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Welcome! 03/05/2016
Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change. If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away. I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!
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<sigh> George Lucas, ..., it's like a mental condition that won't let him let go and move on. Frankly, Han shooting after Greedo bothers me way more. You had a vision, man, own it. Not that I've ever read them, way before my time, but Hulk is somewhat akin to the original version of Superman from, who, for instance, couldn't fly, but could jump really well. But why does moving from a red-sun world to a yellow-sun world make him stronger? Shouldn't the more intense radiation kill him, since his physiology isn't adapted to it? Or perhaps his species is not native to Krypton, he just happens to be from there. Maybe he's just wrong about why he's superpowered; has nothing to do with the lighting, Krypton is just hugely massive. See, it's BS questions like this that make the writers want to fix their s#!%. (Don't get me started on Green Lantern. Is he allergic to Yellow light? How "yellow" does it have to be? A specific wavelength? A band? Does intensity matter. Why doesn't white light, like daylight, bother him? It has yellow. Or is it all in his head? The perception of yellow. Yellow paint, even if it's not reflecting much yellow light. What if he's presented with an optical illusion, where one background makes it look not quite yellpw, and another makes it appear vivid yellow? And we don't actually see yellow, our brain has to synthesize it from other information, mostly red and green balance, I guess. Can you "see" yellow if you observe the right balance of actual red and green, and would that affect him?) (And how does The Flash maintain traction to run?) I like Mystery Men because they are essentially mundane and avoid most of this. "I am The Shoveller. I shovel well." Or Batman; "My superpower is that I am a filthy rich genius martial artist." I don't disagree, that's a pretty astute observation, but I would like to point out that you just did the very thing we're talking about, applied a layer of science colored paint to it.
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At one point, if I remember correctly, Dan claimed that he lost his original notes regarding the Uryuomoco language. However, I think there are enough fan made commentaries and translation pages to ensure we can continue to communicate. https://elgoonishshive.fandom.com/wiki/Uryuom https://elgoonishshive.fandom.com/wiki/Uryuomoco http://www.ookii.org/Egs/Uryuom
- Today
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He might prefer to tell to tell her and to warn her of the consequences of disseminating the information, rather than have her find out on her own. From Edward's point of view, briefing someone in is more controllable than a loose cannon rolling around. I wonder if they can also learn by the same method (well, similar method, but reverse) of the way they taught Uryumoco? Also, how the h$## does that ability evolve? And did Dan channel Tolkien and design Uryumoco, or is it random gibberish? Also, they could make a fortune with that ability.
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Maybe we'll find a loophole, but basic physics says, "Don't get your hopes up." Flip side, it has been pointed out the fundamental argument for why c is the speed limit have to do with avoiding cause and effect contradictions. As long as you are willing to toss the even more fundamental notion of causality, there is no reason c has to be the speed limit, for information at least.
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On July 17 in History: 180 - Twelve "Christians" are executed in the town of Scillium (in modern Tunisia). That ought to nip this weird new cult in the bud. 1203 - The Fourth Crusade, apparently having completely forgotten what they are supposed to be doing, sack and conquer Constantinople. 1429 - Charles VII of France is crowned during the Hundred Years War due in large part to the efforts of Jeanne d'Arc, but also due to English incompetence and mismanagement, stemming in no small part from the fact that their king is a baby. 1453 - The Battle of Castillon marks the end of the Hundred Years War and any chance of the English ever reclaiming the throne of France. "We'll be back!" they say ominously. They won't be back. 1762 - Peter III of Russia, who had been overthrown in a coup by his Great wife Catherine 8 days before, is murdered for good measure. It was probably just the act of an overzealous supporter and Catherine knew nothing about it, but she IS the ruler of RUSSIA, so we can't take that for granted. 1917 - George V of England renames his house "Windsor", since "Saxe-Coburg and Gotha" sounds a little too German, which is awkward since we're kind of in the middle of an apocalyptic war with them. 1918 - Nicholas II of Russia and his entire family and many of his retainers are murdered by either the Bolsheviks or Keyser Soze; I forget which. 1936 - A faction of the Spanish military attempts to overthrow the recently elected leftist Popular Front government. Oh, this isn't gonna be good. 1955 - Disneyland opens. Nothing works, but at least when the Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don't eat the tourists. 1976 - 25 African countries boycott the Montreal Olympics due to the participation of New Zealand. Don't worry; New Zealand hasn't suddenly become racist! It's just that they continue to participate in sporting events with apartheid South Africa. ...Okay, so maybe they're a little bit racist. 1984 - The U.S. decides that while 18 is old enough to put your life on the line in defense of your nation, it's not old enough to have a beer. You gotta wait three more years for that shit. Because the last time we imposed increased restrictions on alcohol went so well. 2009 - Walter Cronkite dies, taking with him the last remaining shred of journalistic integrity and accountability in American culture. 2014 - Malaysia Airlines flight 17 is shot down by Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine for reasons unknown. Probably by mistake, but still. The Russian government denies any responsibility, which is how you can be sure they are responsible. And that's the way it was.
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But the best kind of Yamato is a Yamato nadeshiko. However, that Yamato didn't fired anything. (reading TVTropes ...) Usually.
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Yeah, I've never found that retconning does much to help a series. That is the path to midichlorians, the dork side of the farce. (OMG, the Star Wars fan sites are hyphenating it. That can't be good.) Yeah, the lesson is not that too much technical footing is bad, the lesson is don't retconn the explanations, or anything else. However, the original Superman was explained so badly and inconsistently it could've been worth the try. (If it would help ; unfortunately, Marvel and DC are both extremely bad with consistency.) StarWars however? There really was no reason to bring another explanation. It didn't made it more consistent, more logical, more anything ... didn't brought any option not possible before ... it just made it more complicated. Inverse is not true however. Hulk, for example, doesn't tend to be able to pass as ordinary human AND his skin is very tough, HOWEVER it still doesn't LOOK tougher and it's entirely possible it feels normal as well. And "How"? Frankly, I don't find it THAT unbelievable. Non-Newtonian fluids can get tougher when bigger force is applied to them ; the way superheroes skins react to bullets may be similar.
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But the best kind of Yamato is a Yamato nadeshiko.
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I thought the Yamato fired energy weapons through the vacuum of space? You need to distinguish multiple ships with same name. Just like Enterprise may be HMS Enterprise or U.S.S. Enterprise, with designation SP-790, CV-6, CVN-65, CVN-80, NX-01, NCC-1701, NCC-1701 A/B/C/D/E/F/J ... there are multiple Yamatos, and Tom Sewell means this one and not this one.
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He WOULD prefer if she wasn't told, at least on the party ... but admits that eventually she will learn about them. But William and Gillian are "cute", as opposed to the golem which wasn't... Also, the golem didn't looked that much as Uryuom ... Point in their favour. We don't know if THEY know Spanish. Also, I don't think they really appears on the party ... ... but in the case they would, it would definitely be worth the try. Good point. Even better point. But perhaps don't go omega, no matter how much fluffier are three tails instead of one. Jeremy? It's entirely possible Grace and Tedd ate most of it. I think so too, but until recently, Tedd needed gadgetry to transform. Elliot can look like any female human, but his only male forms are himself and himself as a cat-person. Ellen has only copied females (which might be why she couldn't copy not-Tengu.) This is why I rate Grace as the most versatile shapeshifter. Elliot CAN look like any female human, but Tedd WANTS to explore more forms, so it's entirely plausible he had more forms than Elliot. Copying not-Tengu would fail because of his spell resistance I think. Ellen definitely can copy males, just decided not to. Grace can only combine forms she has, and I would assume most of the forms she has Tedd tested on himself as well. Still, yes, I guess it makes her most versatile from main eight, technically ... ... note that it's possible Rhoda's disquise spell has no actual limits ... we only SAW one form, but it's probably more versatile. May still be limited to humans.
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Which would be odd considering she's kept up to date on pop culture references. Wait ... you expect her behavior would be CONSISTENT?
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You have the cause and effect backwards. Yes, there would be limited space underground, so if the rest of people won't manage to move off-world, they would die ... which is the population drop you mentioned. It is possible that even after those tens of thousands of years, the population of that generation ship would want to expand. Planet offers much more space than ship, even if they would try to build more ships. But yes, it's hard to predict what will that time do to their psychology ; perhaps they wouldn't be able to live on planet anymore. Note that while we may not be first civilization in galaxy, we are not that slow either ; inhabitable planets require heavy elements which needs to be produced by supernovae first, and evolution is not that fast either ... meaning, it's entirely possible there were NO intelligent civilizations millions of years ago. Sentimentality is VERY strong motivation. I'm pretty sure he meant exactly that, further out. But lets see, roughly 100 or so miles up, about an hour to orbit ~ 25,000 mph. Geosync, around 27,000 miles up, ballpark 85,000 miles around, in 24 hours, yeah, you've actually slowed down as well. You've added energy, but your forward velocity is lower. And if you put on the brakes, so to speak, you'll speed up as you fall inward (while you are still orbiting). .... right. Geostationary orbit is about 24h at distance of 42,000 km, moon orbits at about 380,000km and it takes it 27 days, so it's about three times slower. My bad. The plausible outcomes: 1) We develop FTL, and our descendants - probably eventually evolving to something we wouldn't recognize as H. Sapiens Sapiens, but still our descendants and probably a single species (depending on just how much FTL the FTL is; 1.1C wouldn't help much; the Jenkinsverse works in kilolights and interstellar travel between places worth going to still routinely takes weeks or months) - spread to the stars. 2) We develop high-energy drive systems, but not FTL, and our descendants spread to the stars and evolve into multiple species. And perhaps we also save the Earth - or Mars, or both - from incineration... 3) We die with the Earth, if not before. It's true that spreading to stars without FTL will force us to evolve into multiple species, but we can still evolve into multiple species WITH FTL if we choose so. And there is definitely option of surviving inside solar system without the ability to leave it - we may lose Earth, but there will always be option to live in space stations, small enough to be kept in habitable zone.
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The plausible outcomes: 1) We develop FTL, and our descendants - probably eventually evolving to something we wouldn't recognize as H. Sapiens Sapiens, but still our descendants and probably a single species (depending on just how much FTL the FTL is; 1.1C wouldn't help much; the Jenkinsverse works in kilolights and interstellar travel between places worth going to still routinely takes weeks or months) - spread to the stars. 2) We develop high-energy drive systems, but not FTL, and our descendants spread to the stars and evolve into multiple species. And perhaps we also save the Earth - or Mars, or both - from incineration... 3) We die with the Earth, if not before.
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Yeah, I've never found that retconning does much to help a series. That is the path to midichlorians, the dork side of the farce. (OMG, the Star Wars fan sites are hyphenating it. That can't be good.)
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I'm pretty sure he meant exactly that, further out. But lets see, roughly 100 or so miles up, about an hour to orbit ~ 25,000 mph. Geosync, around 27,000 miles up, ballpark 85,000 miles around, in 24 hours, yeah, you've actually slowed down as well. You've added energy, but your forward velocity is lower. And if you put on the brakes, so to speak, you'll speed up as you fall inward (while you are still orbiting). Agree, evolution does not sit still; adapt or die. One scenario is, as we spread among the close stars, we become multiple competing species. Niven uses this in A World Out of Time.
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I think so too, but until recently, Tedd needed gadgetry to transform. Elliot can look like any female human, but his only male forms are himself and himself as a cat-person. Ellen has only copied females (which might be why she couldn't copy not-Tengu.) This is why I rate Grace as the most versatile shapeshifter.
- Yesterday
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Maybe to encourage Ashley to accept Grace's shapechanging? Five of the Main Eight now have ways of taking the forms of other people in various ways: Tedd (to Grace and, potentially, the other six); I think Tedd has shown more different forms than any other character. Possibly more than the entire rest of the Main 8 combined. And anyone who knows Tedd or Ellen well has ways of taking any of a large variety of different forms. (Although if they only know Ellen well, the varieties of "different" are somewhat limited.) That would obviously include all of the Main 8.
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When (and whether) the sun will render Earth inhospitable (by becoming a Red Giant or by other means) is entirely relevant to the discussion of how long intelligent life can survive on Earth (and by extension, how long alien races might be able to survive without moving to new planets). And to be clear, what exactly is it that you are claiming is incorrect, and do you have any sources for your claim? According to the Wikipedia article on the future of the solar system about 1.5 billion years from now, Mars will warm enough for ice (both water and carbon dioxide) to melt on its surface, possibly leading to a greenhouse affect. Of course (based on what I can read of the source for that claim) it will be billions of years before Mars grows warm enough by natural means for life as we know it to survive there... But the combined efforts of both "humankind" (and I use the term loosely, I don't expect homo sapiens to still be around by then) and nature will surely be able to produce results faster and more easily than either working alone... Of course, Wikipedia also claims that multi-cellular life on Earth will go extinct by 800 million years from now, and the oceans will likely boil away by 1.1 billion years from now, so it will require more than just the forces of evolution for our descendants to last long enough to see the point where rising temperatures make terraforming Mars significantly easier. (On the other hand, the article does go on to mention the possibility of the nitrogen cycle reducing atmospheric pressure enough to slow the rising temperatures, giving us until 2 billion years in the future before the oceans are lost, and presumably extending the reign of multi-cullular life as well.) As for building housing and an industrial base on Mars, I would expect that could easily be done in a few centuries - and when dealing with a catastrophe that takes hundreds of millions of years (or even a couple billion) to reach it's conclusion, that's nothing. ...Then again, maybe we won't bother terraforming Mars at all. Maybe we'll just build enclosed bases/homes/cities/etc. there and call it good. If those of us with dreams of space have our way, we'll be building such things on Mars in the not-so-distant future anyway.
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Maybe to encourage Ashley to accept Grace's shapechanging? Five of the Main Eight now have ways of taking the forms of other people in various ways: Tedd (to Grace and, potentially, the other six); Elliot (can create new forms more or less on the fly); Ellen (copy spell); Sarah, who at minimum has a watch that allows her to take Tedd's form; and Grace, probably the most versatile shapechanger. Speaking of cats, does Grace still have that catnip plant she got at her last birthday? Or has Jeremy eaten it all? If so, I hope Tedd has stocked up on yarn.
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But maybe we'll finally see Elliot use the cat form after so long?
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But make sure there are no dogs around!
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This will come later than you think. It isn't just a matter of terraforming Mars, it's also a matter of building all the necessary housing, manufacturing capacity, etc. And it's not as if we'll suddenly realize that we have to immediately start finding ways to deal with a much-hotter Earth. It'll be a gradual thing. No single generation will see a much-hotter Earth... each generation will see a very-slightly-hotter Earth. (Unless we build something like a planetary shade, and then after working for a while it breaks. Which isn't implausible.) I still like the idea of moving the planet farther from the sun... the engineering of that task is left as an exercise for the reader. Or someone.
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This thread still needs a link: http://egscomics.com/egsnp/shs-02 There are some superheros who have noticeably tough skin, temporarily or permanently - but they tend not to be able to pass as ordinary humans when in these forms. (Examples that come to mind are The Thing and Colossus.)
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The sun, has no place in this discussion, what you purport, is incorrect.
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Early on, keeping the Earth cool would probably be easier than terraforming Mars. However, over time as the suns output increases, it will get harder to keep the Earth cool and easier to terraform Mars (as Mars will get warmer too). I imagine there will come a tipping point where it's easier to just terraform Mars if it hasn't been done already, and the only reason for continuing to put the effort in to save Earth is sentimentality. Moving the Earth would be such a massive undertaking I doubt it would be any easier than terraforming Mars. Particularly if we don't want to kill off what's left of the biosphere in the process. As for surviving underground, there are only so many naturally occurring caves and most of them aren't appropriate for long-term human life, so we'd have to dig out new underground dwellings. We'd also need sources of food (underground farming?), water (aquifers might work at first, but my understanding is eventually most of the water makes its way to the surface and evaporates, so eventually you'd need a way to draw the water back out of the atmosphere and pump it back down to your dwellings), and breathable air (the farms might help with that). With current tech it might be possible for small numbers, but it would be expensive. With future tech it might be practical and worth the expense for large numbers, but I doubt there would be the resources to support billions of people underground, so if the population hasn't significantly dropped by then some people would probably still need to move off-world. Although I've heard some of the details of Earth's future overheating before, at the moment I'm going by the wikipedia article "Future of Earth." While it mentions that life underground might be able to survive long after the surface is uninhabitable, it seems to forget about those underground life-forms after that, mostly treating the point the surface becomes uninhabitable as the point where life on Earth ends. It also doesn't speculate on how intelligent life might react to these changes. So I can't really say how long human-descendants would be able to survive underground. Perhaps we would be able to survive until the surface went molten (in which case human-descendants and the other life forms in our shelters might well be the last living things on Earth), but even that might be sooner than when the Sun goes Red Giant; in one scenario a runaway greenhouse effect 3 to 4 billion years from now could heat the planet up enough to melt the surface. Reaching close enough to light-speed to fully take advantage of time dilation would require incredible amounts of energy; for all but the most advanced civilizations it probably wouldn't be worth the cost. However, without time dilation interstellar journeys take an incredibly long time - many human lifetimes in most cases. The most obvious solutions to this are sleeper ships, generation ships, or some form of immortality (including sentient machines). In the case of the generation ships and immortals, however, once you've been traveling the void of space for thousands or tens of thousands of years, why would you want to settle down when you found a planet? (And for a machine designed for space, Earth wouldn't even be any more appealing as a place to settle than a lifeless rock.) Chances are they'd have a look around, maybe replenish their resources (which in most cases could be done on uninhabited worlds as easily as inhabited ones), then continue their journey. As for sleeper ships, maybe no successful interstellar civilizations in our galaxy have decided to go that route, maybe they don't interfere with existing biospheres for moral reasons, or maybe they just came through our neighborhood so long ago there's no trace of them anymore (there's no reason interstellar civilizations can't fall just like any other). This is a bit of a stretch, but maybe they settled on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago only for the colonists to be killed off in one of Earth's mass extinctions (obviously this would require them not leaving behind any fossils in places we've looked so far, but it's not like we're even close to knowing all the species that ever lived on Earth). Or maybe they came through so long ago Earth wasn't habitable yet (heck, maybe this was before the Sun formed). It's also possible that the aliens that came through weren't the sort that would find Earth inhabitable. Or, (as with the machine intelligences I mentioned above), they might not find it any more habitable than any other rocky world that isn't so hot it would melt them.
