Grrl Power IV: Constantly Expanded Universe

[lord_khaine]

What i would most of all like is Deus and Sydney newer meeting each other.
This is Halo's oddyseus. Her chance to grow just a little up.

Though at the same time, i do also find it slightly amusing that Deus massive wealth is very likely to be insignificant at the Frakture.
I mean they will likely not care about a lot of whats valuable to us.

[Rogar Demonblud]

So, let's play spot the cameo.

[Onyavar]

So, let's play spot the cameo.

Spotting them is no problem, placing them is.
A star-powered Tigger, four random fanservices and two clunky robots.

... Frankly, I have no idea. Please tell who it is.

[tyckspoon]

Spotting them is no problem, placing them is.
A star-powered Tigger, four random fanservices and two clunky robots.

... Frankly, I have no idea. Please tell who it is.

The very blocky robot in front of the counter in the last panel is Marvin the Paranoid Android, as depicted in the 80's BBC adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide. Couldn't tell you any of the others, although that red robot across the counter from Marvin looks like he should be familiar.

[lord_khaine]

The red guy is likely from the Black Hole. Thats a really, really old movie.
From 1979. So im not surprised people not getting that.

Had not guessed that was Marvin, since i have only read the books, and he was not on any cover i saw.

But the tiger guy is from the books the author recently recomended.

[DataNinja]

Had not guessed that was Marvin, since i have only read the books, and he was not on any cover i saw.

The covers that have Marvin tends to show the more-advanced spherical version from the movie, rather than the boxy robot shown here from the TV series.

[HandofShadows]

The red guy is likely from the Black Hole. Thats a really, really old movie.
From 1979. So im not surprised people not getting that.

Yep, that Maximillian from the Black Hole. They actually had model kits for him.

Did I just show how old I am?

[JeenLeen]

Unless they're a cameo, I'm guessing the two blonde chicks are plotting something (con? pickpocketing?) on Dabbler's friend. Well, that, or their hand gesture is something like "she's hot"; I don't really get what that gesture is meant to mean.

Hoping the groups convene in the aftermath of whatever plot that is.

Also, it's neat seeing Vale show an excited emotion.

[Traab]

Unless they're a cameo, I'm guessing the two blonde chicks are plotting something (con? pickpocketing?) on Dabbler's friend. Well, that, or their hand gesture is something like "she's hot"; I don't really get what that gesture is meant to mean.

Hoping the groups convene in the aftermath of whatever plot that is.

Also, it's neat seeing Vale show an excited emotion.

At first I thought that was pixel, not happy vale.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Yeah, me too. Vale's usually drawn as a foot taller than that.

[lord_khaine]

It confuses me as well for a while. I had to check the Who is who page for confirmation.
But oh well, a minor lapse in scale. Can hardly blame the author for that when he is busy experimenting with space background.
In general the art is really, really good.

[HandofShadows]

Unless they're a cameo, I'm guessing the two blonde chicks are plotting something (con? pickpocketing?) on Dabbler's friend. Well, that, or their hand gesture is something like "she's hot"; I don't really get what that gesture is meant to mean.

Hoping the groups convene in the aftermath of whatever plot that is.

Also, it's neat seeing Vale show an excited emotion.

Vale is holding a miniature Marker from Dead Space. The one blond with her hands held apart might be showing the size of the.. "equipment" of the tiger headed cameo.

[Keltest]

Bonus Sydney points for ignoring a sign with clearly English words and lettering on it, even if they are badly spelled.

[halfeye]

Bonus Sydney points for ignoring a sign with clearly English words and lettering on it, even if they are badly spelled.

Language is very weird. I was once in France with a college for a couple of weeks, didn't speak french, so I went into a shop to buy some bread using gestures and mime (and french coin, naturally), which worked more or less. When I got out, I thought "hang on, that shop assistant was speaking english". I didn't recognise it at the time, because I wasn't expecting it. It was a very strange experience, but I'm sure it's not that unusual.

[Keltest]

Language is very weird. I was once in France with a college for a couple of weeks, didn't speak french, so I went into a shop to buy some bread using gestures and mime (and french coin, naturally), which worked more or less. When I got out, I thought "hang on, that shop assistant was speaking english". I didn't recognise it at the time, because I wasn't expecting it. It was a very strange experience, but I'm sure it's not that unusual.

I didn't say it was implausible, but you have to admit its a very Sydney thing to do.

[HandofShadows]

It's a very Sydney thing to do to miss the sign. But I think the important question is why is there *anything* in English here, badly spelled or not. It's roughly the equivalent to finding Mayan or Aztec writing in ancient Rome. So that means that there is either a lot more alien tourists visiting Earth than we thought, Earth is a little more important than we think, or something from Earth has "hit it big" out there.

[Keltest]

It's a very Sydney thing to do to miss the sign. But I think the important question is why is there *anything* in English here, badly spelled or not. It's roughly the equivalent to finding Mayan or Aztec writing in ancient Rome. So that means that there is either a lot more alien tourists visiting Earth than we thought, Earth is a little more important than we think, or something from Earth has "hit it big" out there.

Or translator microbes/magic/technobabble, and the sign is misspelled in every language.

[Traab]

Well it does help that english is the original language of the world due to its ease of use and simplicity of style. Its why foreigners are naturally less intelligent than us. Because they have to translate everything from english into whatever gobbledegook they made up to be different out of sheer stubbornness. But yeah, totally not surprised to see it here, after all, any race smart enough to travel space has to speak english because that is the language of intelligence. I bet they measure temperature in Fahrenheit and distance in miles as well.

[Rogar Demonblud]

So, Sydney has a chance to do something to improve her situation, and wastes it spouting random syllables that some schmucks in Hollywood told her is a pretend language. Sounds about right, but it does make me wonder how her generic Adderall supply is holding out.

[Onyavar]

Again, I'm not fluent in most of these nerd languages.
My educated guess is that the first two greetings were from Star Wars - "Nanoo" sounds like perfectly for that weird swamp bunny character; and the second one is either channeling R2D2 or Anakin?
Qapla (Klingon) and Tek mal tek (Goa'uld) were easy. Tonk'peh looks like Vulcanian (?)
The rest, I couldn't place right now. Even though I might know the universes.

And again, I'm not recognizing the cameos, but honestly, you need to know a work to find a cameo funny. So, I just wondered about the guy in a bad face mask with the otherwise normal human business appearance. Which SF series do I need to avoid to never getting to know this character?

[tyckspoon]

Again, I'm not fluent in most of these nerd languages.
My educated guess is that the first two greetings were from Star Wars - "Nanoo" sounds like perfectly for that weird swamp bunny character;

Mork and Mindy, late 70s - early 80s fish-out-of-water sitcom featuring a young Robin Williams as the alien visitor Mork. 'Nanoo nanoo' was his space-greeting.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Star Wars figures into a few of them. Achuta is a Huttese phrase from Phantom Menace (actually, Greedo may have used it too). Klaatu, Barada and Nikto are alien species who work for the Hutts (you see them die in numbers in the sail barge fight in ROTJ). Somehow, that became a line in the Evil Dead series (so zombies rather than aliens).

Like I said, Sydney is just spouting random syllables without any real meaning. I'd hate to be the Babelfish trying to make sense of her.

[tyckspoon]

Klaatu, Barada and Nikto are alien species who work for the Hutts (you see them die in numbers in the sail barge fight in ROTJ). Somehow, that became a line in the Evil Dead series (so zombies rather than aliens).

Like I said, Sydney is just spouting random syllables without any real meaning. I'd hate to be the Babelfish trying to make sense of her.

The actual origin is a classic 50's sci-fi film; warning: Wikipedia pothole ahead. It's been referenced and riffed all over the place since.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Yeah, that lightbulbed for me after I clicked submit. In my defense, I don't think I've seen the movie since I was maybe eight.

Also, the line Sydney ends with is from Python, so maybe a reference to one of their joke Eastern European Language Books.

[DataNinja]

Bah Weep Gra Nah Weep Ninny Bong is the "Universal Greeting" from 1986's The Transformers: The Movie.

[Lamech]

I assume a space traveler with a genie got a little carried away. "I wish all the aliens would just use English!" Presumably the suddenly vastly increased ease of communication and standardizing the language everyone thinks in led to an outbreak in peace.

[Rogar Demonblud]

Why would you think that? It hasn't for us. Two nations divided by a common language and all that.

[AvatarVecna]

Honestly what makes these things seem implausibly unlikely to me is just the sheer scale of things.

Spoiler

Show

Deus and Sydney being on the same block is kinda long odds, but they're astronomically huge compared to the odds that Deus and Sydney would be on the same livable sphere at all. There's some 11 billion potentially-habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars in our galaxy alone; if Deus was randomly teleporting to one, and Sydney was randomly teleporting to one, the odds that both ended up on the same habitable planet are 1.21 quintillion to 1. To give that number a tiny bit of perspective, if you randomly teleported 1.21 quintillion people to the surface of the sun, and if they all somehow survived standing on the surface of the sun, each one of them would have a whole 5 m² of personal space. This is equivalent to a circle around you with a radius of ~126 centimeters, or ~50 inches...so unless you and your immediate neighbor are both rather short, if you extended your arms your fingertips could touch...and that's happening all over the entirety of the sun. And these odds get monumentally worse if we just say "potentially-habitable planets in the Milky Way" (which now includes those orbiting non-Sun-like stars, raising the total to ~40 million), and they get immeasureably worse if we open it up to the rest of the universe (~50 sextillion).

Assuming this Dyson Sphere is around a star of similar size to our own (if being built far enough away to not get melted by it, making the area bigger and meaning more distance between those average random teleportations), the odds that Sydney and Deus would both end up on this sphere at the same time have got to be astronomically smaller than the odds that (if we assume they are on the same sphere) they happen to be within a block of each other. "Within a block of each other on the same Dyson Sphere" is extremely coincidental, but it's significantly less of a coincidence than "within a Dyson Sphere of each other in the same universe"...or even "in the same galaxy", TBH. To quote a great toon: "it's a big universe/and we're not".

Now of course, neither of them was randomly teleporting: Deus has been setting up some kind of trip like this for awhile, and this makes sense as a destination. The odds that Sydney's orb apparently comes with Google Maps Space Edition are pretty decent, and the odds that a major trade hub like this is somewhere in the search history. But the most recent stop? They got to Earth somehow - what, did they fly there the normal way, instead of taking the Wormhole express? I dunno, I can believe that a trade hub like this is in the history, but that it's the latest entry feels contrived, particularly since we still don't know the origin of the orbs (and therefore Dave can write things however he wants to suit the story). But because that's what the story needs so Sydney isn't irreparably lost in the universe by randomly wormhole-tunneling across it, that's what happened.

Honestly...the odds of English-speaking aliens on the Dyson sphere, and english-reading signs isn't unsupported by the comic thus far. As far as the comic is concerned, there's quite a few aliens that live on Earth, or visit it as tourists, or leave valuable alien artifacts just sitting around in the ocean apparently. Having signs on the Sphere in English just means there's probably enough humans who visit that there would be (and you'd think if that were the case, there's probably signs elsewhere in other Earth languages). There's two contrivances here that seem too big to really dismiss if I wanna take the story seriously: the first is similar to the above, in that it's weird how either signs in english are extremely common (indicating much more traffic here from earth than the comic would imply), or that Sydney happened to end up in one of the few places with a sign in English and she just happened to nat 1 her Perception at the worst moment (which gets into the "being at the right point on the sphere" odds discussed before).

But the larger contrivance is sorta build on something somebody mentioned when this first came up: when beings/organizations/aliens at this technology level are regularly visiting earth...why hide their presence? If this Dyson Sphere is populated with enough people that there's a few dozen within a block of Deus during the previous comic just by happenstance, then that implies some serious population numbers in the galaxy as a whole. Even if the Earth wouldn't get invaded per se, has no one tried to economically exploit this? Like, if we in our modern time had machines that led to an alternate-universe Earth where everybody is still using swords and armor, it's like if nobody ever tried to go over and teach them to make guns, or teach them about medicine and infections, or even like...learn about them more directly? It's possible there's a highly-capable (and highly-numerous) space police enforcing The Prime Directive, but even in Star Trek every time they bring up Directive 1 it's to talk about how they need to break it this one time.

...I dunno. This just makes the comic operate on a much larger scale, that it becomes difficult to care about the stakes as much. If the reason the experts on Earth (including Dabbler) couldn't make sense of the orbs was because aliens are so rare that little is known about them, it would imply that in the comic, life is (cosmologically speaking) extremely rare, and all the more precious for that rarity. But this...

...Deus may be the richest man on Earth, but for all we know he's the third-poorest person on this block (with only Vale and Sydney lower than him). So who cares?

[Sean Mirrsen]

-snip-

In my opinion the "not randomly teleporting" bit overshadows probability concerns. The Fracture is not a random dyson sphere around a pulsar, it really appears to be a local, at least, trading and travel hub. Whether you're a rich entrepreneur from the third planet of a nondescript yellow star in a backwater spiral arm of the galaxy (or however that quote goes) going for a shopping trip, or an alien explorer prepping a trip for a local tourist trap to hide some artifacts of substantial power, it's quite likely you're going to go through The Fracture.

Mind, the orbs did not have the causeway-travel feature unlocked previously. Nevertheless, the time-shifted trip through the garbled portal was still recorded in the travel log, corrupting the 'previous location' and making the icon fuzzy and indistinct. Which means, the previous owner of the orbs also traveled via portal - but not to Earth, which lacks, or lacked, a gate. The previous owner, then, had first gone to the Fracture, and from there had booked a ship, probably as a regular tourist, to Earth. It just makes sense as a destination in this situation.

But, yeah. Anthropic principle and all that.

As for English, I would assume that the people on the Fracture know it by virtue of Earth being said tourist trap - it was mentioned before, that thanks to the Veil, alien tourists are able to visit what would otherwise be a protected pre-FTL civilization, and if enough people - not necessarily humans - go to and fro, eventually some of the primary spoken language is going to leak through. That said, it's not going to be super common, or indeed super accurate - between translation corruption, alien script systems, and Earth likely not being the only common destination on the Fracture, I expect plenty of signs will be in native alien languages. If there's only some English mixed in with alien writing, if it's corrupted with odd-looking characters, heavily misspelled, and most importantly if you're an aliens-savvy person and aren't expecting there to be English writing, you're definitely going to miss it until the stars align and there's a perfectly recognizable sign that's right in your face and draws your attention.

[Ibrinar]

@AvatarVecna about exploiting it financially. Well earth has no tech to offer a society with easy spaceflight probably can mine planetary bodies, that doesn't make resources worthless, but worth much less. Art is an option if the intergalactic market is interested. If they have slavery maybe that too. but still after a certain tech level a low tech world has little to offer so that might make enforcement easier.