Grrl Power #1402 – Spacehole
It’s less that the FlyBall is blinking and shimmering and making noises like an agitated gerbil, and more that it’s doing… something. The visual are mostly for the audiences benefit, though if Sydney was paying attention, she would notice something going on. She has gotten used to being orbited by multicolored light sources though, so this isn’t enough to catch her attention.
As to Sydney’s question… Well, the reason I have Altus’s answer trail off the last panel is 1) an advanced space alien probably knows more about physics that we do. We like to think we mostly have a handle on stuff, but dark matter comprises about 27% of the universe, and dark energy accounts for about 68% of other… “stuff,” and we don’t know what that is either. So, we don’t know what 95% of the universe is made of, and we also haven’t married Newtonian and quantum physics, so it’s fair to say that there might be some significant surprises left for use to discover. Maybe instead of nickel-iron, most rocky planetary cores are tungsten, which would maybe make up for 2-3% of the dark matter. Or maybe a bunch of aliens thought it’d be cool to paint their planets Vanta Black and we just can’t see them.
BTW, “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” sound cool for sure, but it’s just a fancy way for scientists to say “we dunno.” It’d be like trying to recreate grandma’s holiday ginger cookies from taste and not being able to figure out what that last seasoning is, and calling it “Dark Spice.” It’s cardamon, BTW.
The second reason for the trail-off is, I just have no idea how to answer it. It seems to me that wormholes would be weapons of mass destruction. Like they destroy actual mass, and lots of it. But that model of a wormhole that shows two pieces of graph paper being connected by a funnel is obviously such a wildly simplistic view of what’s going on that any speculation I made based on that would be like trying to recreate grandma’s cookie recipe after shoving one of the cookies up my ass. Which wouldn’t give me an informed starting point regarding the ingredients, is what I’m saying. Unless the human rectum just happens to be an excellent platform for ferreting out cardamon. I wouldn’t know. I would be surprised to learn if that’s the case, but I think it’s safe to assume our crinkle stars aren’t cardamon truffle hogs.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Would you like to write that commentary over again? Sober this time?
The problem I’ve got with the whole “wormhole instant travel” thing is just symmetry. Something gets to experience that time passage, so you might come out 300 years later on a 300 light year trip, or maybe you just get to pass the time for 300 years, and your great great great great grandkids are the ones finishing the trip. There’s “t” and “tau” but you should either have to pass the space or the time.
The speed of light limits how fast you can travel _within space_, not how fast you can travel by manipulating the shape of space. Presumably when two points are connected by a wormhole you can step between them instantaneously, even though it will take years for the light of you leaving to reach the place you arrived (if it travels the long way).
Imagine, you are in a large building with staircases connecting the floors in a way that to go from an even floor number up to an odd floornumber you have to take the south stairwell, if you are going from an odd floornumber up to an even floornumber, you use the staircase on the north side. From top floor to ground floor is a walk of two miles total.
A wormhole lets you slide down the firefighter pole in the middle through all the floors from top stright to bottom. It is a lot faster in speed per yard than anybody can run the regular way, plus it is also shorter distance to cover.
Another analogy is, it’s kind of like a lot of museums. Normally, you get to walk from the entrance through the museum along a path that takes you through every part of the museum without going back through any exhibits, and it takes hours. But if you’re at the entrance and you want to get to the exit real fast, you can just duck under the rope divider and step over there, because they’re right next to each other.
… New “Fast Travel Waypoint” detected…?
The flashing is a warning light. Sydney plays D&D. She knows what happens if you put an opening into extra-dimensional space into a different opening into extra-dimensional space. That is what is happening here. Her wormhole generator is entering a wormhole created by a different wormhole generator.
Well, unlikely to be that, otherwise it would have happened already the first time Cora picked her up from the station.
The planets painted Vanta Black are normally referred to as MACHOs (massive cosmic halo objects), and unfortunately they’re pretty much ruled out as an explanation for dark matter. No matter what color you paint your planet/black hole/whatever, you can’t stop it from being visible when it passes between an observer and a distant light source, blocking some of the light. We’ve watched for this sort of eclipsing, and it’s not nearly common enough to account for all that mass.
No, these days MACHOs are out and WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) are in.
If the Flyball is “listening” does that mean Sydney can unlock things by learning how they work rather than needing to upgrade to them?
I mean, in game terms studying would be a potential source of *experience* points, possibly for a specific skill rather than general attributes.
I suspect the Flyball is “listening” to the curvature of spacetime as it is taken through a wormhole.
Whether it learns from that or is only somehow affected by it remains to be seen.
I didn’t see the fly ball do anything special even on a reread after I read DaveBs comments. It just looks like it glows as usual. Maybe the art is a little too subtle.
If you zoom in you can see a sparkly edge (or halo?) around the fly ball. And they only glow when Sydney is interacting with them, but the flyball is currently glowing without any interaction.
Exactly this.
The indication isn’t in the text – it’s in the imagery.
The extra glow, the wormhole/portal effect inside the orb. The way the panel zooms in on the orb to make the effects clearer.
(Whether the extra detail in Sydney’s eyes is important I’m not sure – that might just be DaveB adding detail as the camera gets closer. Maybe.)
This is all speculation of course – I might be wrong. Maybe the orbs do only need the bearer to learn of something intellectually in order to advance. But my opinion is otherwise, hence my comment.
Presumably we’ll get some explanation soon. Hopefully in the next strip.
Harem is getting a little horny. The one on Altus’ left ear.
“Newton, Einstein, Hawking… we prove ’em wrong every time we go out for groceries.”
I’ve seen mention of each of Harem’s copies have nicknames in the past – what are those nicknames again and which copy do they match? Also which copy is Harem “saving” for a future husband?
Unofficially, Berry for the one deemed the ‘default’, or at least the one with the least mods (Strawberry hair)
Gothamer for, well, the goth-looking one (long black hair with purple, and skull hairclip)
Blondini for the blonde
Bodie for the Military-Punk body (short hair, purple with a pink patch)
Abbey for the white hair and glasses
As for the one saved, some readers have speculated it might be a hidden body not-as-yet revealed
When’s the last time Sydney updated the balls?
The idea of wormholes as weapons of mass destruction I think was interestingly done in the Farscape movie The Peacekeeper Wars.
Probably where Sydney got the idea. Her knowledge of physics may be basic but her knowledge of nerd trivia is encyclopedic.
Brand new sentence that last one. Pure poetry.
Oh dear. Sydney’s going to have to put another pip in The Fly Ball again, isn’t she? Those things are kinda taking over their own development, aren’t they?
I strongly suspect Sydney’s about to get a new upgrade.
The best, and so far only of it’s kind, depiction of Wormholes in fiction I’ve seen was in the show Reboot. Wormholes aren’t… holes, they’re 3-dimensional, they’re spheres, but instead of having a surface, they show the other side of the wormhole, but inside-out.
Reboot didn’t have the gravity lensing, just the aperture.
There’s an excellent video on youtube depicting passing throught a physics-accurate (to current knowledge) wormhole in space.
That is also how wormholes are depicted in Robert Forward’s novel Timemaster. Be warned that Forward is a physicist first and a writer second.
So, um, about the covering planets in Vanta Black:
1. Actually, it’s something darker than Vanta Black we haven’t discovered yet.
2. It’s really amazing at pulling in solar energy.
3. Yes, it still does black body effect, but there’s another trick that really helps with that a lot. See, you then use something like a diode (well, actually a massive matrix of them) to transport that energy you just pulled in through a bit of otherwise hard vacuum and then go through another shield layer, this one highly reflective. And now you’ve trapped all that energy inside.
4. We’re not going to hear from these guys. Sure, they can get our signals, but them sending us signals? They’d need to give up energy for that, and that’s not part of their plan.
One of the things about a wormhole connecting two distant points of space isn’t that it squishes the space between Origin and Terminus, but rather it connects them through a dimension beyond the accepted 3 we experience.
I know that some theories and hypothesis would call that which exists outside our accepted 3 dimensions “Bulk Space”, or at least they a couple of decades ago. After all, terms do sometimes change with new ideas and newer iterations.