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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!
weirdee

Story Wednesday, Apr 18, 2018

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10 hours ago, hkmaly said:

4) ... unless they are smart, give up searching for life in general and even sapient life in general and just do the most logical thing of JUST LOOKING FOR RADIO.

Searching for radio signals allows you to cover much larger area and eliminate almost all false positives, as you can be almost sure that at the source of radio signals you will find life which is sapient, developed enough to understand the concept of other civilization from different planet, able to use math as base of communication and WILLING to communicate.

There are two problems with that.

First of all, in the real world, after over half a century of searching we have yet to find any alien radio signals. Now this could be because our equipment isn't sensitive enough or we haven't looked closely enough at the right stars (and there are so many stars that it will take a very long time to check them all), but it could also indicate that for some unknown reason life forms that send radio signals into space are fairly rare.  (Of course this may be different in the world(s) of EGS, but for the purposes of understanding a fictional world I find it easiest to start with what we know about the real world and then make only those modifications necessary to account for what is seen in the story.)

Secondly, radio signals travel at the speed of light through a vacuum, meaning depending on how far away the star in question is, the signal could be hundreds, thousands, or even over a hundred thousand years old (and that's just if the star is in this galaxy). This is fine if all you want is to know if there's anyone out there, but if you're actually hoping to hop in a FTL spaceship and visit them, that delay could prove a bit of an issue.

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24 minutes ago, ChronosCat said:

This is fine if all you want is to know if there's anyone out there, but if you're actually hoping to hop in a FTL spaceship and visit them, that delay could prove a bit of an issue.

Also, again, it presupposes that radio will be the go-to method of communication of any sapient species. Humanity has used radio transmissions for only about a century. It remains possible that some technological development will supersede radio as means of communication at some point. Tightly focused directional transmissions of some kind might become possible or desirable. This is not to say that listening for radio is futile, merely that there might be different things to look for as well that we simply have not thought of as yet.

The Freefall webcomic posited another possibility to look for. Mind you, personally I am with Winston on that one.

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I vaguely remember reading suggestions that the human radio signal has already gotten quieter than it once was.

That is certainly at least somewhat plausible. Between developing more and more sensitive radio receivers (so we don't need to broadcast as loudly in order to hear ourselves), using directional antennas for efficiency (so we aren't broadcasting equally loudly in all directions, just as loudly as we need to in the direction we care about plus some quieter slop), and replacing some of our necessarily-loudest broadcasts - e.g. transatlantic communications - with cables and fiber-optics (so those transmitters are turned off).

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19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

1) When under Guardian Form spell, you can't cast ANY other spell not part of that form.

I forgot about that fact, though I wonder how that would affect enchantments on a person before the Guardian spell is cast, i.e. Ashley casting Cheerleadra then Guardian in this hypothetical scenario.

19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

2) Guardian Form will surely override any abilities Cheerleadra form could give, even if the form would still technically be under it.

That depends on how they stack with each other (If they stack at all, of course). Ideally, the strength boost would stack, but even if that boost doesn't, Cheerleadra still has utility effects, like accelerated healing and becoming one with their cell phone, that could be useful to the Guardian form (the cell phone then isn't likely to be useful in most combats, but the instincts from the Guardian form would help in maximizing that benefit in the cases where it is)

19 hours ago, hkmaly said:

4) Ashley would currently probably be able to hold Guardian form for ten seconds top.

This would be the biggest roadblock to the combo, in my opinion. I'm not sure she currently has enough power to even be able to cast Guardian form in the first place, much less maintain both it and Cheerleadra at the same time for any meaningful length of time. Though my speculation is for future situations, likely after Ashley has gotten significant amounts of training.

14 hours ago, Scotty said:

We haven't seen enough movement to truely rule our the eyes not reflecting light, the size of the white between the first and second panel could easily be attributed to the robot going from wide eye to squinty which could change the curvature of the eye itself and thus affect how it reflects light.

The white also doesn't match up with the lighting highlights on the rest of the golem's body in the first panel. A large centered highlight would suggest the light source is directly in front, but the highlights on the golem's body suggest the light source is above it and to the (panel) right.

14 hours ago, Scotty said:

A lack of tail and antennae could either be damage sure like it broke off if the robot fell backwards, but it might also be that the creators either didn't think those details were necessary or couldn't find any way to properly sculpt them (I would imaging the statue would be carved first and then enchanted).

Antennae would likely be too delicate to properly sculpt, though a tail should be fairly easy. The thick lines across all the golem's joints suggests it's not a single piece of stone, but instead is made up of separate pieces that are likely held together with magic, which would be the more realistic way to design an automaton made out of stone as stone isn't very flexible.(The broken arm seems to be broken just above where the elbow would be) A tail would simply be multiple small sections that connect on the back near the joint between the pelvic section and the abdominal section.

14 hours ago, Scotty said:

I like to think it's like how Stargate depicted ancient alien interactions with humans. the egyptian, greek, roman, and I think even some asian gods turned out to be all the same species of aliens (Guo'uld) and the Norse gods (the Asgard) were shown to have been the Grey aliens that were supposedly the aliens found in the Roswell incident, Uryuoms also resemble the Grey aliens. If Uryuoms had interstellar capability long before Humans started forming settlements and the basics of civilization, then it's possible that Uryuoms might have charted a decent portion of the galaxy and had found and visited Earth a long time ago.

Again, if the uryuom had interstellar capability long before Humans started forming settlements and such. There's no evidence that they had the capability that long ago.(And even if they did, space is big. The number of stars in the Milky Way is between 100 and 400 billion) Going by the Wikipedia article, the first instance of the Greys' design was in 1893 in H.G. Wells "Man of the Year Million" and is a hypothetical of what humans could eventually become. The design as an extraterrestrial became popular with the Roswell incident. Stargate is a fun and interesting series, but I don't think it's a good model for depicting past cultures, especially for a series that already has powerful magical entites that could be seen as gods, like the fairies/Immortals and beings like Heka (which is the name of the Ancient Egyptian god of magic).

14 hours ago, hkmaly said:

4) ... unless they are smart, give up searching for life in general and even sapient life in general and just do the most logical thing of JUST LOOKING FOR RADIO.

That is the smartest course of action if one is simply looking for sapient life, as early stage pioneers/explorers would like be. Though some scientists would likely want to study the development of early civilizations or even pre-civilization sapients. In those cases, obvious communication signals would be insufficient, and more involved search methods would need to be employed. Though such searches are unlikely to occur until interstellar travel is firmly established.

4 hours ago, Scotty said:
11 hours ago, hkmaly said:

... well, they DO talk about the parent planet and never mention another dimension, but it's true we don't exactly know that much more ...

I think Dan's being vague about where they're from for the same reason he's been vague about when the last magic change was or how old Pandora was.

Though there isn't much reason to do so for Uryuoms, unless Dan is worried that he'd have to be accurate about the planet, like if he randomly picked a star and said they came from a planet around that, he might get emails saying that there's no known planet, of the known planets around it couldn't possibly support life, or something like that.

Being vague about which planet the Uryuoms are from also has the benefit of side-stepping potential issues of scale. The stellar disk of the Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 lightyears(5.8786x10^17 miles/9.4607x10^17 km) in diameter and on average 1000 lightyears(5.8786x10^15 miles/9.4607x10^15 km) thick

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9 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Going by the Wikipedia article, the first instance of the Greys' design was in 1893 in H.G. Wells "Man of the Year Million" and is a hypothetical of what humans could eventually become. The design as an extraterrestrial became popular with the Roswell incident. Stargate is a fun and interesting series, but I don't think it's a good model for depicting past cultures, especially for a series that already has powerful magical entites that could be seen as gods, like the fairies/Immortals and beings like Heka (which is the name of the Ancient Egyptian god of magic).

That kinda proves the fact that Human's take inspiration from previous examples, you got H.G Wells coming up with a description, where he got that from though, was it truly conjecture about how Humans could evolve, or did he himself take inspiration from other examples in order to write his stories. My point is that other media took that description and used it as inspiration for other works, Dan most likely used that description to create Uryuoms, it stands to reason that if Humans in EGS could base religions on Fairies acting like Gods, they could also base other works and such on interactions with Aliens, especially since EGS has both sci-fi (aliens, alternate realities) and fantasy (magic, fairies) elements then Human history in EGS should likely have a mix of both.

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13 minutes ago, Scotty said:
45 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

Going by the Wikipedia article, the first instance of the Greys' design was in 1893 in H.G. Wells "Man of the Year Million" and is a hypothetical of what humans could eventually become. The design as an extraterrestrial became popular with the Roswell incident. Stargate is a fun and interesting series, but I don't think it's a good model for depicting past cultures, especially for a series that already has powerful magical entites that could be seen as gods, like the fairies/Immortals and beings like Heka (which is the name of the Ancient Egyptian god of magic).

That kinda proves the fact that Human's take inspiration from previous examples, you got H.G Wells coming up with a description, where he got that from though, was it truly conjecture about how Humans could evolve, or did he himself take inspiration from other examples in order to write his stories. My point is that other media took that description and used it as inspiration for other works, Dan most likely used that description to create Uryuoms, it stands to reason that if Humans in EGS could base religions on Fairies acting like Gods, they could also base other works and such on interactions with Aliens, especially since EGS has both sci-fi (aliens, alternate realities) and fantasy (magic, fairies) elements then Human history in EGS should likely have a mix of both.

While humans in EGS could base religions on extraterrestrial visitors, that doesn't mean they necessarily did. Just because there are both sci-fi and fantasy elements in the present of the setting, doesn't mean there needs to be a mix of both in the distant past of the setting as well. Especially with sci-fi, as a major theme of science is progress and advancement. Things are discovered and invented. Old ideas being proven false and refined or discarded. New ideas being formulated and tested. Forcing sci-fi elements into the distant past makes the setting feel less dynamic. In the case of EGS, having the Uryuom visit Earth in ancient times makes them feel less like a species on the cutting-edge of advancement, and more like an ancient precursor, appearing not as a dynamic people but as something from myth and legend. Not an equal people, but something that by its nature demands to be either revered or feared. Even in Stargate, this aspect presented itself. Of the species that had visited Earth in the distant past, the asgardians were a dying race with a severe lack of creativity (they needed humans to come up with novel-ish solutions to fighting the replicators) and the gou'ald society had stagnated significantly until the humans of Earth shook things up by killing Ra, and both species had the tendency to treat the humans of Earth as a lesser species, either to protect or to subjugate, but not equals (The asgardians started treating the humans better when the humans started saving the asgardians, but I'm not sure they ever fully treated them as equals).

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8 minutes ago, Drasvin said:

While humans in EGS could base religions on extraterrestrial visitors, that doesn't mean they necessarily did. Just because there are both sci-fi and fantasy elements in the present of the setting, doesn't mean there needs to be a mix of both in the distant past of the setting as well.

It doesn't mean they didn't or there wasn't either.

I'm not saying Dan's copying what other people are doing with the idea, I'm saying he's taking elements of it and putting his own spin, most stories only suggest aliens as being the inspiration for various mythology and religion, Dan though has primarily suggested Magic and fairies, as being that inspiration in EGS but with Aliens also being a fixture, one can't assume that they are strictly a recent arrival. they might not have influenced humans simultaneously, but one could have replaced the other at various points in history. We also have brief snippets of alternate realities to suggest possibilities as well, Magus' universe having magic public suggesting that someone convinced the WoM to end the cycle of changing sooner, the SL universe where Uryuoms have coexisted with humans for centuries or longer without secrecy. And all these realities represent possible outcomes that the main universe could have had if things had happened differently. So yeah there's good enough reason to speculate how far back Uryuoms have had contact with humans and whether humans were influenced by them in some way. Fairies would have influenced religion and mythology, but Uryuoms might have had an influence in other areas, especially if they didn't want to be treated as gods.

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13 hours ago, Scotty said:

Though there isn't much reason to do so for Uryuoms, unless Dan is worried that he'd have to be accurate about the planet, like if he randomly picked a star and said they came from a planet around that, he might get emails saying that there's no known planet, of the known planets around it couldn't possibly support life, or something like that.

That MIGHT be justified worry.

12 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

First of all, in the real world, after over half a century of searching we have yet to find any alien radio signals. Now this could be because our equipment isn't sensitive enough or we haven't looked closely enough at the right stars (and there are so many stars that it will take a very long time to check them all), but it could also indicate that for some unknown reason life forms that send radio signals into space are fairly rare.  (Of course this may be different in the world(s) of EGS, but for the purposes of understanding a fictional world I find it easiest to start with what we know about the real world and then make only those modifications necessary to account for what is seen in the story.)

So far, ALL methods of searching for aliens had no success. Sure, it may be because using radio is not good method, but it can also mean sapient life is just that rare.

In EGS, they have one advantage over us: they know that there is at least one other sapient species somewhere.

12 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

Secondly, radio signals travel at the speed of light through a vacuum, meaning depending on how far away the star in question is, the signal could be hundreds, thousands, or even over a hundred thousand years old (and that's just if the star is in this galaxy). This is fine if all you want is to know if there's anyone out there, but if you're actually hoping to hop in a FTL spaceship and visit them, that delay could prove a bit of an issue.

As far as we know, nothing can travel faster. Sure, the moment we develop something FTL, it will became much more practical way of communicating.

11 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Tightly focused directional transmissions of some kind might become possible or desirable.

They already ARE possible and have lot of advantages for bidirectional communication. However, searching for directional transmissions is futile, the probability of being in right direction is almost zero.

11 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

The Freefall webcomic posited another possibility to look for. Mind you, personally I am with Winston on that one.

Technically, looking for stars going out is searching in electromagnetic spectrum. And, yes, civilization which is not able to utilize stars have reason to be careful around civilization which can, but on the other hand, they don't exactly have any good reason to conquer us, we don't have anything they would need except answers to several questions in form of "is X universal or it's just us". (Obviously, that doesn't exclude they may have some BAD reason to conquer us.)

11 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

I vaguely remember reading suggestions that the human radio signal has already gotten quieter than it once was.

That is certainly at least somewhat plausible. Between developing more and more sensitive radio receivers (so we don't need to broadcast as loudly in order to hear ourselves), using directional antennas for efficiency (so we aren't broadcasting equally loudly in all directions, just as loudly as we need to in the direction we care about plus some quieter slop), and replacing some of our necessarily-loudest broadcasts - e.g. transatlantic communications - with cables and fiber-optics (so those transmitters are turned off).

Yes. It also went harder to decode. Analog TV is something you can decipher by looking for patterns and try what they could mean. Compressed digital TV? You would need lot of experience decoding it without knowing the specification. ENCRYPTED digital TV? Forget it. Encrypted digital TV damaged by noise? Hard to actually notice there is any intelligent signal there.

9 hours ago, Drasvin said:
23 hours ago, hkmaly said:

4) ... unless they are smart, give up searching for life in general and even sapient life in general and just do the most logical thing of JUST LOOKING FOR RADIO.

That is the smartest course of action if one is simply looking for sapient life, as early stage pioneers/explorers would like be. Though some scientists would likely want to study the development of early civilizations or even pre-civilization sapients. In those cases, obvious communication signals would be insufficient, and more involved search methods would need to be employed. Though such searches are unlikely to occur until interstellar travel is firmly established.

Civilization which just started to use radio IS early civilization ... compared to someone who routinely travels through galaxy on FTL ships. But yes, obviously ; searching for life in general is worth it if you either can't find any radio signal or already found someone by radio and want to explore more species.

9 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Not only there are that many stars in Milky Way, it's STILL mostly empty. Average density is around one atom per two cubic centimetres.

9 hours ago, Drasvin said:

Being vague about which planet the Uryuoms are from also has the benefit of side-stepping potential issues of scale.

Basically, ANY distance Dan would say could easily be unrealistically small (because of not enough habitable planets) OR unrealistically large (because it would take too long to get here and would be too hard to find us). Or, most likely, both. Not saying one means Dan can at least pretend to have reasonable answer.

13 hours ago, Scotty said:

I think Dan's being vague about where they're from for the same reason he's been vague about when the last magic change was or how old Pandora was.

I think the more fitting comparison is with Dan being vague about what year the story happens in. The more you think about it, the more clear is that ANY answer is not really going to make sense.

 

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41 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

They already ARE possible and have lot of advantages for bidirectional communication. However, searching for directional transmissions is futile, the probability of being in right direction is almost zero.

As my argument was that searching for radio signals alone might not be sufficient, this was my entire point, yes.

42 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I think the more fitting comparison is with Dan being vague about what year the story happens in. The more you think about it, the more clear is that ANY answer is not really going to make sense.

Indeed. Dan went from everyone using land lines to smart phones in the space of less than one in-comic year. That's fast, even for the telephone industry.

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17 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

There are two problems with that.

First of all, in the real world, after over half a century of searching we have yet to find any alien radio signals. Now this could be because our equipment isn't sensitive enough or we haven't looked closely enough at the right stars (and there are so many stars that it will take a very long time to check them all), but it could also indicate that for some unknown reason life forms that send radio signals into space are fairly rare.  (Of course this may be different in the world(s) of EGS, but for the purposes of understanding a fictional world I find it easiest to start with what we know about the real world and then make only those modifications necessary to account for what is seen in the story.)

I read in an issue of Scientific American a few years back that our own current best instruments could only detect signals of the strength that we have been putting out at a distance of up to eight hundred light years--which is not too shabby considering that we can barely detect the planets themselves at that range and even then only because the planets gravitationally tug on their parent stars or happen to pass directly between their stars and our line of sight.

18 hours ago, Scotty said:

I think Dan's being vague about where they're from for the same reason he's been vague about when the last magic change was or how old Pandora was.

Though there isn't much reason to do so for Uryuoms, unless Dan is worried that he'd have to be accurate about the planet, like if he randomly picked a star and said they came from a planet around that, he might get emails saying that there's no known planet, of the known planets around it couldn't possibly support life, or something like that.

Obviously, the Uryuom's star is named Cer, and their planet is named Oulch, or perhaps Gollu. :D

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4 hours ago, The Old Hack said:
5 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I think the more fitting comparison is with Dan being vague about what year the story happens in. The more you think about it, the more clear is that ANY answer is not really going to make sense.

Indeed. Dan went from everyone using land lines to smart phones in the space of less than one in-comic year. That's fast, even for the telephone industry.

Not speaking about the ridiculously small 512MB card in camera and gigabytes of space in computer ... just MONTH of comic time before video camera phones with HD. (March 9 and April 9, exactly month.)

And the speed CRT monitors changes to flat panels is also quite fast ...

 

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