Grrl Power #871 – Cosmic waive
I rarely ever have a characters voice in my head when I’m writing them. It’s why I’m always flummoxed when people ask “Who do you see voice acting the Grrl Power characters in the anime?”
But Ray Cosmos 100% sounds like Frank Nelson. Here’s another link of him in one of those old ass sitcoms where the audience applauds between every single line, but in this one he’s saying something other than “yeeeeees?” So just imagine Ray sounding like Frank when he’s rasping in that slightly lower register “I also saw your show.” Got it? Now reread the line “Indeed. Everyone has signed a waiver.” Can’t you just hear Nelson belting that one out? <Jon Stewart doing Art Kern impression>Mmmm, that’s good voice casting!</>
Irradon, if you recall, is the Twilight Council’s alien seat. He’s now upgraded to the official Earth Ambassador. Or… Galactic Ambassador to Earth. Now, of course Earth would have major problems coming to terms with any kind of interstellar trade body, because Earth has roughly 200 countries. A lot of them are economic or military allies, but then there are other countries that are economic allies but military… well, not foes, but, there’s a lot of tension. In any case it’s a mess. Realistically, I don’t know that aliens would really want to deal with the UN because they’re a deliberative body that is a nice idea but doesn’t have any real power unless everyone is on board with any given action, something which almost never happens. So, maybe they’d convene a meeting of the G8 countries, or just the European Union?
Honestly, they’d probably show up, tell Earth that there’s already 9,001 alien civilizations and managing currency and exchange rates between them is hard enough, and they’re not going to deal with 8 other currencies from the new guys.
I was also thinking about Irradon’s “Every goddamned planet” quip, and at first, I thought, “Well, probably not every planet, because monoculture races like the Klingons or Ferengi would be able to present a more unified government presence,” but then I realized that on that first day of meetings, you bet the different Klingon houses would be at each other’s throats, and all the Ferengi corporations would be trying to fiscally scuttle each other. There would be some worlds where there was truly one single government, (outside of hive worlds controlled by Unity or the Zerg Overmind or Skynet,) I still think the majority of worlds would have to deal with some major upheaval when suddenly finding themselves dealing with alien diplomats.
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Like a Merchant scamming for the very first time like a merchant here’s a waiver for you to sign. I can see how they do not like him.
funny thing about waivers. they only work as long as the court agrees to it. you can’t sign an unconscionable waiver. and waivers won’t work on local laws. because until I hear otherwise everybody poops. if our food has toxic potential, so does their fecal matter (in fact it might be worse!)
Funny thing about courts, they tend to side with whoever has the most money. What’s that? Corporations valued at a trillion dollars? I’m sure Joe Smith can front that dosh easily.
We don’t know much about galactic law and there would be little to no precedent for how Earth law applies to extraterrestrial life. I’m guessing that the U.S. would be cautious about doing anything that might piss off the aliens at this point (though setting a bad precedent would be dangerous).
Also, the tourists could be well aware of the risks (or believe they are) and want to come anyway to explore a new planet). There apparently is an app to check if food will make you explode anyway.
Now that I think about it, aliens have been visiting incognito and even settling down for quite a while already, so it *can* be done safely though that process might be better regulated than this.
I agree with you, palmvos, since you are completely correct that unconscionability does render a contract invalid. Well done :)
However…. the obvious counter-argument is that would only be an airtight attack on Ray’s waiver if this was a purely earth-based argument – we don’t know what the Galactic Council’s take on waivers are with respect to unconscionability. They might have a much more generous take on caveat emptor than the US has.
It could also be argued that risk does not mean unconscionability, since if there was no risk, there would be no need for a waiver in the first place. Think of it like signing a waiver to be a patient in an experimental surgery, so you can’t sue the hospital if something goes wrong. It’s happened before, and it’s usually not considered unconscionable when the patient goes into the agreement fully informed that there are risks and is taking those risks willingly and without undue coercion.
Also now I’m noticing that NN1 said pretty much the same thing (nice posts, both of you!), but this had to do with law so I was drawn to it.
OoOoOOoh Like a Merchant
When I reach inside
To your wallet
And I extract
All your money
Oh, ho, ohOhOHOH
Ooh, baby, yeah
Can’t wait to exploit you
The very Next time!
Did… did you just filk ‘Like a Virgin’?
This guy. I like the cut of his jib.
Technically, I filked ‘Like A Surgeon’ by Weird Al Yankovic, which e_voyager was paraphrasing. It’s a parody of ‘Like A Virgin’, so they’re easy to confuse.
I’ve been looking forward to seeing a comic that takes the ‘There are for sure Aliens’ premise and runs with it a bit.
Rick and Morty didn’t go in quite this direction.
It’s like a safari where you have to sign a waiver that if lions eat you it was your own fault.
The dardevil slash idiots aren’t such a nieche market
W-e-e-lllll, a waiver is one thing, yes… But distraught rellies & friends wanting some justice? Will the waiver protect RayCee? How fast can he run? ‘Cos I doubt he can hide anywhere.
Paper shields tend to be ineffective. It’s why restraining orders only work if the person has something more valuable to lose that their own obsession.
Hartcourt Fenton “Harry” Mudd has shown that you can hide pretty well for a pretty long amount of time before it catches up with you. :)
The problem with hiding (and fleeing…) is that you’re still in a prison. A moving prison, sure, if you’re running, but still a distinct lack of freedom.
Ray Cosmos was honestly sounding like Magnanimous from M.E.G.A.S. XLR in my head.
So like Bruce Campbell then?
Yes exactly, that was his name. It eluded me for a moment there.
See, I was thinking more along the lines of Zap Brannigan
I’d honestly imagined Mung Daal for a little bit, just due to his “Laaaaadies” line
I was thinking Calaboose Cal from ‘Tom and Jerry’, voice by Phil Hartman.
…. can I please be allowed to apply my shovel to the back of this guys head… Violently and repeatedly?
I doubt if it will help. I suspect he keeps his brain in his crotch area.
He’s a Codcranium?
If he had a hat it would be called a codpiece. :)
Hey you went to Tanya’s officer Camp to didn’t you?
… I don’t get the refrence
That mustache is so pencil thin, I bet he shaves with an eraser
The thinner the moustache is the more evil it is.
Evil directly correlates with both thinness and length – Ray’s isn’t quite long enough to twirl yet, but I’m sure he’s working on it.
He hasn’t hit ‘Snidely Whiplash’ level yet, but I’d say that mustache rates at a solid ‘Smug Douche’.
Told you they were related!!
Let’s hope they don’t meet up. I can see Ray running a sideline business on his tours where each trip is bringing various banned commodities to Earth, for the right price. Deus would just have to figure out what we have here that Ray could want in exchange.
Heh heh.
He would be perfect for every single company in the Fallout-verse, especially Vault-Tec
Well, he at least understands that Vault-Tec’s definition of ‘safety’ is ‘protecting the company from lawsuits’.
Kind of like how HR isn’t really there for the employees, it’s there to protect the company *from* the employees.
god I can’t stand this guy. I hope he’s gone soon.
I am pretty sure Dabbler and Cora feel the same way.
I can just see Ray turning around without checking behind him and smacking Sydney in the back of her head. This of course is immediately followed by Sydney using Power Word Stun – 60 foot radius (a very creative stream of expletives for 30 seconds, before she winds down).
Somehow, I don’t think Syd’s Stun(ning Expletive) Beam would work all that well on this guy. He’s probably had just about every bad word in every galactic language hurled at him at one time or another…
All the better for his reaction when Sydney hits him with a combination that the massed litigants of a dozen systems couldn’t come up with. Of course, whether he is put off by it or decides to stick around for the sake of the show is a separate question…
I think Irradon’s thought should be more like: “Every. Gods. Damned. Pre-FTL. Planet!”
I was also wondering about this comment. It seems to me that you could say that Irradon has not encountered a new civilization that had already met another alien species or another federation/group. Or that they’re willfully ignoring those experiences in the current state of agony.
I think it’s every damn planet that goes through this process of joining the galactic community. It’s possible that the majority are just barely post-FTL. Once they can come visit or start territorial disputes in other star systems, they can’t be ignored any longer.
Earth fought off an invasion from galactic scale baddies on their own despite being pre-FTL and just made a deal for an FTL engine to reverse engineer, not to mention the alien refugee ships. They’ll be flying to other worlds soon and they have the firepower from those supers to actually be a non-trivial threat. Note that the aliens probably have little to no idea how common powerful supers are, just that they were deployed promptly enough to quickly defeat that attack.
Waivers? He does know Earth commerce!
Can’t be helped. Some tourists just crave that sense of foreign unregulated culture. And the unexplored nature of Earth? Of course they signed.
Now we get into some fun discussion on what the most valuable thing that you can purchase on a limited basis from the aliens.
In this case, Cora seems to have facilitated a ‘jump shuttle’ as the purchase, although I’m assuming this is a tiny ship capable of both surface to orbit and minor ftl capabilities, per her comments in the past. Depending on how the ship works, it could be a really good investment as both a tech example and as a heavy lift platform depending on capacity.
For simplicity sake, I’m going to assume that the shuttle is either reactionless, or can accept common or easily reproduced reaction mass such as purified water (The scene from SG1 where they traded a bunch of guns with only the magazines worth of ammo comes to mind if not). I’d also assume it’s got either a free energy device for the engines, or stored antimatter, or some other scifi nonsense that will keep it functioning. Depending on payload capacity and cost per flight, it might be viable to begin using it to transfer material to orbit to create a docking platform.
Asteroid mining seems less viable, baring some seriously powerful lasers for reducing them to liquid and then harvesting the choice remains. It’s most likely uses are going to be replacing a reusable medium lift platform (although I’m curious if Max has been scheduled for such yet) and placing science devices, although you never know if somebody is going to break it trying to figure out the FTL unit.
I think a better mid term purchase on the part of the US government would have been an orbital elevator, assuming that’s within pricing range. If not, a fleet of non-FTL but able to insert and exit orbitals would do as well to perform the same situation. I’m assuming that any self replicating technology is completely off limits.
Of course, this shuttle and the technology from it are also going to be acting as another of the ‘filters’. If humanity can’t get its shit together well enough to not nuke each other, well, the galaxy is better off without us.
I’m also curious if we’re going to get something like Undying Mercenaries ( https://www.amazon.com/Undying-Mercenaries-Series/dp/B074C7NGNX ) where Earth starts leasing out soldiers (in this case, super soldiers) in order to have access to the galactic economic currency. I look forward to the shenanigans of the ‘Scoville Creature’ in the inevitable crossover.
Frix (to NASA engineers, technicians and others): And this is the hydrogen fill port. You open it like this and then you can pump in up to about 450 kg of hydrogen, but don’t excess about 1257 kPa.
NASA Engineer: But 450 kg of hydrogen would be barely enough to get something like this off the ground.
NASA Technician: So where is the oxygen fill port?
Frix: Oh, the air input is up there. We will get to that in a minute.
NASA Technician: Oh,I meant for reacting with the hydrogen to get thrust.
Frix: Oh, you can’t do that! The hydrogen has to be very high purity or it will contaminate the fusion reactor and can severely affect output performance. It is nowhere powerful enough to work with oxygen as fuel stock, or even helium.
NASA Engineer: Fusion reactor!? Can we look at that next?
The most valuable thing would be textbooks written in a local language.
You cannot just disassemble a high-tech device and replicate it without understanding how it works. To do that, you need to be very close to capable of building it on your own already.
since local language translation might not be reliable- a set of engineering texts with a translator that starts at a tech level below ours would be the best. that would have a couple of advantages- among them- time. this will slow down the explosion of new tech.
what happens if someone discovers even a hint of Dues’s little shopping expedition?
All said texts should also include a disclaimer at the end like “if you have read t huh is far this text is out of date, and any use of said information is solely the responsibility of the user” … we know the drill.
Besides, any engineer knows that what the physics books say, and how reality works is oftentimes at odds.
I’d rather have a working item to reverse engineer.
only given a few things.
1. enough copies to experiment with
2. enough of the theory to understand how to take it apart
3. time and equipment to test with.
yes we know that theory does not necessarily translate into practice perfectly. but without the theory it is really hard to get to a crudely working prototype.
Yes, if you give a working radio to the ancients Romans what you’ll get is a broken radio.
You don’t even need to go back that much, send a microprocessor to the ’40 and they’ll probably have no idea what to do with it.
when you get to the part in the (translated) tech manual..
“ensure that the reaction feed-port is lubricated with &%pla^$ to ensure good £$%hel* intermix..”
like many translators, it is better to get a ‘person’ to help you get the gluons differentiated from the quarks (they may have totally different names..)
Are you sure that sentence wasn’t a line from one of Dabbler’s old succubus high school text books?
:walks into an alien* fusion engine garage. The kind where all the equipment’s in good shape, but nothing’s going to get replaced until it finally breaks, once and for all: the place has at least two vehicles currently being worked at, but you have to ring the bell-equivalent to pull the owner-operator away from the garage floor:
“Hello. How would you like to make a lot of primitive currency by moving this entire facility to a rustic backwater planet which still has distilled alcohol, flush toilets, and the concept of dentistry?”
*Human-compatible physiology, humanoid enough to be not-horrifying but not close enough to trigger the uncanny valley on either side.
I’d imagine the primary use of the jump shuttle will be to be dismantled, so our engineers can find out how it’s put together, so they can make new ones. Once they’ve figured out how to make more, they’ll experiment to find out how it works. Then we can write our own textbooks.
Most naturally. You know someone will find a new way to supercharge the quantum capacitor to get extra boost.
Wellll…supercharging the quantum capacitor has unpredictable effects that tie into the near certain possibility of overloading of the primary processor in the Heisenberg compensator. Supercharging may cause a majority population spin inversion, which falls very neatly into the Bad Things category.
ONLY when they have a backup – potentially destructive experiments when you have only one working model is NOT recommended.
Primary, but if it were me, I’d get at least a little bit of use out of it before taking it apart. Among other things, it’s a hell of a lot easier to figure out how something works by opening the hood and letting idle for a little bit. While it’ll get taken apart eventually, I’d want to test it for a little bit first before that point, just to hedge my bets.
I’d also want to see if it came with an owners manual. That alone might be worth more than the ship itself. Assuming 90% of it isn’t NUSPI (Schlock Mercenary references ftw). The ability to duplicate it would also depend seriously on manufacturing capabilities and whatever alien space magic is required for ftl.
One of the benefits of asteroid mining is that it is off planet. There probably isn’t anything out there that we don’t have on Earth and in greater concentrations but with asteroid mining, all of the toxic tailings and other byproducts can stay out in orbit. If you ever reach the point where it is cheap to get things out of the gravity well it would make sense to move a lot of industry off planet.
The big distinction is between the asteroids that are primordial material, and the ones that were originally part of a large enough body to have undergone hydrothermal processing.
The primordial material is really a pain, aside from being depleted in volatiles in the inner Solar system, it has original elemental abundances; Your average handful of dirt on Earth is better ore. Probably good feedstock for an advanced life support system, though.
The processed material is more heterogeneous, you might hit an asteroid that was part of a pitchblende deposit, or solid metal, or what have you. It’s been sorted out a bit, you just need to find the right bin.
For the USA at least, a shuttle is probably a better bet than an orbital elevator. The shuttle is a lot more flexible in where it can fly from/to, whereas an elevator needs a ground footprint on the equator – not (as far as I’m aware) a region of the world where the USA has any territory to base it. The elevator is also vulnerable to collision with most of the junk we’ve spent the past 60 years putting in orbit: every orbit crosses the equator twice, and the elevator presents a target at every altitude between the ground and well above stationary orbit. Buy the shuttle first, use it (or its descendants) to clean up the low and middle orbitals while negotiating ground basing rights, and then buy the elevator once there’s an environment suitable for it.
I bet this dirtbag was a used spacecar salesman before he was a tour guide.
I totally emphasize with the diplomat in panel 2/3. I really, really do.
It looks odd that the purple of Dabbler’s skin ends just above her choker.
That’s a shirt. Strange on dabbler, I know.
She is wearing a high-necked shirt now. That is where it ends.
Yeah, asteroid mining is really not efficient compared on earth, even if you have some market fixing by one party.
And speaking of that : Rare earth are NOT RARE.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dont-panic-about-rare-earth-elements/
Asteroid mining isn’t a question of efficiency, it’s a question of scale.
And being able to completely ignore regulations and environmental consequences.
There are no environmental regulations in spaaaaaaccce! Who cares how much CO2, sulphuric acid, etc you release on a lifeless rock that has no other use? As long as you don’t mess with a potentially habitable planet or moon, and keep your tailings out of the travel lanes, nothing important is affected.
And if there were, who’s going to enforce them? As in the Troy Rising series, just incorporate your mining company in some backwater country (e.g. Galtyn) and thumb your nose at the EPA.
That was true on earth too until we did it.
My proposed regulations would be
At least all orbits around inhabited objects would’ve to be kept clean, so they don’t get land locked.
If you want to sell it you will also probably need to be able to proof it hasn’t traces of the more poisonous mining methods.
If you mine with explosives: avoid space debris, so travel through our solar system stays safe.
Don’t orbital bombard your results.
Dump the more radioactive parts in Venus.
The way to enforce this to the same level of earth would be: make space rocks part of countries or countries on their own.
Orbits wise, I’d expect the asteroids to be parked or simply located in Lagrange point 4 and/or 5 since they’re full of junk and they’re pretty stable. Any of the other Lagrange points could work as well. This combined with the fairly small size of most of the asteroids means they won’t have an orbit to contaminate.
Poisonous mining methods? What? The issue with pollution is that garbage doesn’t stay put when you toss it in a bag and leave it there, wind and animals tend to track it everywhere. In addition, everything has to deal with constant exposure to oxygen, so it’s frequently in weird compounds that have to be broken apart. If you melt an asteroid down and take everything you need, you just leave the scrap behind. Anyone coming to that area is going to be properly sealed up.
Explosives strike me as… unlikely. Focused solar rays seem more useful. Explosives seem like they’d create strange vectors you’d have to eliminate.
Fair enough.
Is there a reason you want to fly that stuff to Venus? If the material is already there, is there any harm leaving it where it was?
Most of the regulations you’re proposing seem less focused on ‘mining’ and more on travel and leaving stuff in the causeways. Just not creating exceptions for mining and creating these as standard requirements for anyone out and about in the system seems the most reasonable.
Mining close to a planet is comfortable, because the coming decennium many processes are still best done on the surface of earth, such as: anything requiring human labor, living, anything relying on oxygen reactions and any production process requiring a lot of energy.
I meant traces in the sense that you bring the poison back to earth on the material, because I don’t like being poisoned by chairs.
Not as unlikely as you would think there’re many materials that are best and easiest mined that way especially when you consider that the top layer is probably radioactive from all the cosmic rays.
In Venus it get the possibility to become less radioactive, since it’s protected by it’s dense atmosphere.
In current and near-current tech, asteroid mining isn’t about mining at all. It’s about “where do I park this thing?” aka extra-orbital bombardment. It’s going to be a while before the metal value of whatever comes back even begins to compete with the extortion value.
And what happens when some group hijacks the controls?
Yeah, I’m not in much of a hurry to start this game.
I have a degree in Geology and that is an idiotic article. “Relatively abundant” is one word. It is a geology/astrophysical word. It is not a ‘you humans can easily walk to the corner market and get this’ word.
A lot of the mines in the US that already exist might have these elements, but they were mined destructively for other mineral resources in ages past when there was no particular use/demand for rare earths that were also there in the concentrations that were available. There probably wasn’t any tecnique for sorting them out even if they did want them, at the time. At the time. A big zarking screwed up stupidly dangerous to everything and everyone toxic mess was made. Because why give a damn about the future if it’s gonna cost you money right now?
It is not about making a new mess (although of course business as usual, if the cost of the rare earths rose enough they WOULD) it’s about not being able to get through the old one without dying or costing too much.
Right now it’s easier for the US to use the economic and military might of its empire to secure the metals from elsewhere. It was an idiotic fight to pick that the US now has to do this instead of choosing to though. The cost of our military is enormous, and might easily be more expensive than the moon or asteriods.
China is NOT a member of CERN, they just have a MoU with it and collaborate on computing power. So they’re certainly not in position to expel a member (and anyway it would not be possible, this is not how it works).
https://home.cern/about/who-we-are/our-governance/member-states
Did I miss where Dave B Said that Left Suit was China?
You probably missed some news last year about that :
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-trade-rareearths/china-may-rare-earth-magnet-exports-to-u-s-jump-amid-threat-of-restrictions-idUSKCN1TQ1DW
It’s implied when they said they’d embargo all rare earth metals. There are only 2 nations other the US that have ANY mines with rare earth metals – China and Australia, and the overwhelming majority of rare earth mines are located in China.
Which is why the same person threatening about CERN made … not so much sense.
China does what China wants. If they want to expel the U.S. from NATO they’ll sure as hell try.
It would be hilarious for China to try to become the pocketbook for the North Atlantic Trade Organization.
NATO isn’t a trade organization otherwise I’m sure they would’ve. Look at the crap they pulled with the Paris Climate Accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They know how to undermine an agreement.
North Atlantic Treaty Organization, AKA the North Atlantic Alliance.
No matter how you slice it, the joke is CHINA HAS NO ACCESS TO THE ATLANTIC.
Ray’s face is almost as punchable as Deus.
True. But Deus is cleaner… Nothing splatters off him to soil everyones clothes.
Ahh yes, Frank Nelson. I used to listen to old Jack Benny episodes on late-night radio.
A fun appearance of him was in Garfield In Paradise, as a hotel clerk. And as a car rental clerk. “You look familiar.” “I have a brother in the hotel business.”
Only a 1.5 page of appearances and I already hate that guy.
Hopefully, he’ll try to use his “charms” on Maxima and will end up being splattered on a nearby wall.
sadly unlike our protagonist Maxima has restraint. she may ask firmly and politely for an excuse to bar him from any closer than the oort cloud. and offer to kick his arse to the line herself. I suspect that she might get both if she asks firmly enough. evidence helps.
108 not 8.
Or somewhere between 1000 to 8000 depending on the state of cryptocurrencies in the timeline of the comic.
“So, maybe they’d convene a meeting of the G8 countries, or just the European Union?”
I have a bunch of chauvinistic opinion why the USA wouldn’t get frozen out of that, and one glaring non-chauvinistic one: superheroes. The Galactics are here because they watched a bunch of individuals swarm out of a building and erase a Fel super battle carrier in roughly five minutes. They’re going to include the nation-state that sponsored that team in all deliberations.
Although everybody else is probably throwing together national super-teams on the quick. *That’s* gonna be interesting.
I wonder if the aliens back home realize how uncommon supers are or that the Fel lander on superhero central. It could be that they just heard that the Fel came down, then were immediately surrounded by humanoids of immense power who quickly dispatched them with no casualties. What if every major population center has a Maxima?
That’s an interesting question. I wonder how many superhero team reveals are being sped up, now that Archon is getting all the press time.
I’m guessing no more than a handful around the world, maybe 1-2 per country with a large population. Remember, at the parking lot battle Archon were surprised that there were 20-ish supers on the opposing team – even after decades of working with supers on black ops, they didn’t think there were that many in the whole US.
Could be that many many more supers are coming forward though, now that government vivisectionists are off the table.*
* ah ha ha ha, ha ha, ahem. sorry. *
Of course they’re off the table. Do you have any idea how hard it is to apply brain probes when you’re not allowed to stand on the floor?
The diplomat knows they’re uncommon if he watches the news and that seems like something he would report, but this would only mean the alien governments know that they’re rare, but not to which extend and whether or not it’s location specific.
You know, I’ve decided to not wait for the line to form. But just startup the hate train on this smarmy wanna be left over ferengi spooge now. And hope someone rearranges his facial features with some blunt objects.
Ah, yes, we are ‘merica, all the system resources are belong to us.
Not sure what a ‘jump shuttle’ is, though it shouldn’t have any FTL capabilities since Cora was pretty adamant about that being one of the things a culture had to develop for themselves. So selling them an example to reverse engineer shouldn’t have happened.
Waivers: Good enough for RNC conventions, good enough for alien visitors.
Special circumstances. A post FTL group tried to invade Earth, only to be completely wiped by the local supers. The only reason they weren’t allowed to keep the ship was because it is essentially a plague ship, would cause far more harm than good. The Jump shuttle was a compromise, compensation for dragging Earth between the Fel and their Artifact.
They already have the FTL Jump Shuttle called Sydney (and an anti ship weapon called Maxima), so it’s not a normal “They have to develop FTL capabilities on their own” situation. Cora had agreed to get them one in exchange.
Negotiations started on page 777 and the result was mentioned on page 817. The shuttle has a FTL drive.
Sydney’s FTL is probably going to be a closely guarded secret after that Nth tech discussion.
Possibly Need-To-Know even within Arc-SWAT, just to be on the safe side. Official story is, Cora brought Sydney home from an outer space whoopsie. No reason to tell her teammates about the whole trip… Fracture? Yeah, that was a side trip. For supplies. And really hot food
In practice, if they have 9,001 currencies et al, then there is no way they can enforce an embargo on Earth without lots of risk of war. If Earth nations want to deal with alien nations, it will happen.
We have 200+ nations. They have thousands. And I can guarantee that if they have thousands, they’re no more organized than Earth. They may have a body that is controlled by a group of allies who claim they speak for everyone, but they’re lying. Possibly to themselves as well.
Examples: Fel, SmugD’s seller and Alari.
Googling “Jon Stewart” and “Art Kern” gets this page as the first result. Is there a video anywhere?
I would have linked it if I could find one, but Jon Stewart used to say “Mmmm! That’s good (X)” in a high pitched nasal voice all the time, and I think he was referencing a Johnny Carson bit which was Art Kern the TV salesman who usually had a stacked blonde standing next to him.
Googling for Frank Nelson got me on to a bit of an old TV trip.
The moment I saw Ray the voice I heard was Bruce Campbell’s at his smarmiest. Look’s a bit like him too.
I can see that.
More the Bruce Campbell playing Bruce Campbell in “My Name Is Bruce”; Ash was just cynical after dealing with the Deadites and having his friends killed, while the Elvis he played was actually kind of heroic, all things considered.
So, a Glivven eating a hot dog is, like… a human eating grakz?
*grabs some popcorn*
*”Excuse, please not to be eating our young!”*
*Hands bag to aliens, grabs OTHER bag of while, irregularly-shaped balls of light puffy cellulose*
Maybe we shouldn’t assume the ‘First Wave Tourists’ are rubes who got swindled by Cosmic.
They’re thrill-seekers getting the first look at a quasi-civilized planet so their Websites get more hits.
They KNOW their guide is unqualified, has no interest in their safety and is just short of killing them himself.
Each of them has their own translator, food tester and nonlethal/lethal/makes holes in things weapon.
At least one is the famous vlogger who discovered that human eating grakz on the Fracture and bought her third round.
Sure, but earth doesn’t care. If you illegally pass the airspace of a country with a non-certified aircraft and land on non-certified ground in that country with possibly heavily armed individuals risking the live of multiple people who’ve signed a waiver that is probably not binding in the country of arrival you lose your aircraft, freedom and big parts of your money.
I like/hate that his hairstyle gives him two very different visual profiles depending on what angle he’s viewed from. Front-on the close-cropped hair around the sides make him look tough and not to be messed with, but from the side he’s got the Elvis look, very flamboyant. The two contrasting images seem to fit what we’ve seen of his character so far.
Hrm I thought the front-on view made him look like a middle-aged huckster trying to conceal a rapidly-receding hairline. Eh, to each their own.
I dunno, I see Ray more like if David Spade was doing Lando Calrissian, instead of Billy Dee Williams.
This looks to be more of the “have not’s” wanting what they don’t have and don’t have any right to, but trying to whine their way into getting it.
Isn’t that how the US got hold of that ‘Jump Ship’ in the first place?
right….because shooting down a ship crewed by genocidal aliens that had been led there by a another ship crewed by at least one killer alien in self defence is DEFINITELY “trying to whine your way into getting something”, Definitely.
No, ARCHON (specifically, Maxi) shot down the ship, the highly toxic and deadly to all living life ship, and the US suits whined until they got a substitute replacement
Archon is part of the US military and it all happened on ground of the US military in the US, which means it happened by their employees on their ground in their country.
The US suits made a legitimate point. The claim made was: it forms a threat to all living beings in a way you can’t possibly confirm or deny with any science you’re allowed to have from us, so give us the ship of which we have openly expressed of we want to hide the technological integrity of.
A comparable situation would be if the Chinese government claimed: give me all your Chinese political refugees, because they’re planning to murder hunderds of people and you can’t stop them. We know this, because we have classified documents we’re not going to share with you.
The US intelligence services have reason to mistrust, such claims.
I actually find it shocking they did trust Cora to come back with an actual entry ship and apparently believed them enough to accept a simpler ship for it.
They got it through salvaging what they took down.
Though, I’d have to go back and look, but not sure on what Cora said they couldn’t do.
Nitrates? Fireworks? If an alien literally explodes, “It signed a waiver!” does not cover the injured or even dead natives *around* the tourist who most assuredly did NOT sign any such thing. Or if the result is farting nerve gas, that’s even worse on the natives!
He may think he can outrun local law enforcement when things inevitably “go south”, he ain’t outunning such natives as Maxima or Halo. Even if he pulls that off, Dabbler and Cora sound eager to do painful things to him, getting a bounty to do that would probably be icing on the cake.
See my post upstairs about rellies and friends. Makin’ justice.
Exploding could be covered with a paragraph containing something like “you have full responsibility for all damage to yourself and others you do while using our product”
Landing illegally with a non-certified ship could not, because that are your deeds with your stuff.
A little different take on Ray’s voice would be Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne in “The Witches of Eastwick”.
Appearance-wise, Ray reminds me of Space Dandy, from the side-view at least.
I think I saw Ray Cosmos’ brother working at a used car lot over on Main Street by the Interstate. I can hear Paul Frees or Don Messick voicing his character in an Anime.
Time for Sydney to take him out to lunch at her favorite Thai place… or to Fusion. Get some “Unmaker” spaghetti. “You’re here on Earth, so cultural exchange is mandatory.”
Oh, I just thought of something really gross too… acquaintance of a friend was being babysat years ago. It was time for lunch. The sitter gave him lunch… in the form of top ramen with sliced hot dogs.
What happens of you mix Grakz with Unmaker and eat it? This experiment must be done far away from populated planets. Safety first.
I just want to know. When the hell are they going to bring out the Quadcoder?
If the alien council decides to make exclusive deals with the UN then that body will suddenly become a lot more powerful and a lot less purely deliberative.
Of course if it is trade deals they probably should go to the EU. Reasonably coherent, relatively rich (by the standards of the local primitives anyway) and not too competent to put up too much of a legal fight.
Then again, unified planetary governments ought to be rare (and once you get past Kardeshev 1 non-existent) so there might be procedures in place to deal with fractious barely-ftl species that still fail to fully grasp the concept of ‘every ftl ship no matter how small is powerful enough to be a global extinction event. The bigger ones are planet busters’
Well, typically you start by establishing diplomatic relations with a government, then make some deals with that government, then let that government handle the ‘back end’ for you. Honestly, IMO an extrasolar government/council would go to the UN and let nature take its course — the UN becoming the de facto interface between here and there … except, of course, for not-so-poor-any-more-and-getting-less-little-by-the-month Galtyn …
I think the Xenocharchy would want to talk to the Un, but all the others will probably restrict themselves to individual governments, because the Un isn’t really in the position to make trade deals(not enough control) yet fully capable of making militairy deals(reason d’être and has a military force).
Just as you don’t want to talk to the Eu about military things yet can get some real people to talk to about trade.
Is there a club Oontz in NYC?
(#373)
Unfortunately no.
Well, either no, or I’m not cool enough to know about it, and I’m hella cool.
Actually currently no clubs would be open anyway, on second thought, at least not for the time being.
Cool? You are a lawyer
I’m an obvious aberration from my species.
If her street cred in the forums here isn’t enough to establish coolness, you should see her professional
bunny earshat collection.:)