Grrl Power #719 – Idiomatic, planetary…
I think if aliens really did show up, most countries would freak the fuck out, but then the one country who was all “Come on down” and the aliens are like “Thanks, here’s the technology for optical circuitry that’s ten orders of magnitude faster than anything else on your world,” all the xenophobic countries would be all “Oh… shit.”
Ah, alien idioms. To watch just about every show and read every book ever, one might get the impression that English is the only language with idiomatic expressions, because aliens are always stumbling over them, no matter how intelligent they’re supposed to be, and no matter how obvious the meaning is from context. Well, except for those “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” aliens who are the cartoonish counter example. Seriously, how did that race invent integrated circuitry or crack warp travel talking like that?
“Jablus and Forbgyte… used silicon to channel electrons into this XOR gate? Guys, can we lay off the metaphors for like, one hour so we can get some work done?”
“Dornius, at noon, knows only hunger.”
“Yes, Phil, I ate your sandwich, because you never label anything.”
God, imagine just trying to order a ham on rye on that world. “No, no, I don’t want yellow mustard, I want the dijon… gah, I mean, Fligbus, his senses filled with spice! No! Not the red pepper flakes! Who puts red pepper flakes on a ham sandwich!?”
It always bugged me when Spock or Data’s IQ would suddenly drop to 70 when someone said something like “Hit the sack” “Beat around the bush” and they’re all, “Why would you attack the area around foliage?” Based on context, those things should be pretty easy to figure out. If you’re dealing with a language that replaces every third word with “smurf” or “squanch” then it can get a little more challenging, but those aren’t really idioms.
Aren’t all news excerpts in movies/TV/comics/etc really just exposition vehicles? I think they’re better than two informed characters saying to each other “As you know…” then going on to explain something they both know for the audience’s benefit, and both options beat the hell out of a boring preamble. At least Star Wars had John William’s music blaring overtop of it.
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I always thought Farscape did a good job of it, both in having the alien races use idioms that were, well, alien to John and in having him use expressions that they didn’t get. By the end of the first season it seemed like they were able to use each other’s context clues much better to figure things out.
And most of the time they did figure it out but gave each other weird looks for a bit. They didn’t comment on it or ask for explanations just some subtle acting to show there was a speed bump (except some of the Texas idioms which are incomprehensible to native English speakers).
Well, I guess Bob’s your uncle.
…Or your Aunty, you never know these days…
That’s the version Daniel the Human says. “Bob’s your Uncle, or your Aunty, you never know these days…”
You Humans do say a lot of weird things, but it’s not impossible to get used to them, just gotta take some time and work out context…
I went to a gym and exercised for a full hour after you said that, but I still don’t get the context. Did I not work out enough?
Just to point this out but “Work Out” is also an idiom. You understood it meant to exercise. But the words alone don’t express that literally; thus it is an idiom. For all one could know without cultural habituation that it meant to perform a job outside, or some vocation that puts things out somewhere.
* facepalm *
Okay, its not an “idiom” technically. But it is a multi-purpose phrase in English which despite being the main conveyor of information can have radically different interpretations based on the context and content of the sentence. I forget what that is called.
for instance.
Everyone is going to work out.
vs
Everything is going to work out.
Completely different meanings, the subject alone changes the meaning.
I need to go work out,
I need to go work out a few things.
How is that new machine working out.
How is that new work out machine.
It is the sort of thing that can annoy translators.
There are many examples in English and various languages of a common place holder term or word that depends on the words around it to convey its meaning.
Not sure if you have twigged yet, butt Viirin was making a joke, playing along with the idea concerning people being confused by idioms and taking them literally
Nice to see Suzie back.
The real question is whether the refugees on board want to join the others. There are problems either way. And the news is right to question whether the destruction will follow, but not completely due to the refugees. Halo got scanned, and apparently Earth is well known enough that common knowledge will show human = Earth almost immediately.
Considering the refugees were not part of the soul battery option. Nor were they part of this ship. and instead seemingly had to catch a ride and were dumped rapidly….and taking into account how the one previousu alari we know acts
I’m going to assume that ship is the “ruling class” and the folks on Cora’s ship are not. So. I assume they wont want to join up, and they’ll rather get much nicer treatment with people related to Sydney than the other Alari.
I suspect that this ship is likely also the other one who caused the monster thingy to arrive. and may well be related to the orbs previous owner in some round about way.
I have a fairly relevant question that this comment is a perfect opportunity to jump onto.
Does anyone else remember how in the context of the story, in all these hundreds of pages… It’s only been 4, maybe 5 earth days since the start of the story? 4 days since the operation that sent Sydney into space, and with how long she was there and the fact that it was night time in the Maxima shot, and we appear to be seeing the light side of earth at the moment, given its position it’s probably like 4 or 5 AM in American where Suzie Wu would be. Which means it’s been just 5 days since she got her name on board and already she’s an anchor where before she was a fairly green reporter that made obvious mistakes on-camera.
I’m not complaining, mind, but I just think that she got REAL lucky, and also this has been a hell of an eventful week for humanity and the rest of the races on earth in general xD
Actually, we don’t know how much time has passed on Earth, do we? Long eough for Deus to get his energy towers built and his ‘Stargate’ set up, and to start using it; and the arrival of the Alari was after all that, so I think it has been at least several weeks, perhaps even months.
No, no I do know how much time has passed. I recently read through all of Grrl Power again for the sake of it and I counted the transitions from day to night and back, and there was even Word of God mention from Dave B that 4 days had passed in the comic itself. That was on the night where Maxima had Sydney ferry some of the cast to a secret location and that took all day. From there we entered into the Secret Council, and it takes all of a few hours for the events with our favorite Alari to occur and the portal to her world to be opened. Then Sydney gets trapped there and gates to the space station, which is implied to be instantaneous or close to it (makes sense too, since it looks like a wormhole). She spends about half a day on the station, and after 8 hours has her episode on Cora’s toilet.
That’s about 5 days and closing in on the 6th.
So I re-iterate… VERY eventful week for the earth xD
there was a time jump at some point. We are at least in week 3 plus however long Sydney’s trip to the stars took.
Sydney’s training montage may have covered some time. Boot camp was 8 weeks when I was in the service.
Sydney hasn’t finished boot, yet
I feel like it went something this way: “Hey, you were the one reporting about the supers, aren’t they basically aliens? Now do the alien story too!”
I think it has been longer than we would guess, BUT given how positive Suzie tends to be and the fact that she got at least one exclusive with Maxima (I wouldn’t be surprised if Ariana was throwing more her way since shes a sympathetic media outlet) She has had a lot of opportunity basically just land in her lap thanks to her personality.
She slid in on a shrimp sandwich.
I have noticed that too. I can’t account for more than about 2 weeks. This comic moves very slowly.
I’m pretty sure that the portal they took to get to the Alari homewold also took them forward in time. I’ve been thinking that since day one of this story line. Little clues and hints along the way all kind of clue into that. Go back and give this story a read with that thought in mind and you’ll find it actually starts making sense. If that is what happened, it could have been months, and that would be slightly more realistic for Ms. News to be a leading news lady now.
This has been my assessment as well.
Yeah A structure the scale of what those solar updraft towers appear to be would take at very least months to build, and the second one was only partly completed the first time we saw it and complete the second
Or there were two completed towers and one partially completed tower. Look in one direction you see one complete and one partial tower, look another direction and you see two complete towers. For all we know Deus had plans for an entire forest of these towers. After all in our world we usually build entire fields of wind turbines rather than ones and twos. Occam’s razor argues for this simple scenario over the overly complicated notion of time travel.
Occam’s razer is a rule of thumb not a hard fats rule and this is a comic and in comics Occam’s razor is often ignored
I checked the farmland in the background of both shots. It’s identical fields and pastures patterning.
I suspect that when the group followed Sciona through the rogue portal, they were jumped forward in time a little, then when most of them went back, they were brought back to Earth at the same point in time when they left Earth. The rogue portal not only connected two points in space, but also two points in time. It wasn’t very far forward, relatively speaking, but it did overlap that particular Daphne-body in temporal existence, mucking up all of herself from 6 sets of input (aka too many, and twice as much from two same-bodies that were not in the same-space) instead of the normal five. (And then Daphne-on-alien-world went back through the portal and the confusion vanished, and all of herself was able to piece together what happened.)
At some point in the “near future” there will be several minutes where there are too many Daphne-bodies again…but at that point, 5 of them will know what’s going on, and the 6th temporally displaced one will be mucking up the reception of the rest out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, Sydney is still a little bit into the future (probably just a few days at absolute most; the Squidward fleet is mega-nega-powerful and quite capable of destroying Sciona’s world in a handful of days). She didn’t get to go back through the portal to her own time. The flight orb didn’t know how to register how to get back to Earth from Sciona’s planet because the rogue portal wreckt everything, and it’s probably not set up to handle temporal shifts. (At least, at this pip level!) That could very well be why Earth was fuzzed out,
Then again, it could’ve been from whatever the previous owner of the orbs did, or had happen to them that caused them to drop the balls (lol, plural) in the Caribbean.
As for how that might have happened…the television movie/show Alien Nation had a race of aliens that dissolved when hit with saltwater, because it worked like acid on their flesh. (LOTS of plot holes in that whole concept, but still…) The previous wielder of the orbs could’ve had a similar problem, but had never encountered saltwater before and didn’t know. They could’ve been injured, crashed into the ocean, lost consciousness, lost their grip on the right orbs, and literally drowned while unconscious…yadda yadda yadda.
But from how swiftly those tower things were constructed in Galatyn…I’d say at least a couple weeks have passed…and yes, things can get built that swiftly, if you throw enough money at it to buy highly skilled and experienced workers (or spend enough money prior to that point to get them to that stage). If you don’t believe me, check out this video:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/30/china-build-57-storey-skyscraper-19-days-timelapse-video
That’s right, construction companies in China built a skyscraper with 57 floors in just 19 days…and that’s a ver complex structure. A solar wind vortex tube thing, however large, is WAAAY simpler in its design. So with the right equipment and motivation and everything stockpiled and ready to go, it could go up literally in just a handful of days.
Psst, stop using logic, the rabid locals get angry when you use it against them
*frothing at mouth*
Graaa graaa … forrry
*pulls toothbrush out of mouth, and washes face*
Sorry bout that. Did someone mention locals?
Rabid locals, you are okay :D
You say “Go back and give this story a read with that thought in mind and you’ll find it actually starts making sense.” The problem with that idea is that when people have a theory in mind that they want to be true, they have little problem finding evidence to support their pet theory. That’s why equally intelligent, thoughtful and caring people can have such disparate political beliefs.
I don’t see the evidence for time travel that you claim to see, so I have serious doubts about that theory. I think that if the time travel you believe in had happened there would be some serious and unignorable paradox issues that we haven’t seen in the comic. The lack of paradox is itself evidence that nothing happened to cause paradox.
You can have time travel without having a paradox So I don’t see your point
Harem: “There were too many of me.”
She was getting contact through the portal and through space.
And I have a completely different theory on what that statement by Daphne may have actually meant. I’m not going to reiterate that theory here, but you can find it at this link.
My theory is only a theory, just like the whole notion of time travel is just a theory. Let’s just admit that none of this is fact until DaveB actually tells us what is fact.
That…is actually a great theory, too…which could’ve been triggered by the fact she was so far apart, she might’ve instinctively teleport-created a new clone out of (distance) separation stress…
Shrug.
well, the scale of one alien ship is roughly “ground to orbit”, so the scale of their civilisations is anything from “thats no moon” to “casually demolish earth to make a space bypass”.
scale here doesn’t refer to physical size but the degree, as in how threatening and what are their capabilities. You might mean that but your comment can be read both ways.
imagine the comment is being read to you by John Cleese.
That wouldn’t mean it was a good argument.
That’s funny–just a couple days ago I was watching a TOS episode where Spock started explaining Earth myths about witch’s familiars to McCoy, not five minutes after being completely thrown by a Kirk reference to trick-or-treat. Make up your minds, writers!
It’s not that unbelievable for Spock to have encountered some stuff but not others but yeah if he was in Startfleet Academy for four years it’d be weird for him not to encounter Halloween.
Not necessarily. Hallowe’en isn’t a universal Earth custom, localized mainly to the UK and North America, and the phrase trick or treat is even more local. At the time the series came out there would be older people who remembered a time when basically nobody in the US said Trick-or-Treat on Hallowe’en. This is no longer true, but you can imagine in the next 300 years (time between TOS coming out and its setting) the phrase could have become regionalized such that spock wouldn’t have heard it wherever he was but Kirk used it growing up in Iowa.
Maybe Spock was perturbed that he didn’t understand something, and immediately looked it up.
Spock did some quick wikiwalking in those 5 minutes!
It’s impossible to learn a single thing on Wikipedia* in 5 minutes, you have to finish the first 17 linked articles first to truly get the subject.
* the alt-text is what really sells that particular strip.
Why do I have a feeling they’re going to blame her for the devastation of their homeworld? That feels like it’s going to be the other shoe that’s going to drop.
How could they possibly blame Halo for that? She trashed the invaders, and showed up and then helped them. That doesn’t exactly sound like the ravager of worlds, there.
Yeah, Halo is about the “oops”-er of worlds, tops.
Or perhaps the Alari already know that mankind are barely functional as the whoopsers of worlds.
I doubt that.
The planet was in ruins when the team arrived. I would want them to acknowledge that she avenged some of them by taking out 3 of the planet killers.
But they don’t know that!
I highly doubt that the official Powers That Be have even sent out any scouting parties to the Alari home-world as of yet, and even if they DID, i don’t think that the reports returned would have filtered down to the general public so rapidly, such that the refugees have heard them yet…
Even if Sydney just flat out went up to them and TOLD them what she did, i doubt they will believe her…I mean, seriously would YOU believe someone that comes up to you with some ornamental balls floating above their head (that can probably be bought at the local Space Wal-Mart toy department), and tells you …”Oh Yeah, those Space Squid that totally blew your planets Elite Military to dust, vaporized ALL your major cities (and all the not-so-major ones too), laid waste to the general well-being of your planets ecology, and that you BARELY escaped from one step ahead of the blast wave… yeah those guys… Well, i PERSONALLY sliced and diced one of them to death, blew a hole the size of Cora’s ship through a second, and took out at least a thousand of their fighters and/or drones… All by MYSELF…”
you’d go “yeah Right, SURE you did” as you start edging away from this clearly unbalanced escaped mental patient…
Deus Ex Alari stealthed military satellite saw the whole thing. After all if you were chased off your planet by a genocide squad you might want to try and leave something behind to keep an eye on their activities…or the very least if they leave.
Granted in this short time frame chances are only their high ranking military will have seen such transmissions.
Methinks the cargo hold full of other refugees might go a long way to keeping that from happening.
Also might go a long way towards stopping Galytn from having a monopoly on the technological advances.
If the Alari share technology with the Galytn, then Earth as a whole would presumably have gained technological knowledge beyond what’s currently available, possibly elevating its status in the universe. Sure, the Galytn would control it, but if Earth is deemed to now have access to that tech, then other races could also trade with Earth, and the U.S. government has an inside track with Dabbler and also Cora through Dabbler. Of course, even if it’s looked at as an illegitimate gain because the Alari shouldn’t be sharing it, Deus will be elevating Earth’s tech level soon enough.
Huh.. I wonder if they tracked the soul wave? THough that would also be odd.
In theory- the planet was destroyed probably within the month before they arrived on the planet. We have no clue how long it takes from Alari homeworld to the space station thingy. but we know its about a day or so there.
and we can guess, that the alari to base can’t be more than a day given how fast Cora arrived-unless she just happened to be really close at the time.
so..
What crazy odds that the soul wave lands. then the refugee thingy lands. AND cora brings another hanger full of folks.
I suppose it could be the refugee folks were close, and sensed the soul wave battery thingy on earth…
Maybe the planet was marked for invasion anyways, as Sciona was there in the first place…
“Hey we got a decently evolved civ here, but they are still not very space faring. They do have some interesting champions however – we could use them as battle slaves!”
~time passes~
“We are invaded! – what low level civs do we have to escape to?”
“Invasion stategist Scionas’ pet project ‘Planet Dirt’ is the nearest, Sir!”
“Instruct all ships to go there”
Deedes wins the comments section today.
This is the most likely scenario.
Also while Deus’ actions REEK of “Just as Planned” …
I think this is more of a “Aliens just showed up? Now i have an valid excuse to patent and then show off all this sweet juicy tech for fantastic sums of $$$ years ahead of schedule …
And the xevoarchy cant say shit because we are aiding intergalactic refugees? ”
What? The aliens in question are culturally down with swearing personal fealty / volunteering for indentured servitude when they have no available cash!
MUHAHA HAAHHAHHAHAHAHHHHHH!.
Sure the timetable just got rushed a decade but Deus is flexible in his planning.
Does he realise the difference between a ‘Refugee’ ship and a “Colonizer Vessel”
is how well armed the passengers are and how well repaired it is ?
Maybe not right away but he owns a nation full of people that are all
“Oh no not this again” so i am sure his own super V squad (The v stands for Victory not Villain ;)
is
Reminds me what Sciona said, right before she released the souls from that battery: “We’ll be invading Earth after all, but now as refugees.” Kinda ominous since she ended with: “Guess we can stil take it over though. Eventually.”
I always figured that Spock and Data had evolved senses of humor and were playing “Stump the Monkey” always waiting for the stupid monkeys to figure out that their legs were being pulled and doomed to be somewhat disappointed by the monkeys never figuring the game out… “Surely they aren’t stupid enough to not catch on to the fact that I memorized every idiom they have published in the past 5 centuries…. Guess they are, perhaps they will catch on next time”.
Also, we’re really crossing into alternate history now, for 2019 will be quite different from our own world, what with superheroes and aliens openly living among us. Sounds fun. Too bad non of us will be alive by the time the comic reaches 2019. (Probably created by Dave’s great-grandchildren by then.)
Just kidding!
Who puts red pepper flakes on a ham sammich?
Why, Sydney of course.
Must try that on my next ham sandwich.
There is a rather delicious pepper paste called Sambal Oelek (you can get it from Amazon)… Not too hot, it adds just the right amount of spice to Ramen or even mac and cheese. About a half teaspoon full in a bowl of ramen gives it a nice kick.
There used to be a company (Haas Davis, perhaps?) that made Red Pepper Ham lunch meat. They also made Black Pepper Ham.
All things considered, the debate, in my mind at least, is not if there are aliens or not. The debate is why would they come here? We have, in our solar system, enough resources to last at least until the death of the sun in 7,000,000,000 years or so.
With advanced recycling, we could probably infinitely multiply those resources. Yes, I know that entropy will eventually kill us all, please not the heat death of the Universe is a bigger and separate issue.
The point is, we have no real reason to think that the rest of the universe is significantly different in respect to resources.
Then there is the issue of the number of solar systems out there. On the low end, we are looking at 100,000,000,000. The high end is irrelevant.
Of those 100,000,000,000 stars, if we assume that 1% are inhabited in a way we are capable of recognizing, understanding, and interacting with, the we have 1,000,000,000 inhabited solar systems.
Now, lets assume that 1% of those civilizations have reached a point where they have achieved space flight. That has us down to 10,000,000 civilizations that are at our level of technology or above.
Now, let’s say that 1% of those space traveling civilizations have achieved interstellar flight. Doubtful, but possible. We now have 100,000 civilizations that have avoided all the pitfalls of creating and having an energy source that puts out the equivalent of what our civilization has produced, in a day.
100,000 out of 100,000,000,000 are somehow capable of interstellar travel.
Each of these civilizations now has a volume of space that takes exponents to not exceed the capacity of my calculator. 2.34E44m3 if my calculations are correct.
Honestly, I think that is assuming that life is ridiculously more common than it is.
So, ok. We have established that resources are not a practical reason for them to travel. Likely they would eat up so much in resources they would need to stay where they went, and they would know this when they left.
And we have established that the next solar system over is unlikely to have life, but it is going to have enough resources to extend the civilization for a few billion years.
So, why go?
Proxima Centari is under 4.5 Light years away.
Traveling there using current technology would require roughly 80,000 years.
That’s a non-starter.
Wormholes, Right? They’re fun to think about. They do not appear to be in any way producible. Most of the SCI-Fi space travel scenarios involve them or just ignore the question of how travel works. Sure, you can claim time space compression, but if i compress everything for a million light years in a straight line, I’ve probably created space Holocaust at best.
But, for the what if people out there, let’s say we found some way to produce a stable wormhole to anywhere we chose to go. Great. So that star in the horsehead nebula looks cool, let’s go there.
Of course the level of radiation there is too high for life, we’re work on the other 99,999,999,999 planets tomorrow. Assuming that we followed the Theory of relativity and therefor respected the law of conservation of matter and energy, we will need another solar system to burn tomorrow.
So, the world ship looks to be the most practical.
Ok, so 80,000 years. Let’s say we find technology capable of reducing it to 10,000 years. This is most likely impossible for some very practical reasons, among them that impact with a spec of dust would cause your ship to have a fission reaction.
So, if we assume that there are 30 years to a generation, we are looking at 333 generations taking 10,000 years.
The good news is that the people who got to the other end would probably still be recognizable as human.
The bad news is in the time they took to do this is the time we, as a species, went from domesticating the cat which allowed for the formation of cities, to the time the ship left earth. The ship would have to institute whole sale slaughter of anyone not considered immediately useful, and even assuming that you started with the smallest possible crew, let’s say 2,000 and put a high limit on the crew of 100,000 the society that walked out of the ship at the end would look almost nothing like what you started with.
Ok, but there are two reasons to undertake such a voyage.
The planet dying is not one of them.
1. If, on early space travels there happened to be another inhabited planet in your solar system, it is possible that the stronger species would kill the other and decide that they must spread their dominance to the universe.
2. If, on early space travels there happened to be another inhabited planet in your solar system, it is possible that the stronger species would decide to convert the weaker species to their religion. At this point spreading the faith to the universe seems like a logical next step for a religious society.
Actually, both would be a religion. You’d rather deal with the second one.
Neither fits with what we are seeing here. Mysterious lights in the sky and rumors of powerful creatures making deals with politicians that are then voted out of office? It’s like Ed Wood decided to take over the planet.
Your travel time numbers are off. At 1g acceleration it takes about a year to get reasonably close to the speed of light so it’d be more like 5.5 years to get to Proxima Centari.
Even not accelerating the whole way modern technology would only take about 100 years to get there (it’d be crazy expensive to even send a probe though).
“Your travel time numbers are off. At 1g acceleration it takes about a year to get reasonably close to the speed of light so it’d be more like 5.5 years to get to Proxima Centari.”
We do not have even a hypothetical power supply for 5.5 years worth of 1g acceleration, much less the propellant needed. However, you are right that if we took an icy asteroid or comet that already has a head start on breaking free of the sun’s gravitational field and doesn’t have a planet’s to deal with either, and attached engines to it that could convert the ice for propellant we could get there within a human lifespan using current technology. Setting up for the trip would be extremely expensive and probably a decades long process, but it could be done. There would be a significant possibility of failure, since the only tech we currently have that could sustain the necessary output is fission and we have never tried keeping a plant running for anywhere close to as long as needed for the journey but at least the waste could be disposed of as “additional propellant”
There’s a problem with that.
If you accelerate to anywhere near light speed, then you essentially turn every spec of dust into a Tsar Bomb’s big daddy.
Sure, as long as we are talking in theoreticals, we could build a force field that is projected out in front of us by a full light second and covering a 180 degree hemisphere.
As for using an icy asteroid to fuel the trip, my question is how much of the asteroid has to be left at the completion of the trip? I think your space ships are more likely to resemble the Posleen World ships with what amounts to clustered armoured skyscrapers leaving a world with a minimal genetic base and arriving at the point of civil war due to overcrowding.
As for fuel, I’d guess you would want a molecule sized blackhole kept as far away from the crew compartment as possible. You could place it at the end of a mile long antenna at the front. With proper engineering I suppose you might manage to create a type of forcefield, I’m not sure I’d want to risk unbalancing the containment like that, and you can guarantee that you would not be able to see anything in front of you.
Additionally, consider that if it evaporates, you need to build a new one. Trillions of Miles from home. With only what you have on board. And that’s the best case scenario.
Worst case is it becomes unbalanced and eats the ship. I know, it’s theoretical, but to generate the energy you need, you are going to have to breach the event horizon.
Propulsion would involve a reverse of the theory of relativity (Yeah, I know, it’s an equation, reversing it makes no sense mathematically, but effectively we would be putting the energy back into the form of matter and violating the Pauli Exclusion principle so badly you’d feel sorry for it) where the energy output of the black hole generators (More or less limited only by the mass you were willing to feed to it) is converted into matter by two separate but identical processes resulting in a “Simplified” Orion Drive. (For those of you not familiar with the concept, you would form two simplified bullets, and instead of shooting them at each other at relativistic speeds you just form them from energy in the same space and get to find out what happens when two solid objects try to occupy the same space.
And then, if your power plant does not eat you, you don’t eat each other, you don’t get his with a stray molecule at relativistic speeds, you don’t get cooked alive, you don’t run out of parts of your ship to sacrifice to the blackhole, and you manage to pay for it all…… You might get there alive.
I’m still of the opinion that you would be looking at several thousand years to travel between solar systems.
And that 5.5 years is from the people on Earth’s point of view. For the people on the ship it would be much less time. From the point of view of the people on the ship 1g acceleration is fast enough to cross the galaxy in one lifetime.
Blah, blah, science, blah, math, blah…
Is this not a universe where a blood mage just created a wormhole to go home?
Is this not a universe where magical and supernatural creatures – elves, dwarves, fairies, werecritters, vampires, succubi – abound?
Does Sydney not possess FTL travel means?
What about Cora and her ship?
Did Deus not just Stargate to the Rapture on a shopping lark?
All that other blather is about your real-world limitations.
Well, yes, but we want to play, too.
This may be my 2nd-favorite example of a string of formal 3rd-person rhetorical questions.
um, sorry to nitpick, but… nope, it’s about 7-ish years for the TRAVELLER, and 10-12-ish years to any Earthlings watching from home… the time-dilation effect is more noticeable when you go longer distances, like out to Rigel… only 25-30ish years for those on the ship, but over a thousand years at home…
on the first Wikipedia page you linked to below, using the first graph we see that the LEFT edge is the shipboard time, and at the same time the RIGHT edge is the time spent on the same trip, as seen from Earth…
Please note that the Y-Axis on both the left and right sides of the graph are logarithmic and the horizontal lines shown don’t make for easy precision (even zoomed in) so my numbers are estimates…
And one more reply for links (sorry for spamming I should have compiled this all together before posting).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acceleration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot (not using constant acceleration).
Earth currently has 7.5 Billion humans.
How many humans can it support indefinitely? 12 Billion on the low end, 20 on the high.
In the last 70 years, we have QUADRUPLED our population.
Unless we want a series of World Wars to reduce the population, we will need to start figuring out space travel.
I suspect Venus can be terreformed rather easily. It already has a magnetic field.
“How many humans can it support indefinitely? ”
that’s a question that is almost impossible to answer as it all depends on what your definition of support is and what kind of tech you have to meet those needs. will a minimalist life style and high tech you could have 100’s of billions living on earth.
also populations do not grow at those speeds forever as most first world countries have already stopped grow that fast and some have even stopped all together. most high speed growth comes form less developed countries.
Soylent Green is people.
“Unless we want a series of World Wars to reduce the population, we will need to start figuring out space travel.”
The Trump administration, is working on that now.
“Unless we want a series of World Wars to reduce the population, ” Sorry, this is the part to which I am referring.
And here I was hoping you’d realize how over the top that claim was and welcome the ambiguity.
Can you tell me which wars have been started while Shtrump has been in office?
Unlike Oblamo (who got a peace prize days after buying the election), Shtrump actually has been talking with psycho puppets in an effort to end conflict (remember, the Vietnam War never actually ended, it’s just remained in an uneasy Cease Fire* all this time)
*okay, probably used the wrong term
A company in the Netherlands ran research on this topic inthe nineteen seventies.
Assuming that the population centers were moved to desert areas, and accounting for the nascent level of hydroponic commercial agriculture that the Netherlands was developing at that time the earth could sustain thirty two billion people, if everyone lived at the mean standard of living Japan had at that time.
And that’s assuming we only use the surface skin. This is a sphere, and we could colonize up to a couple of miles down with reasonable extensions of current technology.
Spit take – I started reading this as “a company of Neanderthals ran research for nineteen centuries…”
“Okay, I apparently completely missed some things in those articles on cave paintings…”
“… went from domesticating the cat which allowed for the formation of cities … ”
Gonna sit back and think about that for a bit.
Do starfaring civilizations have cats?
Of course they do!
“Do starfaring civilizations have cats?”
What if they are cats, or their analogue. So, the Furries, already exist.
Yes,
Thunderians,
Na’vi,
Ctarl Ctarl,
and
Flerkens,
to name a few.
you missed Kzinti
Perhaps the Kzinti were skipped on purpose because they tend to drone on.
Domesticating the cat allowed for the storage of grain. Storage of Grain allowed people to go from hunter-gather/nomadic civilization to permanent homes.
Cats could burrow into the grain and kill rats, etc…
Now I’m wondering if Vale encountered those refugees on the station and that’s why she looked bummed.
Further to that, maybe she’s an Alari soul that got… uh… “re-bodified” and feels bad about the whole stellar tyranny thing. XD
Vale is al eldritch horror wearing a human skin.
An alari soul is pretty much not going to inhabit her, and would almost certainly get eaten were it to make such an attempt.
Vale may not quite be what she’s presumed to be. She is something extra special in any case, special enough that Sciona couldn’t make heads nor tails of her :)
Nth being? ;)
too easy, my money is on the girl with the cute stickers on her mask who saw the news report of supers as potential playtime as being a Nth being, while Vale is more a 3rd level or (ascended class) being.
Alien starship appears in orbit out of nowhere, and any country that doesn’t say “come on down” is supposedly “xenophobic”?
OK, whatever.
Not really surprising for the news to be judgemental like that, but it is unusually forward.
Killjoy, we tend to kill that which we do not understand, that is where hate comes from.
Which really doesn’t have much to do with my post.
I get the idea that Dabbler is the one that taught her English.
Dabbler is a cunning linguist
She’s also good with languages.
So clearly Deus engineered the Lovecraftian kaiju attack on the Alari homeworld so he could then welcome the refugees in the African nation with the weird name as camouflage for his illegally acquired alien tech.
But how on Earth did he do it?
Wow, most likely the country Deus deals with, surprise surprise :P
I wonder why Sydney is reacting to the expression like that… I would expect her to laugh at it, followed by a ‘I cant wait to use this in front of Max’… And is she poking Cora?
yeah, i agree her hand is shown in a rather weird position in relation to anything else nearby.
At the very least they should know its an expression or idiom they are unfamiliar with and ask “what does that saying mean”? I have heard humans say that to each other – even had it said to me – so that would hardly be weird.
While I doubt alien languages lack idioms, they can be among the hardest parts of a language to learn, given their non-literal meaning. So, yes, I am not terrible surprised, especially with aliens would struggle with them, even if their own language is packed with them.
It is why dubs tend to go for context based translations rather than literal ones sometimes, idioms and puns don’t translate well between languages.
Correct – Rocky and Bullwinkle was almost impossible to listen to in French…
And sadly, in 2019 The Rocky and Bullwinkle show is still canceled.
So next arc is about dealing with the worst geopolitical crisis in the history of mankind.
Two questions:
1.How long will it take Sydney to get back into her routine?
2.Will Maxima consider this other dimensional jaunt as “burned up vacation time” and stick her on KP duty?
I am partially suspecting a cover story (if this ends up a short trip into the future, like days or a week), that Sydney was (part of) a team checking out the potential threat that attacked Alar.
Granted the public might question, why send a rookie on such a mission, but hey; its a good cover and they brought back more refugees/survivors of the tragedy.
Heh :) if cora lands near the alari ship (probable because of the refugees she has in her hold) – journalists are going to see… Halo disembarking from an alien ship ^^ Arianna’s PR nightmare sense would be macking a hell of a ruckus ;)
She’ll have to exit using the teleport function of the trueorb.
Looks like we hit almost every check on the best case scenario first contact (including the secret society was in place before hand so some world powers were already in the know).
But publically; Aliens: Look human, small numbers, refugee level peaceful contact, land in small country with financial contacts so no major world powers are fighting over tech, and may be willing to share tech.
And yes the look human part is part of the best case scenario as while humans rarely get along with each other on first contact; it is a better case than if the aliens looked like a mesh of dolphin, octopus, crab, cat, and spider with a touch of thorny bush and bobbit worm. You can be as peaceful as all get out but humans would have a hard time being friendly with something that terrifies them to look at.
“You can be as peaceful as all get out but humans would have a hard time being friendly with something that terrifies them to look at.”
,
That is why I used the word, Xenophobic.
Um…this wasn’t a reply to anyone so a tad confused by the apparently defensive tone at the end there. This is a stand alone post; first one I made I believe after looking at this comic or close to it without reading many other comments.
For your scenario, see the A.C. Clarke book ‘Childhoods’ End’. Friendly Aliens come to Earth and provide all kinds of help to humanity. But… they say they won’t reveal themselves for 50 years until humans get used to their presence. At the appointed time they appear to the world and (spoiler alert) are large red skinned humanoids with horns and leathery wings.
The religious/superstition imagery overlap; Farscape touched on it briefly with the witch alien with three eyes. But yeah, humanoid aliens with six arms, blue skin, horns, tails, wings either leathery or feathered on their backs; or any resemblance to any fae, yokai, or other supernatural creature would have some issues dealing with humans. It is an interesting reversal of the fearful expectation of some classic sci-fi and more modern ones where such aliens take advantage of this and pose as gods and/or monsters.
Let me guess; Deus owns Galytn.
That’s the African nation from his last major flashback page.
I still got dollars to doughnuts that says he’s an anti-Sydney: He’s an ugly, spineless little nerd who made a Faustian bargain for all that he has.
Hardly, he was rooting for Sydney and hoping that she did not die. Or that he was not required to kill her, I guess, reading between the lines.
Mind you Halo freaks out Vale, and she is some kind of goddess, from the dark dimensions.
That was Kevin, during the Restaurant Rumble
Yea.
Long shifts & brain turned to mush by the end.
It was mainly the banter, between Deus and Sydney that I was recalling, but then mixing up the example I chose to cite. A better one would be him expediting the rebreather that Sydney had requested.
In fact, having that in the back of my mind was probably what made me make that mistaken connection. A rebreather is a device that could keep her alive. So by ensuring that she had it promptly, Deus was actually helping to keep Halo alive. Thus actually more than just Kevin’s off the cuff remark.
Plus I think he enjoyed verbally jousting with Sydney.
Most important of all though Deus has no financial (or other) vested interest in bringing harm to Sydney. To the contrary she is the poster girl for Archon, for which he has very very lucrative contracts to supply them with all their special gear (such as Sydney’s rebreather).
You don’t kill off a good customer!
May not have a reason to bring harm, doesn’t mean he wouldn’t use her in a nano as a means to spy on what Archon is doing, specially in light of what he has been up to ever since he murdered a nations leader and seized power
Murdered and seized power are such harsh ways of putting it.
The guy was a murderous, vindictive thug who saw nothing wrong in killing family members of his ‘opponents’. Call it … pest control.
And seized power? Oh, no, he appealed to what’s in his philosophy of what drives people – greed. He just made it clear that it’s in everyone’s best interest if he handles what he does best – economics. Granted, that’s a huge part of any Government, but he left the other things to the son.
And, let’s be honest, you think the son could handle a multi-billion economy?
Didn’t say the King didn’t deserve it
Okay, if ‘murdered and seized power’ is not harsh for you, how about this: provoked the legitimate ruler into attacking so his hired muscle could have a valid reason to defend SmugD by causing the ruler to have a fatal heart attack, and then install the son as a puppet ruler allowing himself to do as he pleases
Does that sound better? Same outcome, different words used
He’s the economic powerhouse behind the throne, yes.
Killed the murderous thug in charge, elevated his more peaceful son to power, took over as economic ‘adviser’.
So when are we going to find out what happened with Harem on the Alari homeworld?
Gotta say, that caption in the first panel made me laugh.
When was Suzie’s last known appearance?
to my knowledge it was in the parking lot of the Restaurant Rumble, when her and Arianna got into a fight due to Vehemence’s Aggro-Aura…
What we didn’t see, was Ari taking her home and ‘nursing’ her back to health :winknudgegiggle:
I wonder what the chances are that the Squidward fleet shows up in a bit. Everybody on Earth panics and blames the Alari refugees for attracting them to Earth. In actuality however, the Squidwards have little interest in a few Alari stragglers at this point. What they are really after is Sydney and her orbs.
They didn’t attack the Alari world because of her, they had to have some motive to attack them; and given their scorched earth approach decimating the entire planet’s surface chances are extinction was their goal.
However while it seems scanning Sydney caused them to show up in force, there is no evidence they would know what world she originally came from; and seemed more in panic mode after scanning her and her orbs than showing any real interest. In fact they may not even intend to pursue her and may at this time be patting themselves on the back for driving her off (if their reason for panicking related to those orbs comes from a place of fearing the orbs due to some past experience with another orb wielder or the race that made them).
I don’t know I think it’s actually pretty easy to understand an alien language that replaces almost all of its words with other words.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzq4YDt7V-o
I was wondering when someone would mention that one :)
Plus, let’s just all give the Slow Clap of Defeat to Deus Ex Machina, shall we? I wonder if he is the one that sent the squidbillies to angel island. Or maybe the vikings to draugrville.
Me two comics ago: “Huh, I wonder how they’re going to be hush-hush about this and manage to dodge questions about aliens for as long as…”
Comic today: “Hiya! Aliens here on national TV!”
Me now: “…well, that’s a pleasant surprise. FU “status quo” and “return to normalcy” tropes.”
Is Sydney really supposed to look upset about the use of the saying? Or is it the art just making it look like she’s upset?
That was on the night where Maxima had Sydney ferry some of the cast to a secret location and that took all day. From there we entered into the Secret Council, and it takes all of a few hours for the events with our favorite Alari to occur and the portal to her world to be opened.
There are times
– many times – when I think this comic is just a vehicle for the author to pedantically nit-pick at creative fiction. All these rants can be resolved with this simple phrase: “suspension of disbelief.” Geez.
I really like that it didn’t go to one of the standard locations, like the US or UK. I hadn’t really considered it before but aliens in movies pretty much exclusively go to one of those two places.
Actually, I think at least a third of them go to Tokyo.
In the event of an invasion it is a good idea to hit the most densely populated areas that show the highest amount of technological presence *electrical grids and radio transmission origin points*, as they are most likely to be the centers of the populations economy and most protected parts of the area. Basically look at the night side of the world, the spots with the most lights are like giant targets to an alien invader. Make a closer look to examine technological and population densities and the major cities of the world are where you can do the most damage physically and economically, taking out the supply chain origin and major points of the planet so they can’t assist the more vulnerable locations. It reduces the risk of a long going war of attrition with the locals.
If you want to hit the Humans in the morale as well as physically, you hit them in the tourism hotspots. That way even the ones a few thousand miles away feel the loss of that thing you just smashed. An updated version of their very own Baedeker raids, in a way. (Nothing to do with where the movie studios keep their effects teams, honest!)
Dave…
I can’t place the reference “Idiomatic, planetary…”
Is that a reference to The Jackson 5’s ‘Dancing Machine’?
Beastie Boys Intergalactic?
It would have been funny if this was just a translation error by the universal translator.
Sidney goes “The cat is out of the bag!” But Cora hears [The genitails are uncovered).
“That is what I said!
And so on. :P
But with that reasoning… Sydney would have heard “The Cat is out of the bag.”
Maybe we’re expecting too much from the translator.
In the 60s a machine took ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ and converted it to “Invisible Insanity”.
There was a Piers Anthony novel titled “Prostho Plus” about a dentist abducted by aliens, (why? Because they needed a dentist; aliens have teeth too), and winds up traveling all over the cosmos dealing with exotic alien tooth problems. There’s a running gag in the book in which the aliens he meets frequently use idioms which the standard Universal Translation technology converts into equivalent idioms in the hearer’s language. But because the protagonist is stuck with a cheapo model, it only gives him the literal translation
So how do you defend the planet from a more advanced alien force?
Supers and the fact that the Alari don’t seem too far ahead in magical ability both help a lot, an intelligent strategy should be built around those factors. Doing it with tech is much harder.
Insurgency tactics might be effective, but power armor will significantly change the character of any insurgency. As in, insurgencies might actually get less violent because people learn from experience that they cannot harm their targets without weapons(mostly IED’s), and plans, that they won’t have ready when they’ve been tracked down and they’re getting raided, or when they become aware of a target of opprotunity on the street.
You need to assume that if the aliens understand your coding languages they’re going to beat you in electronic warfare, but I’m pretty sure their infiltrators already have the humans beat on this. The best defence is not letting the fight drag on long enough for them to gain any advantage from disrupting our computers. That defence is probably impractical, but something could be accomplished by delaying in the political areana and doing a controlled denetwork/security crackdown on relevant systems.
Challenging air superiority or bombing them isn’t going to happen without supers or some madman reviving project Pluto and putting it into mass production on an impressive scale. You also probably couldn’t hit them with missiles, projecting from current technology development and the fact that they have energy shields I am going to assume their point defence is stupidly good. Maybe even good enough that cannon shells will struggle to get through.
I am also going to assume they have neutron detectors, making hiding a nuke far harder and picking it out of a barrage of regular decoys easier. You could still use nuclear minefields or stationary tactical nukes with enough material between it and the enemy sensors. Or you could overwhelm point defence with large barrages and artillery attacks, I suspect that atomic shells will make a comeback, you might even see the Davey Crocket nuclear bazooka used.
Depending on how good their artillery, ortillery, and air power is, trying to get vehicles close to them(or make an overland advance in general) could entail ludicrous casualties. (Hence the argument for actually using the infantry mobile nuclear launch system)
“So how do you defend the planet from a more advanced alien force?”
You build a space wall and make the Sombrero Galaxy pay for it!
(really, there is actually something called the sombrero galaxy https://space-facts.com/sombrero-galaxy/)
Lockheed Martin is already working on a project called the ‘Space Fence’ https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/space-fence.html
If the ship is full of the “ultra ‘Elite”, wont that mean they’ll think nothing of rounding up locals on the sly and sacrificing them to recharge their repair equipment with Blood Magic?
Maybe … but keep in mind that they’re in Deus’ domain.
In a country he built up from subsistence living to a manufacturing-based economy in short time. With lots of attention on education, health care improvements, etc.
Those are now His People. And you don’t touch His People.
They’d think nothing of it only briefly. Deus doesn’t sacrifice his workers because he values human lives; he doesn’t sacrifice his workers, or their grandparents, or random visitors, or frankly anybody else because he knows all of those people value *their* human lives, and the system will simply not function efficiently and without constant supervision if any of those people have a reasonable worry that they could end up being hooked up to an alien Blood Death Machine. Such activities also do very bad things to his middle management’s long- and even short-term performance timelines (due to acute and chronic psychological trauma); and the entire *point* of a corporate structure is to have a system where you can assign routine tasks and activities to subordinates, so that you can concentrate on higher-tier problems. Which you can’t do if your organizational chart is mired in psychopathy, PTSD, and/or substance abuse.
tl;dr: permitting blood sacrifices would just make more work for Deus.
… although I’m now wondering what this will do to the veil, since the veil protected visiting aliens too.
No, visitors tended to have their own cloaking slash disguise tech
I will mostly agree, although they did say the veil interfered with first hand accounts when Sciona attacked Cooter in broad daylight, so there seems to be some veil affect for at least some aliens. Although I have said before it doesn’t make any sense for ALL aliens to be covered by it as it would have to program in each and every species individually. But public reveal breaks the veil anyway as stated about the Super press conference. So even if the Alari were one of the races that didn’t need their own disguise tech like the ones at the club; it won’t cover them now anyway as they have become public knowledge.
Unless they have their own disguise tech, or simply use someone elses, kinda like ARCHON did during the ‘bank robbery PR stunt’
The “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” aliens make a lot more sense decades later, now that entire conversation can take place using only memes. They were truly an advanced species.