Grrl Power #754 – And your race smells of elderberries
Cora is definitely not a diplomat. There are better ways of telling a world that no one is coming for them because their toys all suck, but I guess she’s just getting straight to the point.
I’ve talked about some of the stuff they’re touching on in this press conference in my comments for the comics where Sydney was visiting fracture station, but I thought I should formally introduce this stuff to the in-comic world. I mean, the actual discovery of life besides ours. And not just a fossil of bacteria on Mars or living plankton on Titan or something. Actual civilizations with technology beyond ours. It would change the world utterly. It would be the only thing on the news and late night talk shows and morning news programs for months and months. Some religions would just implode, some would be like “oh yeah, God made them too.” I can’t even imagine how hard the Fox fear mongering machine would ramp up. I tell you what, though, I’d buy stock in any publicly traded company that sold guns, that’s for sure. There would be people so afraid of what they think is about to happen (i.e. the plot of every alien invasion movie ever) violence and suicide rates would go up measurably.
For everyone who didn’t lose their minds though, seeing a hot blue, essentially human looking woman saying “No worries, mate,” I think would allay a lot of fears. Obviously some people will think Cora’s lying so we don’t prepare for invasion, but there’s nothing you can do about people like that. Other people might be thinking “So do you have a sister?” In any case, it would be an interesting time to live.
Actually, this event would be so historic I doubt it’d be at the foot of the Archon building. You can’t tell on this page, but that’s where they are. Really, it’d pretty much have to be at the White House, or better yet, in front of or inside the UN building. But this is technically an informal press conference and as it’s been said, Cora’s not a diplomat. She’s probably not even going to meet and greet with anyone politically important while she’s on Earth.
When I looked up references for the LMG sitting there on the table (that one is an M240 I think) I was disappointed to see that most LMGs are just ugly. I guess I was hoping for something slick looking, like a buff-ass Styer AUG, or an IWI Tavor x95. But no, the ones the US used all look like something the A-Team built out of scrap parts found in a barn. They’re probably made like that because you have to strip them down further to really clean them considering how much more ammo they can run through than an assault rifle, but still.
This page colored by Keith.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
SuperheroThey're super, thanks for asking!
Meatspace ComicSeriously these are awesome. Check 'em out!
Not UpdatingNo longer updating or only updates sporadically, but definitely worth reading.
SeriouslySeriously you guys. If you like Grrl Power the check these out.
"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
This is definetly not going according to plan.
But it is *hilarious*.
And I’ll never, ever, ever be able to spell ‘definitely’ correctly on the first try. Believe me, I’ve been trying for years.
I say de-finite-ly in my head when I spell it.
Huh, I really gotta try that one. Thanks!
Dave, look up “belt fed rifle”. Slightly slicker, much lighter, and way more flexible for special forces.
A lot of those are just the same LMGs, the rest seem to be modified assault rifles (seeing a classic M-16 with belt feed looks hillarious). Did you have a specific one you were thinking of?
Arianna may have gotten a small break with just the ‘take me to your leader’ line. Sydney could have suggested “Hey, why don’t you turn into your giant snake form on TV. That would be cool!’
If Sydney really wanted to make a classic sci-fi reference, she would have Cora leave behind a book after the briefing with the title ‘To Serve Man’ in alien script.
I think Sydney or smarter than that.
is* smarter
“Hey, why don’t you turn into your giant snake form on TV. That would be cool!”
Sydney would never break the evil overlord code like that, everyone knows it never helps
Does that seriously say “with great power comes great responsibility” in the background? In Latin? Nice touch!
The thing that surprises me is that “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” was chosen as Archon’s motto before Sydney joined. I’d assume Max had something to do with that (Leon would definitely have suggested it, but experience leads me to think the IT person isn’t likely to be in branding meetings until the discussion involves reserving domain names or designing the web page).
I think it was originally the motto of that great Roman general Stannus Leetius.
No, *his* motto was “Excelsior”. The motto shown was the motto of Bennus Avunculus. ;-)
Well, Peter should know, so seems legit.
Benedictus Avunculus, I believe.
I dunno, I think that with great power comes great power bills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnWKnSczaRc
Technically the M240/MAG-58 (same thing except for a few minor changes) is a General Purpose Machinegun or GPMG.
The M249 aka Minimi is a proper LMG.
I was a SAW gunner in the Army. Thing was heavy (if you count the M-16 I also had to carry as backup) on marches/patrol, and I hated it. It also sent many rounds very fast, and I loved it. I guess the weight depended on why I needed to carry it.
Carrying the musket and a 249, that’s a load.. Did you need a spare barrel as well?
I use to give my guys the collapsible stocks and short barrel. It slims it down a good bit.
HK 21 is a good mix of machinery and clean lines, really good lookin’ MG.
It is an M240 medium machine gun in 7.62×51. for the LMG it would be the M249 in 5.56 Not my Gen of weapons but my son was an expert gunner. (I was the M60 gen of Army LOL)
I miss the old M-60. When you would wrap the belt around your arm, let loose a few hundred rounds at the ceiling, and yell really loud, people PAID ATTENTION. Then they asked you… politely… to leave the mess hall. But 7.62 ammo would cut a car in half a whole lot quicker than 5.56, even with the much higher rate of fire of the M249. YMMV.
Here you go, Cora.
Any resource Earth has can be found in abundance elsewhere.
Water? Ganymede has more of it and taking it from there doesn’t mean p*ssing off a bunch of violent monkeys with nukes.
Iron? Asteroids have most of it and no pesky gravity will to waste energy trying to escape.
For that matter, that’s assuming they have to come here… They don’t… Countless stars lie between them and us, most of them with no life around them. There’s just no reason to come here outside of participation in the culture or partaking of cultural products like entertainment.
The only exception would generally be if humans made someone angry enough. It’s pretty easy to walk away from Earth as it’s inhabitants can’t follow you. So you’d have to go through a lot of effort to market someone that angry.
Just about any civilization that makes it to faster than light travel has proven itself nonviolent enough to spend a considerable length of time with just itself and not get annoyed enough to kill itself off. Such civilizations are not very likely to waste the energy trying to invade a mudball like earth.
Yeah Dabbler pointed this out to Sydney when they first met
And yet, for some reason, Sciona was going to lead the Alari in an invasion of Earth. And that was before they needed bodies.
From the evidence presented the Alari are slavers for some unknown reason. I mean robots with limited AI will follow orders without the possibility of rebellion, why risk sentient biologicals destroying the economy? Earth history is littered with bad examples of empires laid low by slave rebellion.
There is always the monkey wrench in logic.
Ideology.
Manifest Destiny cultures who think everything or at least certain things should belong to them and only them. Or feel the need to express their self perceived “superiority” over others by suppressing them.
Some invasions could lead because the species in question thinks all species of (x) type look too much like the devils, demons, dragons, evil gods, of their own culture so believe these other species need to be exterminated as part of a holy war.
Or simply by existing other species deny their own religious beliefs and rather than adapt said beliefs they deny other species as “tests” of their faith created by evil and must be destroyed so they “once again” (per their view of this) are the only species left.
My American Indian ancestors, are well aware of this. “Manifest Destiny cultures who think everything or at least certain things should belong to them and only them. Or feel the need to express their self perceived “superiority” over others by suppressing them.”
Robots with limited AI OR were they using cybernetic brain jars with slave race lobotomized pilots that have to be replaced every hundred years or so?
Power is addictive. And….honestly? Most comic book supervillians could get very rich very quickly working within the bounds of the law. Hell, half of them already are. But they constantly try to conquer the world or waste their energy on a stupid vendetta against the heroes or something.
I mean, think about it. Is Magneto doing any good for the cause of mutant rights? No, he’s just proving all the people who say mutants are dangerous right. Is Lex Luthor proving he’s better than Superman? No, he’s just turning himself into a criminal no one trusts and draining funds from his legal business interests. Is Shocker getting rich robbing banks? No, he’s constantly getting his ass kicked by Spiderman, but if he sold the patent for his gloves he’d be set for life (which is true of 90% of Spiderman’s rogues gallery). Villains are not villains because it makes sense to be villains.
One supers rpg I played, name not remembered, had it that all the mad scientist/tinker types were actually powering their creations with their real superpower, they just had a mental crutch that required the item in order for their superpower to manifest.
In that setting if you took Shockers gloves apart you’d find a semi-random mess of wires and electronic parts that did nothing and that no engineer could duplicate as a functional object. It eliminated the whole “Sell the patent and get rich quick” fridge logic bit so the players couldn’t have access to unlimited funds.
There are some fun series that explore the idea of a villain with common sense. Lex Luthor is probably the most famous, and Deus does quite well in the Grrlverse.
My favorites are How to Succeed in Evil (books and free audio podcast), and the long-running With This Ring Orange Lantern fanfic.
And yet, for some reason, Sciona was going to lead the Alari in an invasion of Earth. And that was before they needed bodies.
I think the reason is that the Alari are ranchers and humans are livestock. Blood is what powers their magic, so they invade planets to harvest the blood of the planetary population.
Habitable planets are vastly overrated for any spacefaring civilisation. Terraforming them is going to take forever, and then some. The gravity well is a killer (even if they have enough power to lift big structures off a planet that is still a lot of energy and heat)
Even a tiny (by their standards) rotating tin can space station has the interior surface area of a county. The big ones are continent sized. And you can put billions of them in orbit around a star without ever bothering with a planet.
If an alien species gets here and is not genocidally inclined most likely they are setting up so we can’t escape the zoo and become a galactic nuisance. They certainly won’t need earth’s resources. There are 200 billion solar systems in our galaxy alone, that we know of and each of them is suitable for colonisation by a space faring civilisation without ever needing to touch (down on) a planet.
Isaac Arthur has done a lot of videos on this subject (and he likes his engineering biiiiiiig) at his youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
Amazing channel. Love his stuff.
His main points are that’s it far more efficient to reassemble every bit of matter in the system (including the sun) into a truly gargantuan swarm of enclosed rotating habitats. These habitats could house and support quadrillions of humans in the most luxurious accommodations imaginable.
Seconded! I’ve been following his channel for….eh, let’s put it this way. He was still putting a picture of Elmer Fudd at the beginning of every video.
I’ve watched a pile of Arthur’s vids. I generally like them, but he has a very repetitious idiosyncrasy: He is commonly hyper-optimistic.
In many of his videos he’ll postulate some bit of technological end-product (say: A cluster of solar panels orbiting the Sun and beaming back cheap power for us to use on Earth) that we don’t have today and aren’t even within hundreds of years of having, and he’ll claim that it’s all so easy because all of the core tech needed to make this already exists. And yet here we are, without a fleet of Solar orbiting power collectors. If it was all so very easy we’d have done it by now…
And on one level I don’t blame him. He is trying to discuss future tech, and being a downer about the chances that humanity will ever stop spoiling it’s own living spaces long enough to move out to other planets or even other stars wouldn’t get him very far. But when I see this “It’s so easy, we have the tech to make this thingy even now!” as a repeated theme it tends to dig into his credibility with me.
You’re discounting one possibility. Humans might be tasty.
Or that our sweat turns out to be a drug to the aliens.
Ever licked a hooman?
Not nearly as often as I’d like to.
Isn’t that the premise of some porn art series? Human sweat acts as an insanely strong aphrodisiac to them?
There is a less sexy example in the movie (I come in Peace) where a chemical in human brains is used to make a highly addictive drug and an alien drug dealer is on a killing spree on Earth while an alien drug officer (who sucks at his job by the way) is after him.
Knowing that a technology is possible leads to attempts to copy or at least approximate that technology. Among low tech peoples that leads to things like cargo cults. I would imagine as soon as the Alari ship showed up some bright spark started trying to work out the mechanics. Unless there is some aspect of the technology that simply does not exist on Earth, humans would probably have FTL within a generation. If you want a look at a modern cargo cult have a read of “When Prophecy Fails”. The author’s scientific methodology turned out to be sloppy but it is still a neat snapshot of the inside of a UFO (cargo) cult.
Eh, generation might be overstating it.
Within a human lifetime, quite probably, but twenty to twenty five years is kind of pushing it.
It would probably be something like, we know what they did, and have a good idea how they did it. We just don’t know how they did the stuff that would be required to do it.
Like, we know, in a general way, how to do something like an interstellar drive. We just have no real idea how to create the negative mass that would be required.
I think something like this a lot.
Who is to say various (including ours) species were spacefarers that traveled long enough that their kids or grandkids were the ones to arrive at a planet, but could only touch down because they didn’t know enough, and scrap the ship into primitive tools, eventually become a medieval civilization, and once again become spacefaring? Any proof of this would be millenia buried, if not gone due to how global vulcanism works.
Most aliens we meet might be distant cousins that stopped being compatible LONG LONG ago.
No more MZB for you.
What’s MZB?
As long as certain groups and individuals stop fucking things up, a generation is more than a likely possibility
Dirt Monkey’s managed to reach their orbiting satellite within one generation after nearly wiping themselves out, while at the same time as attempting to do it again!
Except we are cheating.
Deus already made a trip (one that we know of, maybe more) and came back with a big load of tech we no longer have to derive from just knowing it exists. Someone will sell him FTL tech and we’ll be out in the galaxy in 5 years, 10 max.
Plus for humanity. Unlike the old black and whites. people can actually use their cable service provider’s ability to save.. and there are apps to record the video when it’s uploaded eventually. After all, how often will an alien stand on a stage and speak. Everyone can have a recording of the momentous event
Cora is not wrong: The novelty of our culture and entertainments will be the most valuable thing we could offer any aliens. I believe the first aliens to “set up shop” on Earth will have the job title – ‘Culture Miners.’ They’ll have the arduous task of sifting through the tailings of our history to find the gems they can sell on the galaxtic market.
What type of intellectual property rights do humans have to their own creations? Do aliens have to pay royalties to see our body of work? (and in the case of the porn, literally)
I was wondering about IP as well – given that the Grrlverse has a governing body that handles military overreach, and that Sydney met a travelling vlogger, it seems like there’d be some rules on media pirating.
Probably something simple like “fair game on open air broadcasts until they establish a presence, then they can exercise and enforce their rights through a distributor going forward. Translations and encoding conversions made by other are the property of the adaptor, until the local rights owner can make or buy their own, then the adaptor has to start paying fair royalties, transfer the rights going forward, or reach an agreement to become an official reseller.”
The specifics, of course, will then depend an awful lot on the skill and awareness of the intergalactic negotiator.
The though, what if Game freaks Pokemon becomes a galaxy wide phenomenon the way it did here….
Seriously explaining why anyone would send a 10 year old and his pets of mass destruction to another world is
Fridge nightmare fuel of epic proportions……
And now I hope that’s the next gen……
Nobody knows how they got off world but you just don’t mess with the RIAA or the MPAA; http://www.tmi-comic.com/comic/space-piracy/
Also; http://www.tmi-comic.com/comic/star-crossed/
“Cora is definitely not a diplomat. There are better ways of telling a world that no one is coming for them because their toys all suck, but I guess she’s just getting straight to the point.”
Actually I’m going to disagree. A diplomat is just another kind of politician that the common man will distrust. Cora is speaking in a language that any one can understand.
If Cora said “mate,” I’d think of a different meaning from the usual in that context. As for her having a sister, does it even matter when she’s that loose?
You mean a cache of mostly capable sentient creatures with no real way to defend themselves on a global scale isn’t a tasty, tasty target for slavers? That’s naive on an alarming level.
Nevermind if some science-based race decides humanity (or some other creature) would make excellent case studies (a la Collectors, Mass Effect 2). There are resources that aren’t in the ground.
When automation reaches a certain threshold, the only use for slaves that can’t be more efficiently be performed by tech is sexual.
FTL races will have passed that automation threshold.
Even sexual uses can be debated. If you can build androids realistic enough to escape the uncanny valley then why would you bother with a slave that you have to feed and clothe and keep from escaping? It would be so much easier to have a non-sapient android who is programmed to want to do exactly what you want them to do and needs nothing more than an outlet to recharge when not in use.
Except by that time it would probably much easier to create virtual realities that are completely undistinguisable from reality witht he main difference being that everything can be just like you want it, even sex. Even the best android would still be limited to what reality allows, but in VR? The sky is the limit!
Anything south of sentient artificial intelligence renders that argument null. Automation might be cheap-ish, but AIs will probably never, ever be as cheap and as easy to maintain as an organic being. Human slaves have been known to rebel against Human slaveholders. It’s a little different when your slaveholder is Superman.
Furthermore, a lot of the argument here seems to be logical arguments against holding slaves. Not every culture would necessarily be logical about it. They might want organic slaves because they just want them.
Any species capable of interstellar flight is also capable of creating servant automatons and automated equipment that renders the need for slaves in any role save Novelty Sex Toy obsolete. Remember – you also have to educate your new primitive slaves if you want them for anything but brute physical labor, and BPL is better done by big tough robots that won’t get sick, require constant food intake, and harbor thoughts of rebellion.
There was no point building a culture on slave labor two hundred years ago, let alone hundreds of years into an ultratech interstellar future.
why use organic slaves?
robots are easier/faster to make, can be made to do a job better then organics and they don’t turn on you as much.
And you can deliberately design robots to not be sentient. Unlike living things, a properly designed non-intelligent robot is not a moral quandry. As long as you include something like The Three Laws of Robotics, they’re safer too.
Saturn’s Children (2008) is a particular horrifying examination of the Three Laws.
Self repairing, self replicating, no need to pay for patents or expensive mechanics. You don’t piss off the robot armies by enslaving robots ;)
Granted for humans those benefits don’t tip the scale but for some species who’s not quite as smart, stronger, more durable, and/or more able to survive different environments it starts to be worth it if transport is cheap enough.
Everyone is dancing around a particular point here: FTL civilizations are going to be pretty much “post-scarcity” by default. At that point you’ve got massive quantities of cheap, abundant energy (because you don’t need alien space rocks that grow underneath a giant tree. Not when you have massive fusion reactors pouring energy out at levels beyond what we could ever need for the next few million years). You’ve got automation to handle all menial labor. You’ve got technology to produce food in massive quantities.
At that point you’re working because you WANT to, not because you have to. Your necessities are taken care of, you only need to work for luxuries and social accreditation (i.e. the motivation of Starfleet members from Star Trek. Or the Alliance from Orville). If you’re invading primitive worlds, it’s because you want to play “Ancients from the Stars” and help uplift their developing civilization or something, because you want to do something worthwhile that helps others.
That’s a reasonable conclusion, and in many different setting it is indeed the case. But it doesn’t have to be the case. What if your FTL travel doesn’t require piles of energy to work? In that case you’re basically just a more mobile culture, but otherwise you look a lot like any other culture we might point at that isn’t post-scarcity.
This conclusion also assumes that technology in those three areas, and undoubtedly more besides, progresses at comparable rates (with the implicit secondary assumption that modern Earth is a representative ‘balanced’ point on those progressions).
Different circumstances may well produce a civilisation in which one or more areas runs far ahead of the other(s). For instance, rapid population growth may lead to a society in which people are cheap and expendable, and food production efficiency is necessarily high but automation low. Or vice versa: slow population growth, very capable automation, but lower-efficiency quality-over-quantity food production sufficient for the lower requirements.
Compared to a few decades back, we’re arguably one of the asymmetric cases. How many outside observers, looking at the technology of the mid/late 20th century, would have predicted the relative extents of development that we actually took in various fields? Large-scale power generation is still effectively the same and not showing much sign of changing fast; crewed space flight and passenger aviation have had some interesting ideas but not really done much quantitatively different; automation and AI have been sidetracked into toys; computers have taken off exponentially before being similarly sidetracked; and who would have predicted the massive shift from productive economies to
gamblingfinancial engineering as a supporting pillar of GDP?So, what I take away from this is Earth is going to be space’s new Japan? I.e our main, biggest, most popular export to elsewhere in the universe is tons of weird and wonderful lewds. I guess it’s an alternative to the ‘Earth is the Australia of space idea’ I’ve seen going around.
complete with hentai.
This was part of the plot of some anime series. One of which turned Lovecraft monsters into cute anime girls, stated Earth is the planet of entertainment technology and aliens sell Earth entertainment on the black market as Earth’s entertainment is a controlled substance.
Magic cards, huh?
Boros ftw!
.
.
.
Oh, wait… War of the Spark, nevermind.
securing a future for humanity in the galaxy, one porno at a time
Maybe he is X undercover?
Remember arc-dark?
(joke-ish suggestion, but… who knows? maybe it is not and error and we may meet another arcdark agent)
ffs… that was supposed to go as a reply to another comment… but I entered wrong email and after correcting it it gets sent as a separate comment?
or it is so only for tablets? (honestly… to hell with those things. And with smartphones)
Isn’t ‘X’ already undercover? How further under the covers do they need to go
Heck, all they need do is remove their outfit and they could be standing right next to you (don’t look, just smile)
Maybe he has an enormous amount of covers and maybe he is actually a woman… named Heather Start.
I think that whenever a US Flag is hung vertically, the blue field should always be in the upper *left*, ‘backwards’.
Yes, the US flag should always be hung with the stars in the upper left, vertical or horizontal.
Archer is fun. Im liking that new season though im confused to know is sterlings mom still alive or is she a computer or something its really not clear. Cause it seems she is part of the ship that can also drink martinis. Im very confused by her. I mean i get she is a hard light construct but if she is why drink? O know she can actually taste too but i dont get it. Maybe she was accidentally evolved past her human form due to an accident but i dont know anything concrete.
I just assumed she is an alien capable of becoming pure energy. I know Archer calls her “Mother” but I don’t think anyone else has ever called her Mallory this season. If they haven’t it’s possible she isn’t related to Archer in this storyline.
Actually, Sydney is showing herself to be much more genre-savvy than Arianna. That joke at the beginning was *just the thing* to defuse the situation, and to show that it is possible to befriend the aliens.
Maybe Arianna is intentionally getting Angry with Cora for the same reason :P
Word of advice….don’t read this in the bathroom at a legal office while on yer lunch break…the read tons of your coworkers, while hilarious, are also embarrassing for you. ✌
For retrofuturistic bullpup , you have this bayonnet and bipod included
http://www.imfdb.org/images/1/1a/FAMAS_G2_with_bayonet.jpg
Bayonets are obsolete.
Not when your bullets run out…
For the fight itself? Arguable. For the psychological impact? Effective.
There are anecdotes from the Falklands War (for which I admittedly don’t have a citation to hand) of Argentine troops, defending a relatively strong position, surrendering when they heard the British forces ordered to ‘fix bayonets’. It’s a declaration of intent: this is going to get messy, this is going to get personal, you will not be able to hide from us.
Did I miss that Cora’s last name was Zylstra? That’s… weird. Here’s why: it’s ethnically Dutch (specifically Frisian) instead of ethnically some unpronounceable alien name. I’m not complaining, but as someone who grew up in a community colonized by the Dutch (including many Frisians), I know a few Zylstras.
The ones I know aren’t blue, though.
As someone who has tried to think up alien names only for them to turn out much more common than I thought I can conclude there are only so many variations you can make with this alphabet before it starts to sound like wannabe lovecraft silliness. and different languages have ended up using the same sound combinations just for different reasons on occasion.
for example I named a planet: Aesperia, only to later discover the word actually exists.
even funnier, one continent on that world I named Ravashira, and years later found out that was the name for a type of soup like dish.
I initially thought it might have been a nod to John Dykstra who did the special effects for Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.
Dykstra is also a Dutch/Frisian name. My first thought was that maybe Cora was half-human (and possibly a distant relative), but that’s unlikely.
Cool to see you here.
When can we get more Legion of Nothing formatted for eReaders?
Good News: No one is going to invade you for resources *you know about*
Bad News: Some might invade as a pre-emptive fear of ALL humans evolving into Supers and THEN spreading into the galaxy being a potential future fear for their empire stabilities.
or
Manifest Destiny: believe all worlds, or all humanoid worlds, ect… should belong to them.
or
Ideological: all humanoids must be destroyed for they are abominations born of celestial eldritch monsters,
or
Builders: That planet’s natural resources would make it a great garden spot, but first we better get rid of those pests making all those black and grey patches all over it.
or
Bored Gods: Hey humans! Guess what? I’ve decided to reformat your planet into a fantasy world with magical mana based monsters, randomly appearing pots and chests with magic items inside, demon overlords, and mutate you all into either super humans to act as heroes and the rest into various monster classes, we’ve already set the ground work for the magical apocalypse. Won’t this be fun.
-head canon, Legend of Zelda was always post apocalyptic after the “three goddesses” showed up-
or
Bored Super powered aliens doing it for fun, “playing” the super villain, or even a two sided game where one is the powerful villain and the other as a powerful hero.
Isn’t there a Space-Corps specifically meant to stop such attempts?(In fact that’s exactly what happened to Scion’s world.)
And Cora already says we’ve got no natural resources an alien race would want. Our planet isn’t special.
No that isn’t what happened to Sciona’s world, Dabbler said they weren’t the Xevoarchy, she didn’t recognize them. Nor did Cora.
Just because a Galaxy Police force exists, doesn’t mean it has the man power to police every single planet in the galaxy at all times. Hence why adventurers and mercenaries can still be a thing.
and did you mean to reply to me? Because only one of those has to do with resources and I didn’t mean NEEDED, I meant too damn lazy to terraform a planet/ they LIKE the local flora and/or fauna so mow over the things they don’t like there and grow the things they do like. Ya’know like how people will cut down a forest, drain a swamp, dam up a field to build a garden full of flowers, shrubs, and such, and kill anything they consider unwanted pests. Not a matter of *we need these mountains for practical purposes* more a (Hey I like those mountains and those trees, and this would be a beautiful spot to put up my country home, but first we need to do some pest control). Practicality/necessity is not the reasoning there.
Everything else was an ideological reason aimed at humans “offending” the beliefs of the aliens or else fitting a criteria for them to conquer (All humanoid life must be under our flag, for we are the one true God’s chosen species to rule over all humanoid life as our dogma decrees *So you are the chosen ones, to rule and guide all of like continence*) or some such thing.
“Just because a Galaxy Police force exists, doesn’t mean it has the man power to police every single planet in the galaxy at all times.”
Foreign aliens have an active presence on Earth though. We’d likely get a better response time. As seen with how doggedly Sciona was hunted.
Also; Why would it be easier to travel several lightyears and exterminate a very well known and protected planet?
Any FTL society, with all the tech that implies, would have an easier just making or gathering their own stuff via terraforming or from asteroids.
Sciona was chased down by Archon, not the Xevoarchy, and on Earth before that it was by the supernatural community not the alien enforcers. The Twilight Council, an alien tourist board member is on the council, but Earth is not part of the Xevoarchy.
Because no they wouldn’t.
Post scarcity to be perfectly honest, is BS. It is basically Sci-Fi’s version of genie magic.
You have to convert one thing into another, and reality thanks to the laws of thermodynamics operates at a loss, something of an exponential loss. You can’t just assemble molecules without using tools and energy to do so; and the tech to do that, is not travel tech.
To be perfectly honest, the idea of a technolpogical society having ALL of its tech at the same relative level is silly. Just because you can fly between planets doesn’t mean your food, health, metallurgy, ect… is all at that same level. Hell we on Earth have a robotics being slowed down because energy storage tech is lagging behind. Our information sharing technology is up high but our fuel tech is garbage from a century ago by comparison.
Just because something developed wormholes or stumbled upon a means to ether dive or whatever, doesn’t mean they also developed molecular assemblers, or gravity harnesses to safely mine asteroids, or even how far they can go at a time could be limited. Not everyone with FTL is going to be on even footing, going anywhere in a short time; they could develop different stages and versions of this tech limited by their own fuel capabilities and available resources and understanding of dimensional physics…half of them could even end up building dimension bombs by accident and destroying their own planets.
Also of note, neither Earth nor Alari were ever mentioned to be “protected”, as to why. Well the many ideological reasons I gave for one. Resources are not always the reason to invade someone…in fact they are more often just an excuse to invade someone.
The example I followed up with is a “Builder class” civilization, we are talking Cthulhu. As to why…its not easier for one, and second they don’t care. Its just that, why expend any effort to mine an asteroid when you can just take what you want already fully there. The garden example I gave. I am talking about a species that wouldn’t view you as protected, or even as sapient. They wouldn’t care about military backlash or harming you or maybe we should just use this dead planet and raw material instead of just taking the already fully developed world. Terraforming also as a result would expend more resources than you’d gain from the planet you terraformed in any short amount of time; you could acquire a gain over tens of thousands of years, but not quickly. So if you find a planet that has the resources you want, or in the illogical garden example, because they like it; they’d just take it.
So why exterminate a planet. Look at the list of reasons I have before. Its not about logic.
the other example is, because they aren’t ascended level super god like beings with handwavy ultra tech that can poof oceans, minerals, and complex carbon chains they need for sustenance into existence just because they have ships to travel between worlds and finding something that would require a lot less expense of energy over a shorter amount of time is preferable.
Same problem I have with people talking about moving mass between planets or Dyson Swarms around suns, there are so many X-factors, such as building the super massive yet containing means to not collapse under their own gravitational weighs ships to even consider doing these things; let alone acquiring the resources and time BEFORE building such things.
It is fine to talk about all this ultra tech, can do this and that, but all so often ignores things like, energy requirements, using resources to gain resources, ability to locate and harvest those resources can be just as limited, completion (territorial space faring species), dealing with species that for ideological reasons will attack one another for reasons beyond resources.
When dealing with sapient beings do not think of logic or instinct either as a driving factor. Sometimes they’ll take it just because someone else has it.
Yes, the tech to produce almost unlimited food and resources is not travel tech, butt, when you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, or protection from the elements, it allows you the free-time to develop things like travel tech
Every time there have been advances in Dirt tech, it has been either when food has no longer been an issue (for however brief amount of time that has been) or when it’s been a desperation move during times of war (advances in transportation, communications and medicine have all happened during periods of conflict)
Yes, but not the point I am making. I am trying to explain logically, why something will take the illogical option of ignoring that to invade someone anyway; and getting kind of frustrated point out this;
(The point I am trying to make in that first post is, being post scarcity doesn’t make you post asshole.)
People have and DO invade each other for reasons outside of resources. Just because something CAN doesn’t mean they will bother; or will have another excuse to invade. Hell humans have invaded islands with no resource value for the sheer purpose of a political move to prevent someone else from claiming it; also possible tactical location, or just because.
But on your point it can be argued that they will still be limited in what directions they can advance on the initial available resources, ideological stance on how to use said resources, their current understanding even as they through experimentation break new grounds (will they use something they don’t completely understand how it works, or have a more cautious mindset and only use things they know about completely), what other resources have they found. Just because someone has developed anti-gravity tech to possibly prevent giant ships from collapsing in on themselves, doesn’t mean they’ve yet gathered entire planets worth of material and the massive power cores necessary to even start the first ship to begin a Dyson Swarm.
But again, just because you can farm all you want, grow all you want, mine from whatever lifeless rock you want. Doesn’t mean you are automatically going to turn all pacifist and love thy neighbor. Maybe there is some spice there you’ve never experienced, maybe your….*repeat entire first post* from Manifest Destiny, It looks pretty I’ll just take it because I find it easier or just don’t care than to start from scratch, down to *because we were bored and this was something to do and we don’t view your species has having value*
Again, post scarcity does not equal post asshole.
Was avoiding the whole ‘ideological’ bullshit and concentrating on the other aspect of Post-Scarcity
yeah but I wasn’t, I mean the post was half joking (hence quickie statements) but it was like 99% stuff like manifest destiny and garbage reasons like (we are going to war with people not over resources or because they are a threat to us, but because our beliefs tell us to or laziness or whatever political BS resulted in invading Vietnam sort of situations.
Basically just because they have no NEED doesn’t mean they won’t anyway. I mean if we want to discus the likelihood of species staying like that post scarcity or whatever; sure, but the opener was (sometimes assholes are just assholes even if they have plenty of fish and will walk over and take your fish anyway and sink your boat) kind of situations.
but also a quarter Q is bored situations. I mean it wasn’t a detailed thought out post, but it is based on historical precedence and how people have treated animals and other people just because they can if nothing stops them. So yeah; I made a string of sci-fi examples of higher powered aliens which were based on expansionist imperialistic mindsets and specist reasoning; and somehow resources became the be all end of all of why anyone would ever invade anyone. Because ya’know Vietnam had all the…something somethings, and the Eastern US had been strip minded to oblivion so clearly expanding to the Pacific was all about resources and land and not because they had the thought in their head of some divine providence to expand across the sea.
and given known intelligent animals will do crap like kill non-competitive, non food, other species for no other reason than it might just be for fun (Dolphins killing porpoises), along with the many cases of countries invading over ideology and not resources; no reason to think some alien life form even with everything they’d ever need to survive won’t have some other reasoning floating around inside their minds to invade other planets. I see no reason to hold any sapient life on some pedestal like (They have molecular assemblers, FTL, Unlimited energy; therefor they must now be the perfectly content, most peaceful race in all the universe);
See, that’s why ignored the ideological crap and focused on the ‘free time leads to innovation and advancements’ crap
If an alien society was already that war prone and illogically impulsive, which is you making a lot of assumptions, then they’d already dead.
Societies that tied up in ideology and violence would have already picked a fight with another FTL world that offended them in some way.(Diplomatically or otherwise.) The Space Corps pretty explicitly meant to stop that sort of thing from happening.
At the very least Dabbler would have mentioned an illogically violent alien society that would have made it a point to attack pre-FTL societies, consequences be damned. That kind of ridiculous aggression usually comes with some kind of reputation.
It is a page later, so no one will likely read this; but putting this here anyway:
But history has proven otherwise: in fact I’d hazard the Xevoarchy exists due to an ideology; hell the whole concept of a prime directive IS an ideology; making them forbid trade, forbid newcomers from joining the space ranks unless they pass certain filters THEY the Xevoarchy have declared as absolute rules and will even destroy (or at least decimate the cultures back to pre-industrial age *sounds pretty aggressive to me*) over.
Fact is, Earth is our ONLY example to go by, and ideology has proven to be a MAJOR factor in the expansion and exploration for empires. There was no lack of resources needed for countries to feel a need to conquer and claim every bit of dirt they could. Their beliefs such as (We are god’s chosen), (Manifest Destiny), the spreading of their beliefs and culture is all that was required and was enough for them to expand. And they lasted, centuries, millennia even. People may say (well they are gone now)…and they’d be wrong in some cases; but those past empires lasted longer in several cases than any country around today.
Ideology is what drove them, competition to show each other up to “prove” who is the better country drove the race to the Moon; there were ZERO resources there and all evidence at the time supported that; it was all about proving who was better.
In fact when country’s have spread and gained enough power they’ve forced their beliefs on others; in fact I would accuse the Xevoarchy of this setting of doing the same. There is no peaceful filters here; it is aggressively enforced laws, segregation based on tech level; hell a society could be completely peaceful but until they have that FTL drive no one will be allowed to trade with them.
also again, Dabbler didn’t recognize the attackers. Also again, just because you have a galaxy police doesn’t mean they know every species out there; especially if it turns out to be some older than the police existed isolationist super tech species who only gets up every tens of thousands of years or someone disturbed and ticked off.
as for assumptions…seriously…I mentioned real world reasons for expansion and mirrored them into a sci-fi setting; with a little Saiyin and Q in for fun. A post about sci-fi stuff reflecting real world. A pretty common thing actually in sci-fi. But again, to place aliens on some pedestal like everything is about food and water is just silly.
Even if we take the assumption that any aggressively expansionist species will be stamped on by the Xevoarchy, that only works once the species has been identified as such. That’s unlikely to be immediate, let alone pre-emptive. Let’s say, for sake of example, that the first offence – which may well be the first that time the wider Galactic community really notices you and tells you the rules – gets you officially cautioned, sanctioned, and placed on the watchlist; any repeat performance is the cue for bombing you back to the steam age. That works fine to protect the planets that would have been further down the hit list, but it’s a bit late for the unlucky first few.
+1
I wonder if she has any idea how many humans both super and non would love a chance at making porn with various extraterrestrials and if Offspring happens all well
how did i not notice before that the ARCHON seal says “with great power comes great responsibility?!”
Anyone notice the latin in the background
cum amplus potentia venit amplus onus
with large power comes large load
“with large power comes large load” X’-DD
+2
;-þ
That speech is so full of it. Being technologically primitive doesn’t mean people won’t come to take your stuff. At the least this Earth has one resource that isn’t automatically going to be plentiful among the more advanced cultures. The supers and the other kinds of supernatural. Earth. We’ve got the best potential slaves.
That’d actually be robots.
Who would bother trying to teach, educate, and equip slaves to be more than barely efficient manual labor?
Can they build robots that can do all the things the various supers can do? I doubt it. And are you going to tell me that a comic book science fiction universe can’t reprogram organic minds to be as useful as robots?
No, but building robots is definitely less dangerous and expensive than trying to subjugate thousands Supers and getting trouble with a Space Coprs on top of that.
Why subjugate, when you can simply buy them?
That’s effectively what Archon has done: pay them way more than what the Private Sector can hope to offer
David was talking about potential *slaves*.
Not a fair, consensual trade of services.
Buying a slave is another way to get one. Saves you the trouble with training.
Not sure if that’s what Guesticus meant. The Archon stuff confused me a bit
Very compelling point you are making here, Cora… Except it is bullshit, since we already know Sciona has been planning earth invasion for years and we have seen Deus successfully complete commercial transactions aboard the Fracture. So, not only earth has economically relevant resources, it is already been targeted for invasion for the specific reason it has a pre-FTL technology, making it an easy (easier, at least) target. In addition, the super beings may be in themselves object of interest, even for post-FTL civilizations
It is time in this interview to crack out the civilization chart. The Alari we assume are not Galactic Empire, but rather just barely post FTL; they are targeting per their cultural expansion behavior (logic be damned when Manifest Destiny rears its ugly head) world just below them to make into slaves and take their land.
It was pointed out civilizations like theirs are common enough that the Xevoarchy gives a few warnings and then blasts back to a pre-industrial age to “try again”.
just something beat them to the punch this time, which given the planet wrecking were either builders clearing the land for their own use, or a revenge strike for something the Alari did (rat bit the tiger’s tail).
I’d agree with the argument that habitat for colonization would be a potentially appealing resource for a species that had environmental requirements similar to humans. A brief round of pest control to eliminate or reduce human populations would be much quicker and less resource intensive than terraforming a less suitable planet.
It would be unexpected though. Depending on how you choose to define human, humans have existed for only a few tens of thousands to a couple million years. If you have an FTL civilization that is stable, and that arose earlier than that, then the math of logistic population growth suggests that they should have occupied every habitable planet in the galaxy within a few thousand years at most. A quarter million years tops, if their FTL is say 1.001 c. Basically, if they wanted to do it, they almost certainly would have done it before there were any humans around to get in the way.
If they needed more living space they’d get a far better ROI mining out uninhabitable planets to build space habitats. Just mining out the asteroid belt would provide enough material to build habitats for trillions of people, and if they have the ability to deconstruct entire planets they could easily house quintillions without ever leaving their home system, let alone a costly invasion of a planet where they’d have to contend with the likes of Sydney and Max.
They really wouldn’t get a better ROI. The beauty of an already habitable planet is that unless there’s some sort of immanent orbital anomaly or something like that, the environment is relatively stable and requires no artificial input to remain so.
A space station, even a big one, is going to have a state of stable equilibrium that’s not survivable by something with human-like environmental requirements. The vacuum for starters, is going to be rough on anything that needs to breath. You can maintain habitable conditions, but it requires continual inputs to keep it there because it’s an unstable equilibrium. It’s very expensive in materials, expensive in energy, and expensive in attention, even if you automate practically all of it. If there’s any way to get an already usable planet, always take it over a planet that needs terraforming or an artificial orbital habitat.
Even if you have to figure out how to kill Maxima, it’s still likely to be quicker, easier, and cheaper.
Of course, if you’re smart, you probably don’t need to kill Maxima to more or less eliminate humans and colonize Earth. Just show up with really cool consumer goods, sell them, and get into finance and real estate. Buy farmland and start planting crops that you can eat but that humans can’t. Humans will take every opportunity to accommodate you, and as the food supply for humans decreases so will the human population. Biology is VERY reliable that way.
You won’t have to kill a single human or have humans kill each other (though they’ll do that anyway), natural mortality will eliminate existing humans, and if the food supply is constrained to match the natural decline, humans will adjust their reproductive rate to match the food supply. If in a hurry, you can accelerate the process by providing medicine, free contraceptives, free education for women, and rewarding but time demanding employment opportunities. Get the recruitment rate down to 1.2, enjoy the love the humans shower on you for improving their lot, and in about 70 to 90 orbits the planet will basically be yours.
If at some point toward the end the remnants of humanity decide to take on some doomed harebrained scheme to move to Mars, give them a hand, and maybe a going away present of some sort. After all, they paid you to steal their planet and drive them to extinction, and customers like that are worth doing something a little extra for. If you’re extra sneaky, the going away present should be a crappy FTL technology, and a map to all of the Earth sized planets you know of that might be reasonably easy to terraform. The only thing better than excellent customers is excellent repeat customers.
Planting new, inedible crops =/= food supplies going down.(We farm and collected inedible stuff already.)
And it certainly wouldn’t be natural if it happened in any timetable not measured in centuries if it doesn’t mass starvation of hundreds of thousands of people per day.
Humanity is certainly not the smartest species, but I question your faith in a plan that relies on Humans putting their own survival and resources below that of a foreign entity.
Not to mention the fact that FTL civilizations aren’t supposed to mingle with lower-tech ones.
” I question your faith in a plan that relies on Humans putting their own survival and resources below that of a foreign entity.” – Blonk
The past century (at least) of Human history demonstrates that knowing about an existential threat on the world scale, and knowing effective means to address it in the medium-to-long term, certainly does not translate to individual Humans or even Governments choosing to use those means if it will inconvenience them in the short term.
Birth rates don’t increase ad infinitum. They level out at a certain point, even in real world, modern countries.
The birthrate for whites, is decreasing now.
One part of that statistic that is sometimes missed is the fact that when whites outmarry, the kids aren’t technically white, even though they are born to (one) white person.
Thus, the apparent white birth rate has a positive correlation with the rate of children born to whites, but it is not 1:1.
The thing is, being a bit silly and very dismissive in a condescending way of the whole ‘invasion’ idea is probably a good way t9 cut down on the human crazy overreaction. Immagine the reaction if she just lt stood there, smiled, and said “Oh, no, we would NEVER try to enslave everyone and suck your planet dry!” Chaos, worldwide. This is actually a better strategy overall for a far more advanced civilization to take with us.
I can’t remember what the book was, but another strategy used for an alien race to make first contact with humans (when we were ready) was to fake a distress call and beg for help. Humans are mostly very helpful, and it took a lot of the ‘Big Bad Aliens’ mentality away. Invasion? Nah, they just had car trouble.
that second one is what the Alari did here with their colony ship, distress, need place to land for repairs and refuge.
The thing is, being a bit silly and very dismissive in a condescending way of the whole ‘invasion’ idea is probably a good way to cut down on the human crazy overreaction. Immagine the reaction if she just lt stood there, smiled, and said “Oh, no, we would NEVER try to enslave everyone and suck your planet dry!” Chaos, worldwide. This is actually a better strategy overall for a far more advanced civilization to take with us.
I can’t remember what the book was, but another strategy used for an alien race to make first contact with humans (when we were ready) was to fake a distress call and beg for help. Humans are mostly very helpful, and it took a lot of the ‘Big Bad Aliens’ mentality away. Invasion? Nah, they just had car trouble.
In the book ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ the Ekumen federation of planets sends an envoy of a single person to each planet they want to invite to join them. The reason they use is (paraphrasing) “One alien is a curiosity. Two are an invasion”.
Imagine the response if a ship of a dozen adult Kryptonians originally landed on the Kent farm in Kansas.
I find it odd, the easy pickings for the resources wouldn’t be on an advanced civilization’s mind.
Also, is Peggy offended or telling Halo they should be? :p
Peggy wants Sydney to pay attention to the fully automatic weapon she is supposed to be training on.
That sounds like she would say something else besides, “But nothing.”
Not even all of the already-refined resources you could loot from a pre-FTL (or pre-interplanetary, in our case) civilization are worth the trouble of taking when you can just go round up a bunch of asteroids, comets, etc.
Even if you’re at the scale of cracking planets for their tasty metal cores, go crack something that resembles Mercury and not have to deal with perturbing the primitive primates with plutonium bombs.
Her last line reminds me of Graven from “With this Ring”. He “conquers” places by making them into what he wants them to be but what he wants them to be is self sufficient, productive, healthy, and independent enough to come up with unique things.
So apparently Arriana failed to spend any time at all with Cora before setting up this press conference.
Or, given the fact that she included Sydney in the one that introduced Arc SWAT to the world, she may just secretly like press conferences going off the rails.
If Cora does rebroadcast her activities on Earth to GNN (the Galactic News Network) there is a chance that someone will get a look at Maxima and say “Hey guys, I think I found someone who got tagged by one of our meteor probes.”
Hollywood already spends the GDP of a small country on its movies. Imagine how ridiculous it could get with galactic network funding!
One film might have a budget which could create a duplicate of Earth, in exactly the state necessary for the movie. So 1700s Earth with dinosaurs rampaging the streets of Paris, for example. And the Core II could be made with actual diamonds the size of buildings, swirling around in magma. Not to mention some high tech metal that actually duplicates the effects of unobtanium.
To get a reservation at an LA restaurant you would probably have to drop a tip with rubies the size of watermelons, studded in a shopping trolley sized bar of rare Earth metals.
and when your done you turn the planet into an amusement park, just try to avoid any sapient NPC animatronics running around you’ll be fine.
Actually the Steyr AUG has an LMG configuration.