray eel or something. In that scenario, the orbs are literally unique, possibly across all multiverses, and finding out more about their creator is probably impossible.
Ok let me give you a little perspective.
The US and USSR, if they wanted to, could easily build a gigaton yeild weapon and a working delivery system.(for that mater so can France, Great Britain, China, and probably Israel, India, and Pakistan.)
Yet one of the standard issue firearms and issue ammunition used by both the US and USSR cannot penetrate basic issue police body armor. This is actualy by design and knowing it can’t defeat basic body armor, the intention being to provide a firearm usefull for basic training drills and qualification in Coledge level military training. Yes you can fire full power rounds through them but not for long as the gun will jam. Yes the guns are still lethal to anyone not in body armor, and even dangerous to people in body armor. Yet even when compared to our actual and potential nuclear arsenal, No one thinks to refer to them as non lethal or even toys.
Sydney’s orbs mar be little more than Jr first gun see
https://www.wideopenspaces.com/best-youth-hunting-rifles-and-shotguns/
only with a more interlocking and graphic user interface.
Dabbler may suspect Nth tech, but since Syd didn’t have a skill that was beyond even advanced warp tech at the time, she might not have fully gone with the idea.
That panel with the glowy guy is making me laugh on several levels. One being the oh so many times running into one of these in a game and rolling my eyes as I can tell the writers just strung “nice sounding” sentiments together or are badly quoting a philosophy book, “we are but the shadows on the cave wall unaware of the curves and the source of the light that gives us life” sort of talk.
the other being a mental exercise in trying to figure out how a super advance, ultra tech, or such species would even try to communicate with below them civilizations.
Imagine traveling back in time to 10,000 BCE, you want to describe things like robots, the internet, and video games to those people. However you are limited in using ONLY their language (and the concepts and ideas there in); trying to describe things they don’t have words…let alone even concepts for. So you end up just having to handwave terms like “magic” or “life force”…ending up with very bad translations that over time would be twisted even further that even by the time that world reaches a point where you could have just “dumbed down” and “over simplified” the term using their fiction, they’d already butchered the originals you told to beyond recognition. Like no…no…I was trying to describe the relation between mass and masslessness in how it relates to the production of the psycholayer dimension within the gravity reaction to increase the potential of sentient and sapient development….not…mind spirit comes from god inside the Earth…sheesh. On a less sci-fi note, it is amusing that thanks to the existence of computer networks, servers, slave and master drives, and the like its easier to understand the avatar system of the Hindu pantheon by comparing them.
In short, trying to describe anything sufficiently complex that requires terms and concepts from your level to someone who doesn’t have them can result in some screwy translations.
Ooga Bug bugga boog booga boog ….
“So what we did is capture lightning in a rock and taught it to think so it can work for us”
Then you come back a few hundred years later and there are stories about elves, yokai, demons, and gods living inside sacred rocks that someone once saw get struck by lightning, or make weird sounds when the wind blows over them. Then a whole bunch of people with shiny crystals claiming they channel intent and magical spirits that can be controlled.
To give a good example of something fundamental to current technology, semiconductors using doped silicon. I understand it, used to make it at work, and do not have the language to explain it to someone on the street. And that’s today, no timetravel involved, not even travel beyond the train or the bus. I might be able to explain FET using P-channel N-gate technology, but trying to explain how that made the electric fan in the computer spin would result in brain meltdown and BSOD eyeballs in no time.
Many years ago there was a one page short story in analog science fiction magazine,
which had Moses start to dictate to his brother Aaron the word of God.
If I remember correctly It went something like,
Moses: ok, 6.2 billion years ago, the creator caused
A fluctuation in the quantum foam which began to expand and…
Aaron: wait, wait, what? Moses: these are the words of our Lord God.
Aaron: I didn’t understand Any of that, no one else is going to either!
but these are God’s words!
you’ve got to phrase it in a way that people understand or No one is going to read it!
Moses: head in his hands sighs, alright, alright, let’s try again…
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness…
Yeah I’ve seen some chariots of the gods type stuff claiming that the tetragrammaton and others was actually an alien and it had to dumb down what it was saying so much that it became grossly misunderstood.
try to tell people about parasites that are present in certain foods, becomes: God says these animals are “unclean” and should not be eaten.
try to explain that decomposing bodies carry deadly bacteria becomes: If we do not properly bury the dead their ghosts will rise as vampires that spread death among the living.
There were a number of short story’s and articles from the 1632 series that explained the problem using one issue of National Geographic, first just the population indicated by one artical was a massive shock to them, this was followed by what in the magazine was an offhand reference to Trillon in a unit of measurement was shocking, in that to them a trillion was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000; one million million million; 10 to the 18th power; not 1,000,000 or a million million, or 10 to the 12 th power. The realization as to what American trillon actualy ment, was not an improvement.
Never mind trying to sort out what adds were, Never mind what they ment. For example,….
what is a Microsoft? Are they realy tinny pillows? And what do they have to do with PC? And what is a PC anyway and why are both leters capitalized here, why is it Pc here, and pc over here? Why do they need protection from hackers? What is a hacker anyway, is software refering to clothing? And if so why would hackers attack clothing? And why are books made out of chrome? I thought that was some kind of metal put on cars? Or are you americans just that insainly wealty that you make books out of some kind of silver alloy? And what in God’s name is Aluminum? Why is it important that something is is made out of recycled (whatever that means) Aluminum? Seriously are you just making this all up?
Just how do you Chrome Software? it’s just magnetic zones on a disk or patterns of electric charges. putting metal on electrons is pretty pointless
Anyone else think of Piers Anthony’s Xanth demons when Cora mentioned the Nth?
I am become Sydney, destroyer of… Stuff…
and Sanity.
And beyond them all stands The System Wizard:
Zee Captain, also referred to as Emperor of Captainia, your Excellence, your Awesomness, Subject Seven, Lady of the Lake, zee All-Mighty One, Bane of the Existential Door, the Singularity, my Liege or simply “Captain”
Zee is an enigma in zeerself, appearing where zee are least expected and guiding the fortune of zeer chosen companions to the future zee envisioned so many cycles ago. Even among those lucky enough to be chosen, few ever truly understand – or even remotely peer into – zeer full spectrum, appearing as merely a masked person in a trench-coat to the untrained eye.
“BONJOUR, MONSEIGNEUR! ZEE WEATHER IS RATHER LOVELY THIS SPRING, DON’T YOU FIND?”
In some cultures Zee Captain is known as ‘Zed’ Captain.
Sydney has such a genuine look of appreciation for her space wizard orb buddies in panel 4. Well done!
I saw someone mentioning creating the basis for magic and manipulate reality to the extend of programming the laws of physics, and it got me thinking. Who do we know who can do something similar? And who’s abilities (might) have some connection to the orbs?
Krona!
What if she is a young Nth race member? Or reincarnation, or hybrid/half-breed, or something along those lines? It could explain why her abilities are so powerful yet a different category from magic. Maybe the orbs were hers or meant for her or left by her predecessor.
1. Language
2. Faster than light travel
3. Time travel
4. A-temporal perception
Time travel makes you Dr Who, being able to see outside of time lets you move laterally through parallel universes so rather than trying to manipulate events to achieve a certain outcome you can just go straight to the outcome you want, it saves a lot of running.
“Seed galaxy with life so that all life looks similar” is the sort of rationalization that sounds plausible on the surface, but you’ve got to start asking some hard questions about it if you’re going to take your comics too seriously.
Let me focus on boobs, like we were talking about on Monday. (I do this entirely for science.)
Mammals developed only recently in human evolutionary terms, dozens of millions of years out of billions of years of life. Furthermore, we’re but one branch of the tree of life, and the other branches (and our mutual predecessors) don’t carry the appropriate genes. So for the idea of most galaxy-fairing species having boobs because of common origins through seeding to work, we’d need to imagine that Earth was seeded sometime in the past few dozen million years.
Apply similar logic to most of humanity’s cladistic features that also seem to be cropping up among the aliens — the relative lack of body hair, for example, or upright walking — and we home in somewhere around one or two million years ago.
But other features, such as the shape of our noses, suggest seeding quite a bit before that, yet much more recently.
Yet it’s also obvious, through genetic analysis, that we’re related to pretty much all life on this planet.
The only scenario in which any of this works is that Earth (and presumably a lot of other planets) is being reseeded every couple million years or so with new iterations of species and/or mutations, all of which originally came from the same biohistory. (Or maybe there’s some magic artifact buried in the Earth’s mantle that does all of that without outside intervention. Whatever.)
Yet this reseeding would also have extinctions corresponding to events such as the Alvarez impact or the Siberian mega-volcano, yet somehow still give us AND MOST SPECIES boobs.
Why even do this? The two reasons that spring to mind immediately are either A) to deceive us (for better or worse) about our origins, or B) to recreate a previous natural history, perhaps that of the seeders own world.
Yet at the same time everyone’s got different funny coloration, suggesting different selection pressures for things like camoflauge, UV resistance, and basic skin chemistry. HUH.
…. I’m going back and forth on how plausible even this scenario is, but one thing I’m sure of is for the “seed planets so everyone has boobs that look alike” thing to work when “everyone” is also related to their own homeworld’s biosphere, to the point where you can map out a genetic tree of life, you’d need to start billions of years back and provide regular updates to keep everyone abreast of each other.
…I see what you did there.
Mammals appeared about the same time as dinosaurs ( https://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/bio65/lec02/b65lec02.htm under title ‘Evolution of mammals).
Panspermia, whethrr natural or artificial, does not exclude reseeding planets. In fact, it’d be hard to hypothesize a realistic ‘natural panspermia’ scenario where a planet is seeded exactly once.
but fur, endothermia, and secreting food for the young aren’t too complicated to evolve more than once.
convergent evolution, almost:
pigeons nurse their young:
( https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/media-releases/articles/2011/mothers-milk-best-for-growing-babies-and-that-includes-baby-pigeons )
Warm-blooded fish, the first but no longer only known example:
( https://io9.gizmodo.com/behold-the-first-fully-warm-blooded-fish-known-to-scien-1704472418 )
hair-like stuff (eyelashes) on a reptile:
( https://www.deviantart.com/catharsisjb/art/Crocodile-Tears-92694903?purchase=print ) fur-like
…or maybe some very early progenitor civilization was built by aliens that looked very humanoid (with boobs!) and after they ascended they decided to constantly meddle with the evolution of others to make sure they would become as awesome as themselves. (Because boobs!)? :)
To have boobs one must perspire. To perspire one must have pores and glands to those pores for mammaries are modified from them as Evolution is wont to do.
Though the montremes, the first mammals had no mammaries, that had slits going down their bodies where lactation comes out. However the marsupials do only they are on the inside of the pouch. Only the placentals have mammaries. Reptiles would not have them except in bad pulpy Science Fiction.
M: Why DO humans have poison sacs, anyway? It was my understanding they aren’t venemous.
F: They aren’t, first husband. I hear they use them to feed their young.
M: They.. feed their young… POISON?
F: No, no! Their sacs contain some sort of nutrient fluid, like the yolk of an egg.
M: I see… then how do their females maintain order in their households?
F: From what I see, they do not. Their males crash about unchecked, completely unafraid of their women.
M: Fearless? Interesting…
F: (Puffs out chest, bears fangs) WHAT WAS THAT, FIRST HUSBAND?
M: Uh b-b-barbaric! H-horrbily barbaric!! And uncivilized!!
F: That’s what I thought you said…
Covergent evolution is a thing.
Take two different species (say, seal and tuna)
expose them to the same environment for a long time.
They can wind up evolving into similar looking critters. (Like say, dolphin and shark).
Humanoid species across the galaxy:
Bipedal – most efficient, simple walking mechanism, even if it does require a larger brain to work.
One head – all major senses located near the single brain for fast response to stimuli, while not making extra vulnerable points.
Hairless – skills provided by a brain makes fur a detriment in hot climates, without making it an asset in cold weather.
Down turned nose – pointing them up gets you into trouble with rain.
Vestigial claws (finger nails) – daggers and Spears are moe deadly.
Etc, etc, etc.
If you point to them breeding between planets, I point to the nearest wizard and assign blame.
Sydney picked up the Death Note
It’s nice to imagine Dabbler’s friends being loyal, but is anybody else concerned that the captain of what appears to be a warship might just decide that conscripting an individual with an Aetherium Causeway generator in her pocket into her faction’s military is worth more than friendship? Would she really just bring Sydney back to the pre-FTL backwater society she came from?
Of course she won’t conscript her.
She has a warship, after all, and that means she has something to lose to Sydney’s PPO.
What we need to worry about is either some sort of mind control, or just shooting her in the head when the shield orb’s down and taking the orbs off her corpse.
I suspect the orbs have the ability to deny access to any one who would use them in a hostile manner. Otherwise, the legend of Biff the Conquerer would include descriptions of the Doom Orbs.
It’s a thought. But on the other hand, you’re not just risking the wrath of someone like Dabbler – who is well established as a badass – but also her team (e.g. Maxima). And, you know, Sydney herself.
Trying to conscript the god-tier individual is less likely to be beneficial (and more likely to end up with you disintegrated) than trying to win said individual’s friendship.
You’re forgetting that Dabbler is more than just an alien succubus. She’s also a genius (both technical and otherwise). Would she ask a friend to pick Sydney up without first considering how likely it is that she’d find out about the orbs and her most likely resulting actions?
Dabbler is a genius, yes, but she can only work with the information she has. No one on Earth has any idea Syd can generate Aetherium Causeways now. Dabbler’s original instructions didn’t take into account that she now can duplicate impossible tech.
Compared to everyone else on Dirt, yes, Dabbles is a ‘genius’, butt most of that is simply her using tech (that she barely shares) that is advanced compared to current Dirt-tech (the rest of it is ‘bluff’ and ‘smoke signals’)
On the cast page we find out that super intelligence & mathematical ability are explicitly some of Dabbler’s powers (inherited from the mystery species that makes up 1/6 of her heritage).
I wonder if Sydney will be at a moral crossroads of sorts regarding her spheres,the what???
The Nth level civilizations have a lot of free time on their hands (or tentacles) and spend a lot of it on the arts. Music is a favorite, and they go in for many variations. Some of the louder and more energetic versions are known as “Nth Metal”. :)
(any Thanagarians in the audience probably got that joke)
Hmmm, If this the Nth were that advanced and the orbs were of that tech. Personally I would think these would be trainer orbs for them to help train there own native powers. Heck they could simply be Larping toys for when they are faffing off or even possibly the equivalent to a toddlers educational toy.
Something like this WonderChild Electronic Discovery Cube
https://www.youngexplorers.com/itemdy00.aspx?ID=217,1931&T1=Y181355
I guess I don’t really think this but it is a big wide universe out there especially when you consider its been around for millions and millions of years.
Don’t you just love how the second frame makes you think the guy understands the advanced alien for a moment, then dashes that to pieces?
Maybe it’s time to start wondering just how much Dabbler trusts Cora…
I’ve always called it “Clarketech” – from Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
So if it *is* Nth tech – the fuck was it doing on Earth? Did an Nth just jettison them out of his spaceship with the trash? Also, jeeze Dave, B5 spoilers!
Could be a case of an Nth getting bored, finding a nice quiet primitive planet where nothing as evolved past giant lizards eating each other, and deciding live out the next million years before quietly dying.
Not thinking that the tiny little shrew sniffing his ankle is going to cause issues in about 65 million years or so.
just because you’re a space wizard doesn’t mean you can’t make a mistake or find yourself in an impossible situation where you have to sacrifice yourself for the greater good.
my personal guess is whoever owned the orbs before was also responsible to the creation of supers on earth and maybe even made the geode that gave max her powers. but some how either natural or by some outside force like the squids put the earth in danger. after putting so much work into uplifting humans the owner of the orbs saved earth at the cost of their own life.
Except, Supers have only really started becoming a problem numerically in the last 200 years or so, reaching a peak only a few decades ago
on page 984 that supers have existed through out all history.(https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/984) it isn’t that there are more supers now then ever before its just easier to find them now because of the news and internet.
whatever outside force caused supers start showing up happened a long time ago in story
While sight seeing the kid playing with them accidently disconnected them and set them aside to play with one of their other toys, and when it came to pack up and go home they forgot to put them in the “car”.
Their parents just *shrugged* and bought the kid some new ones when they noticed they had gone missing rather than try to search for them on that planet when the kid couldn’t remember WHERE on the planet they sat them down, after all its just a low cost play-o-power orb set.
… actually, the kid doesn’t even remember which planet it was.
I get the definite feeling that panel one is a nod to the style of XKCD.
https://xkcd.com/2065/
That is upsetting
“Do you actually speak our language?” is a great line! I wished I’d written that. :)
In various forms, it’s actually been around awhile:
https://m.quickmeme.com/meme/367bmp
This makes sense even if the orbs are just the gateway tech of full-on “Nth” technology.
As Sciona clearly demonstrated, advanced aliens can still be greedy assholes.
I could see Sydney starting an Interstellar War.
Sydney is a natural born chaos bringer.