Grrl Power #1421 – Tinkocalypse?
I know what you’re wondering. If Gaxgy has a treasure hoard, and he frequents a station that has several “Petty Gold” lockers, wouldn’t he just clean them out each time? Well, the answer is simply that he’s allowed to grab a handful each time he drop by, same as everyone.
It got me thinking, if dragons are attracted to gold because it’s valuable, what would they do in a post scarcity society? I guess their hoard might shift to something else valuable, like information. But I don’t know about a dragon sitting on top of a pile of thumb drives, so maybe instead they’d be a librarian, shushing everyone who wants to check out their collection of rare books? I dunno. It’s a cool visual, but I feel like there’s more to the “dragon like gold” than they’re greedy. Cause really, it’s not like the dragon goes into town to buy craft honey and swing by the butcher and knickknacks for the cave. They don’t have a need for money, they can eat a herd of sheep if they want and what’s the local constabulary going to do? So I keep going back to my theory that gold is pretty and clinky and used for nesting and impressing the ladies. But then, why would lady dragons hoard hordes? Of course, there’s no reason a lady dragon can’t enjoy having a clinky pile of gold and gems to roll around on. Maybe if it’s a mating thing, they horde so they can brutally reject any guy with a small one. (Insert joke here about lady dragons being just like lady… ladies.)
Anyway, on to stuff about this page. Showing a “Super Smart” a bunch of alien technology seems like one of those force multiplier situations. I did like in Endgame when Rocket told Stark to calm down, that he was only a genius on Earth. But Stark was able to accomplish a lot starting from Earth tech levels and infrastructure. And also, Rocket, you’re a genius raccoon-GELF thing, but you’re not rolling around in a suit of nanobot armor that allows you to fly and shoot laser beams from a bottomless energy source. But each genius to his own. My point is, what would Stark or Reed Richards or uh… another Super Genius… Man, I’m blanking out. I was trying to think of an evil super genius, but honestly, most of them are either pretty dumb or are simply one hit wonders. Doc Oc made wiggly tentacle arms that interfaced with his nervous system and could move in ways that human limbs don’t. That’s fucking impressive. But then he kind of just… robbed banks and fixated on the fact that Spider-Man kept whooping his ass. Green Goblin made a flying little bodyboard thing. It’s the size of an open pizza box, and can carry a human being, no, at least two human males. I’m sure there was a scene where he was kidnapping Mary Jane while towing Spidey behind. That’s fucking impressive. But then he uses it to fly around tossing goblin-themed grenades and… rob banks, I assume. Yeah, I know, golden/silver age comics weren’t always the deepest analysis of the social-economic motivations of super villains. But still.
What was my point… Oh right. So what happens if Reed Richards or Stark or Doctor Doom got a month to study Nidavellir. (The Star-Forge used to create Stormbreaker.) I’m sure there have been plenty of examples of super smarties getting their hands on alien tech, but it never really caused any significant shifts in power levels or Earth’s tech level.
We’ll see what comes of Digit getting elbows deep into a Starforge.
Kobold Sydney vote incentive! Is finally done!
So… you know, check it out. Oh, and as usual, Patreon has a scales only version.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Once again, Syd is my spirit animal, and this frightens and concerns me.
I know exactly how you feel about that.
I’d be willing to bet that the audience for this comic has a percentage of ADHD or ADHD adjacent peeps that is substantially higher than the general population.
Doctor Doom.
Lex Luthor. Genius to the nth degree.
Braniac
Doc Doom is a decent example; He ran countries, not robbing banks and had his heart set on owning the world, maaaybe the universe after that.
And in a similar way, Number Two from Austin Powers, he’s a shrewd businessman, and legally makes billions while preserving the evil image of the company.
It’s just that Dr. Evil gets in the way…
panel 2 speech bubble seems like Digit is talking instead of Syd.
I realize trying to keep artwork clean, maybe just me as I jsut woke up
Bringing Digit out here feels more and more like one of the worst mistakes Maxima ever made. =_=
I am more concerned about her hands than anything she could have learned or create with harpoons.
A proper Himbos has to be big and dumb, it’s the law.
Kronk is that?
Kronk is practically the definition of a himbo.
He also has to be *kind*.
Big and dumb: Jock
Big and kind: Hunk
Dumb and kind: Decent man
All three: Himbo
Maybe dragons collect memories and stories along with the shinies. The hoard of a space pirate, the chalice of a warlord, a golden maiden that can down a Fel starship with one hand (or a painting of her as a proxy). Just grabbing some readily-available, mass-produced-in-a-star-furnace gold doesn’t have any lore or sense of conquest or triumph behind it. Young dragons are all about the gold and get whatever they can in order to quickly build a hoard, but with age comes wisdom, and in a galactic society in which gold is no more valuable than granite (probably even less, since granite is composite and therefore more difficult to synthesize than a pure element), dragons learn that quantity is not all there is. Ironically, they sorta reach the “the real treasure are the friends we made along the way” conclusion; more specifically, the real treasure is the epic journey behind the acquisition of the treasure itself (but also the treasure itself, of course; you still need to add to the hoard).
There’s a good reason why Dragons love gold.
Although a metal it is very ductile (soft) and has the property of reflecting heat, which makes it ideal as a bed/bedding for any Dragon over a certain size.
We all want to sleep on something that’ll support our weight yet is also soft, while wrapping ourselves up to keep us warm through the night, and it’s the same with Dragons.
Came here to comment exactly that. I like how they described it in the Flight of Dragons, “because dragons accidentally ignite/shred ordinary bedding materials, they need a soft metal and gold is the most comfortable for them”.
Flight of Dragons is a classic, isn’t it?
Actually, gold is one of, if not the, most conductive of metals. Almost anything would retain heat better.
It’s mostly impressively conductive at high temperatures, which is what we’re dealing with here(copper is better at cold conduction)
I would change it around and say while humans wrap themselves in warm blankets dragons need to cool themselves(they’re way too big to not be hit by the square cube law), while they sleep.
NASA wrapped the Lunar Landers in Gold Mylar because it reflects heat and prevented the Lander’s rockets from freezing during Lunar night.
One of the hypercars, possibly the Veyron, has gold leaf on the bulkhead between the engine and passenger compartments to keep the engine’s high heat away from the passengers and driver.
Gold is excellent at reflecting heat, especially Infrared and Radiant heat.
That is science.
The memory idea has merit.
The dragons in the old tales seem to have an eidetic memory for each thing in their hoard. Not horde, that’s something else. Unless you also collect warriors, and have a whole lot of them.
For example, the dragon Beowulf fought got mad because someone stole a cup. Mind you, it was bejeweled, so maybe it was memorable as a result.
The hoards are specifically about memories in one of my settings. There are only a very few dragons; they are the last remnants of an ancient shapeshifting race that got caught up in a war too big for them, and pooled their powers to transform their greatest champions into dragons to defend their last strongholds. The dragons were powerful and impossible to kill, but the enemy simply swarmed them until they were fully engaged, then poured around them to destroy their cities. Unable to die or transform back, the dragons now collect all the mementos of their people they can find, clinging to a past that is inevitably crumbling into dust.
those are called dolls, uh, action figure
Syd, if I had a big cuddly partner, I would probably do the exact same thing. Also, the more I see Digit, the more I grow enamored of her tech-head adhd
I mean, Stark’s armor does go through multiple iterations, with the last one being nanotech that can be a simple hoodie. That’s pretty impressive.
I was literally thinking “Thaaaaaat’s concerning when Gadg… er, Digit made her evil face, well before I read the final panel. XD
Lex Luthor is a super genius, it’s just rarely pointed out by anyone except him and he’s such an arrogant asshole that it’s easy to miss that he really IS as smart as he claims.
My favorite moment was in Allan Moore’s Swamp thing where the bad guys pay Lex one million Dollars for a Ten minute consultation to find a way to try and kil Swampy, sorta worked too.
Stay within the safe confines of the MCU and don’t delve into past comics to discover the crazy stuff Reed Richards and Doctor Doom have been into. Nidavellir is nothing to them.
Just one technology Doctor Doom has perfected is the Power Siphon, with which he successfully took the power from the Silver Surfer, Galactus and from a Watcher. In the cases of Silver Surfer and the Watcher he was thwarted by Reed Richards.
One counter I’ve seen to the “Reed Richards is Useless” meme (in that his inventions never seem to actually impact the setting–“unstable molecules” alone should have revolutionized space travel, but all of the shots featuring ‘normal’ astronauts show them in the usual bulky spacesuits real-world NASA uses, as just one example) is that he WOULD be a world-changing figure, except that he has to spend 99.99% of his waking hours countering whatever batshit insane notion Doom has come up with in the last week.
Is it me or are Digit’s thumbs backward in the second-to-last panel?
I think it looks that way because her palms are facing down. A bit hard to see.
I hope this doesn’t mean that Digit isn’t going to go rouge on Archon… Sydney worries me but Digit straight up scares me. Her love of stabby chains alone reminds me of pin-head…
I figure he’d be like The Collector (Taneleer Tivan) from the MCU or Kivas Fajo from ST:TNG episode “The Most Toys”. Gaxgy would have a hoard of unique items, things that are extremely specialized or where there’s limited quantity. He’d have the Ark of the Covenant, a Northern White rhino, the four stones from “The Fifth Element” (or even Leeloo herself), an honest politician, etc. He’d be the person you’d go to if you were looking for something so specialized that only he’d have it or at least be able to point you in the right direction. In exchange for that knowledge you’d have to give him the item when you’re finished with it
Or Trazyn the Infinite from WH40k.
But isn’t it cannon that Reed actually IS sitting on a huge array of world changing technologies that he just doesn’t release because he’s scared of what they’d do to society?
The evil geniuses don’t want to share, and the good geniuses are afraid to. All the comic book social progress comes from the simply amoral geniuses…
They’re to afraid in those stories to let the world be that different from our own.
Giant war robots running around and a secret civilization is one thing, but society as a whole getting certain tech, would probably ruin some of the stories they may want to tell.
Let’s go with a trans story for instance. In Star Trek, one can quite literally change one’s DNA from male to female (or female to male) and really just be as hot as they want. Miracles of medical tech. Even Picard’s baldness is said to be a character choice, as in the future they don’t care about such things.
Going to be hard to do such a trans story when the tech is there to just leave someone going “Oh. Well. You ARE now.”
Guess one could come close with a “But you weren’t born.” but it probably wouldn’t hit the same?
Lower Decks showed the Federation may not need physical wealth, but looks like the Orion’s not being in the Federation, they still have a wealth system, so when an Orion in the federation, who’s family could use the wealth that the federation was just going to destroy, she took it and gave it to her family to restore them to were they were.
I thought X-Men having their resurrection protocols in their Krokoa era, was dumb. It took away the worry of death and really it really had to jump through hoops to say “Oh no. We’re not clones. We’re the real deal still.” when every other story that did the same thing, it was still a clone :p
Reed and the FF never run out of money because he is being PAID NOT TO release his society-upending inventions. He may USE them for the world’s benefit if necessary, but they don’t get out of his hands.
That pretty much makes Richards a villain. If he’s sitting on a cheap source of clean energy or, hell, even just really efficient batteries just because it would disrupt the economy, he’s basically choosing to let people die in poverty rather than upset the billionaire class.
Not if the batteries in question could be easily adapted to make, say, Stun Guns capable of killing everyone in a 15 ft radius. Or if rather than releasing some crusty acid dust, leaving them in your Walkman too long opens up a portal to a dimension full of ravenous energy monsters.
Half the FF’s tech adventures are some variation of “unintended side effect of Reed’s latest invention!” and those are just the ones he didn’t identify before they happened.
I think there’s even a DC/WildC.A.T.S. storyline about just how drastically society was impacted by a AA battery that didn’t run out of power. Total “want of a nail” level butterfly effects.
Deus hit the nail on the head when he told Maxima “your job is to protect the status quo.”
PS238 had a fun take on why the metasavants’ tech didn’t often get used by society in general–product development can’t keep up. There’s a little scene where a representative from NASA is talking to Herschel Clay, the shop teacher at the school…who also happens to be the billionaire inventor and owner of Clay Industries, one of the world’s top R&D firms. The NASA rep is there to plead with him to slow down, because every time they start to get near proof-of-concept using a new piece of tech, he sends them something so superior to his last idea that their current work gets shelved and they start over with the new thing. Everything created by a metasavant is obsolete before it can even get into production. (Not literally–the setting does have some substantial tech jumps over the real world because of companies like Clay Industries that have learned to ignore the instant obsolescence issue.)
Honestly that sounds like an issue with NASA’s management in that storyline.
“Oh. This thing we’re working on is awesome, but now obsolete? Shelve it!” is a terrible idea to begin with. You finish the one. You either work on the new at the same time or you don’t worry about it (like you mentioned a company did).
In D&D dragons hoarding gold, jewels and magic artifacts have meaning.
When a dragons gets old enough to die of old age they consume their hoard and use it as fuel to transcend.
I always saw Dragons more as collectors. They don’t spend the gold, so it’s essentially worthless to them. They collect the pretty things, in fact i once put a Dragon into a D&D campaign who collected butterflies. ^_~
When it comes to the smartest people in Marvel there’s T’Challa (Black Panther), his sister Shuri, AMadeus Cho, Bruce Banner (The Hulk), Hank McCoy (Beast) and Riri Williams (Ironheart), plus the villains Bentley Wittman (The Wizard), Julius (Mad Thinker), Ivan Kragoff (Red Ghost), Elihas Starr (Egghead) and George Tarleton (M.O.D.O.K.), among others.
When it comes to genius, Hank Pym is certainly up there as well. He invented Ultron… which goes to prove that Intelligence and Wisdom are really two different stats.
There’s also Abner Jenkins (The Beetle/MACH-I through MACH-X), Peter Parker (Spiderman) has been shown to be pretty damn smart several times, Paul Norbert Ebersol (The Fixer/Techno). Really, the Marvel Universe is overflowing with people who should have absolutely made the tech-level take off like a rocket. Pretty much any tech-based hero or villain who made their own equipment.
–BOOK FORT!!
The problem is that science and technology don’t come from a vacuum. Sure, visiting the starforge will give Digit a lot of ideas, but that is what they’ll remain, ideas. Even if you take Leonardo da Vinci and show him, for example, a car, he will not go back to his time and invent a internal combustion engine, because he don’t have the basic knowledge and materials to do it, chemistry, metallurgy, engineering, etc. Steam engines, or things very similiar to them, existed for thousands of years in some form or other, but where developed in that specific historical moment because someone had developed the metalurgical techniques used to forge cannons, that could be applied to build boilers that would not blow up under the constant pressure. That is why ancient romans didn’t have a industrial revolution even if they knew how steam worked.
It always annoyed me the trope give a smartphone to (very smart historical figure) and you’ll get super computers X centuries before their time. It doesn’t works like that.
It’s comics, so powers make up for a lot of that. Yeah, she’ll come up with multiple things that will be inspired by her trip here.
Some of them may even not involve harpoons in any way! (Optimism, I know).
OTOH, it’s comics, so things never change as a result of the tech that comes out of their labs. Yeah in the movies, Stark industries powers New York City (or state, I forget) with an arc reactor. Does this mean anything on the street? No.
Sure, the tech hoard dumped on NYC by the failed invasion gets gathered up. But mostly it’s used as the origin story for villains. Or something to equip the “super-cops” with.
Story-wise it makes sense. Comics are generally about “today, except with capes”. Moving the tech base forward more than a little means it’s no longer about “today”, which makes it harder to write stories that can be wrapped up in 20 pages (120 panels or so).
The few people that try (Adam Warren is one) tend not to be popular.
I don’t expect much backstory about the capes in this comic either as a result. It would be really hard to explain how you have capes (even if they’re rare), but history ends up being exactly the same as in our world.
Pretty much all the urban fantasy stuff has this as an elephant in the room that everyone pretty much ignores, or at most mutters “something something, evil corporations, something” and *then* ignores it.
The shit these alien invaders leave is designed super-humanly to kill and hurt. Until some genius manages to modify one heavily enough that it can’t be with civilian resource brought back to that state anymore these things are much too dangerous to non-explicitly trusted and guarded individuals handle. Yes, even if it can cure all diseases, solve climate change and allow for interstellar communication. Without checks on what you do with this super gun nobody should be able to touch them.
I assure you that any sensible real life government would squirrel away or destroy all sporadic advanced alien weapons left over from invasions they can get their hands on.
Nobody can truly reproduce that shit, so using it is most often the best way to get power out of them and the government needs to spend their most valuable resources to counter it.
To maintain their monopoly on violence governments need to have to be indisputably strongest and holding the largest stockpile of magic guns in the world really makes a difference. They already try it in with low tech guns. Wars and lack of trust in government tend to screw with this an alien invasion would too, which explains why terrorists(super villains) and organized crime have access to this, but only to USA citizens it makes sense to let everybody hold on to their super advanced alien guns.
Also the military probably wants too hold on to them for when super-man isn’t around to safe them and the aliens attack again.
It would take more than 10 years to secure this tech to the level that citizens can be allowed to hear about it again, not use it.
Computers were state secret for decades, simply because they could be used to intercept and decode communication.
Can you imagine what a those alien weapons might do.
Although it’s certainly true that there is a hard limit to what information alone can achieve.
People also underestimate human inventiveness and the ease of lab scale results compared to large scale results.
Leonardo Da Vinci did have the knowledge, tools, materials and skills for an internal combustion engine, just not the high tech version you use today.
Steel was back then expensive, but achievable, fire existed, gunpowder was used to make all kind of explosions and his designs display more than enough knowledge of mechanics to be able to drive an axis on it.
What he wouldn’t have been able to do was make a million of them.
The Romans didn’t have an industrial revolution for a large part, because they hadn’t yet been introduced to electricity and mechanical systems can’t handle as much industry without good lubrication, which they didn’t have.
Meaning they could’ve build a steam engine without extra information, but it would’ve broken pretty fast.
With extra information about lubrication or even electricity they could’ve build quite a lot.
Boiler explosions aren’t a problem for simple steam engines, since you can just vent undue pressure in the atmosphere(the reason why pans boiling water don’t explode).
Same is with the smartphone the internals of smartphones teach all kinds of with simpler tech reproducible things about electricity, also having a high spec calculator available for your calculations bypasses all kinds of difficult manual they used to do back than.
I don’t tell you that information is enough to copy the tech exactly, but it really allows one to skip many hard steps. Just ask the Soviets and especially the Chinese 80 years ago. Also when you have your crappy reproduction others can build further on your documentation and work, because as you said science and technology are build on old work and the more you have the more you can make.
Maybe your super smart historical might not have reproduced the phone, but their apprentices might with the lessons and tools from their master.
Also super computers are much easier to produce than phones, they’re just a large bunch of connected computers, while phones need to be small, wireless and mobile. Collosus was a super computer.
Digit might not be able to exactly reproduce the fancy alien tech, but she can learn a lot of it and use that knowledge for all kind of mind boggling feats and come a lot closer.
If digit build with the knowledge she got here a crappy ftl starship, she would be considered a hero of the USA she would have also not be close to reproducing this facility.
You know we already have designs lying around for perpetual machines that produce infinite positive and negative energy when provided with access to negative energy(they were not long ago sold a cheap ftl ship to reverse engineer and they fly warp drive).
If she managed to build a gold fab like this facility apparently has she would revolutionize the electronics industry and the market.
Heck if she managed to build the battery in Sydney’s glasses except 10000 times as big she would revolutionize renewables.
If she managed to build a weaker version of the black hole containment machine she appears to have observed from the pictures Cern might have some anti-matter left to fill it with.
Her increased knowledge of quantum mechanics implied at the middle right could allow her to revolutionize computing.
Her increased knowledge of the internals of planets with an active core implied on the upper right could allow her to p-waves to spy on Deus, tune out magma streams and communicate with people at the other side of the planet without bouncing around the planet, build vulcano lairs mine rare earths from the core of the planet itself and revolutionize geothermal energy.
The rubber duck at the lower right implies she has gained revolutionary insight in ocean streams and thus the ocean, maybe enough to build underwater cities and facilities.
The contraption at the top-left appears to match Deus’s matter transmuter used to make advanced fighter jets.
Don’t forget without alien tech we’re already capable of making, transporting and containing small batches of anti-matter, detect self fired neutrino beams through the planet, use individual atoms as bits in register, fly into the sun and cool things to billionths of a grade above absolute zero.
We can’t yet use them for anything useful, but we can do them and the potential of these things on scale are clearly visible even now.
Unmatched energy storage, super fast, unobstructed and secure communication with the other side of the planet, super fast computation, Dyson sphere and exploitation of all kind interesting quantum effects.
Also don’t forget these people have access to all kinds of interesting supers.
Mass Hole can manipulate gravity, Maxima fires weapon grade explosions from her fingertips and Sydney can cross unimaginable distances.
The first example of a villainous gadget genius to come to my mind is Bakuda of Worm. All she would do with that sort of technology is to build bigger bombs, and honestly she doesn’t need the help.
The second to come to mind is Leet, from the same series, and frankly giving him access to a small, portable power source that’s not Tinkertech can only make it easier for his tech to stop accidentally exploding. But he could probably already build just about anything that can be found on the StarForge in any case… once, anyhow.
Basically any villian Tinker from Worm qualifies (There’s a few in Ward that get plenty of screentime. I really should go finish reading Ward, but I’m scared of the ending).
And SOP for everyone in Worm is “target the Tinkers first.” Tinkers are scary.
I’ve always thought that Uber’s power set had the greatest potential to be a Tinker of truly epic proportions if he had the mind set. Think about it. He can master any skill if he studies it a little bit. Including Tinker Teck.
Plus he could be a master of finances or any other skill to become a kickass supervillain.
I really want to read a fanfic where Taylor gets Ubers power set, meets Coil and realizes she could do this way better with a bit of common sense, and embraces her inner supervillian.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the skills to write such a fic.
My favorite theory for why Dragons Hoard Gold (aside from just “greed”) is that precious stones and metals conduct/attract magical energy. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with gemstones addorning wands and staffs, or just being straight-up-cursed, but gold and silver also (supposedly) are excellent etheric conductors, the same way they are excellent electric conductors.
And so by piling a whole bunch of gold ‘n stuff together it focuses latent etheric energies, which a dragon being an inherently magical creature can passively absorb, and that energy is what gives them the sustenance to hibernate for decades or centuries at a time.
Yes utlimately it’s still kinda “because magic said-so”, but its internally consistent with several standard fantasy tropes and helps explain why even Good-aligned dragons sit on a giant pile of wealth instead of giving it away to the poor or being reluctant to part with plot-critical macguffins even for well-intentioned adventuring parties, and why dragons get so inscensed if any part of it goes missing, and other stuff like that.
I feel like the reason the dragons have a ton of money is because of their age. They go down to town, raid it for food and money to spend in another town and fall asleep for a few centuries. When they wake up, they try to spend their money but get turned away because the currency doesn’t match the current era so they go raid a new kingdom for money, go back and buy what they were looking to buy then return for a few more centuries and the cycle keeps repeating so their hoard just keeps growing because their currency is useless in each era they wake up in.
So….Digit is going to the nearest Ladies Room?
Oh wait. TINKER!
Sorry.
Was Frix carrying a giant container of Hamburgers?
Rare delicacies from Earth.
He had a crate of Hamdingers. It’s a reference to the MST3K episode “Mitchell”. Nobody likes Hamdingers.
Gold is pretty much the perfect metal for space travel.
A little can shield most radiation while it will conduct electricity and is easy to manipulate.
Would be great for sensors and electromagnetic based mover drives. You’ve seen the pictures. It’s easy to understand what is used to make those UFOs fly.
Put a layer on any ship or habitat out there and you have an easier time living space.
Maybe Digit should give up on harpoons and move to, say…..weather dominators?!? Or a M.A.S.S. device?!?
Mysteries of Mythology over on YouTube did a great little video named Why do dragons hoard gold? which goes into the cultural and mythological history behind it. Highly recommended.
(I’d try to TL;DR it, but I don’t think I can do it justice.)
We’re living in a post scarcity society. Scarcity was always about the ability to eat and have shelter. Those were the things that were scarce – survival stuff. Nobody here does without unless they want to. Everybody gets a free ride if that’s all they want.
This is a post scarcity society. By definition. By action. By example.
Not what you thought it would look like, is it?
It’s also not going to last – I don’t think they ever do.
Entropy always wins and entropy always fights to the death.
This is an answer to “Tell me you live in a first-world country as middle-class or better without actually telling me.”
Basic necessities that must be freely available to everyone for this to be a post-scarcity society would be everything required to survive and reproduce. This includes nutritious food, potable water, clothing, shelter, and medication (both medicine itself and access to someone with the knowledge needed to know the correct medicine). Expanding this to functional survival adds education, communication, and data, but you’re limiting it to basic survival so I will also.
There are quite a few first-world countries, mostly European countries that lean toward socialism (Finland, Denmark, Iceland) that actually care about their citizens instead of corporations, that are truly post-scarcity. Both basic and functional survival.
But for the rest of the world (most of the Americas, Africa, Asia, most of Europe, and absolutely the USA is included) we aren’t anywhere close. People die every day because they can’t afford health care, or can’t afford utilities (heat stroke or freezing at home), or just straight starvation/terminal dehydration. Yes, there are government (constantly fighting against getting their funding cut) and charity organizations that provide as much as they can. I personally volunteer with an organization that helps do everything from helping install plumbing to supplying firewood for heating/cooking. But it isn’t enough for everyone.
No, planet Earth isn’t even remotely close to claiming a “post scarcity society”.
The sad thing is that we actually have the resources to be post-scarecity, but the people with the power prefer to hoard.
Remember when the UN handed Musk that plan he asked for to end world hunger for less than 1% of his wealth? And he told them “nah, don’t wanna”?
Want to hear the biggest Big Pharma conspiracy? That a shot of 13,000cc of vitamin C will cure EVERY known disease.
Doctors since the 1920s though the 1950s ran extensive tests on the effects of vitamin C and found out it cured every disease the subjected it to. So in order to keep making money they suppressed all research. This includes cancer.
They had a universal cure all that is easy to manufacture and cheap to make, and they suppressed it. Big Pharma is a trillion dollar a year indistry with the suppression of one piece of knowledge.
These kinds of conspiracy theories are the absolute stupidest and lamest of all. There is literally NOTHING stopping anybody from injecting themselves a shitton of ascorbic acid. You can both buy it, or synthesise it – it’s not that complicated – yeah, not a middle-school level thing, but not super complicated either. Or you can collect it using the old way, from fruits and vegetables. Multiple pathways available for you to get it without the “big pharma”…
It is clearly not hidden knowledge since you, a nameless nobody, know about it, so it is not suppressed. Yet, nobody does it – you included.
Why? Because it is bullshit and doesn’t work at all.
One IC explanation for why all those comic geniuses don’t affect the world at large (the real one is that the writers: a) don’t really think through the implications, and b) want the comic world to be pretty close to the real one)
Pseudotech. When the Green Goblin is flying on his board, it’s actually a super power. Basically nobody breaks in and steals the board out of police lockup once he’s arrested because basically nobody else can use it. Another Pseudotech user could, after spending some time with it… but then it’s running on that Pseudotech user’s power. And yes, a Pseudotech user CAN hand out their toys… but unless they’re given to another Pseudotech powered person, the maker needs regular contact with the device for it to keep working. Try to mass manufacture the stuff, and you find out that it doesn’t actually follow the laws of physics any more than Johnny’s flames: The copies stop working without Pseudotech users spreading themselves thun to make them work.
Or just lab tech and limited business sense for technical geniuses.
If your hoverboard is made of titanium, carbon nano tubes, wolfram and meteorite diamonds, only flies under specific atmospheric conditions only found in that city and every time you use it a different part breaks. It doesn’t matter how well it flies there won’t be twenty, because working and obtaining these materials on that scale won’t work, nobody wants it and maintaining it is too costly.
Making tech in mass, so that people actually want it is much harder than just making a POC.
Even the nuke the USA threw on Nagasaki wasn’t enough to convince the Japanese to surrender, they needed to lose two cities to believe it wasn’t a fluke.
Also just because I can build a hoverboard doesn’t mean I could market it or find investors. Tech skills aren’t taught in business school and business skills aren’t taught in tech school.
That’d work if it was one real genius. Not so much when it’s the green goblin, iron man, Mr. Fantastic, Mr. Freeze, Doctor Doom, Lex Luthor, and dozens of others. SOMEONE is going to lose control of the tech, and someone (not necessarily the same person, even) is going to figure out how to properly mass produce it… yet the settings are largely unchanged. Plus, of course, those cold guns straight-up throw a middle finger at the laws of thermodynamics.
If 99% of the ‘supergeniuses’ are actually using a super power of some stripe, it makes a lot more sense… and the handful of actual supergeniuses would get ignored (nobody bothers reverse engineering it because everyone important knows it’s not real tech due to the 99%).
Also: “And steal it out of lockup” – a LOT of villains, even tech villains, get arrested at various points. If the fuel for the board is super expensive, then it’s also going to be very valuable, and there’s lots of reason right there why that board isn’t staying in police lockup. Oh, and do you really think the formula in Spider Man’s web slingers is expensive? Peter’s broke.
I named those materials not, because they’re expensive.
I named them, because they’re expensive too work with at scale(raw titanium is actually pretty affordable)
This’s a communication mistake of my side I shall switch to cheaper, but still hard to refine materials.
Give the hover board a body of Thungsten, internals made of instrinsicly folded INOX and a lead coating.
Which is why Masamune in Worm broke the status quo. Worm tinkertech is what you call pesudotech, and his tinker speciality was that he *could* mass-produce it. Him teaming up with the “I combine other tinker’s designs” tinker, and, well, you get the best-equipped non-capes in the setting.
My Story on Dynamo mentions the Goblin’s board after one moment. The problem was the power source and cost of the elements used to power it. Turned out the thing cost a few thousand dollars a minute or something to operate, and was thus totally unfeasible unless you were a billionaire.
These limits don’t have to follow from artificially produced constraints. They could be the effect of real engineering challenges.
Batman’s grappling hook would just rip chuncks out of normal buildings, but if Gotham was by it’s primary real estate developer designed to accomodate grappling hooks it could work.
The Goblin only flies around his neighborhood maybe he mapped this neighborhood to the millimeter, so his fancy propulspropulsion system always knows what to push off of. Maybe he hasn’t developed an super efficient powersource and just littered his neighborhood with wireless charging points.
This is without considering the fact that none of these designs were made by people who even pretend to understand industrial production requirements. Industrial processes often sacrifice general applicability for scale.
Graphene can be made by sending electricity through literal trash. I just happens that this has to happen in a vacuum.
Peter Parker might not be rich, but he has access to an engineering university, with probably a few small scale vacuum chambers(nobody has large scale vacuum chambers, due to physics problems). He could cheaply infuse his webs with graphene, easily bypassing the strength of steel, yet he couldn’t do shit for a thousand of these systems.
Engineering is for big part knowing the world you operate in and adjusting your design to fit that mold and if you’re working in a specificly selected environment and “lab level tools and materials in an environment of my choice” enables many increadible papers every week’
These super geniuses managed to nearly clear step 1 of the npi framework wich has 6 steps.
https://www.sofeast.com/glossary/npi-process/
My theory as to why dragon hoard and sleep on gold is due to thermal distribution. Dragons constantly produce internal flame, which they expel every so often when awake (or when facing an enemy). This is a conscious action and stops the internal heat from building up too much.
When sleeping they can’t expel the flame, and so internal heat starts to rise. A hoard of gold acts as a giant heatsink to wick away the heat.
This also explains why they fly – they cannot sty on the gold pile continually, but flying causes a rush of high cold air along the body to help cool down.
The person who drew the third panel seems to have had fun. Haha
That would be… DaveB
This is like the “1% more autistic” meme. I love it.
Dragons might be attracted to gold and jewels because they stay shiny forever and a careful blast of low temperature flame will make for a good fire polish and clean any dust off without taking the shiny away. When you’re the almost indestructible apex predator it’s all about the shinies ;)
Value comes from rarity. If they are in a post-scarcity society (can’t actually happen), and dragons want physical objects with value, then they would be collecting antiques with solid provenance. You can’t get more rare than something that can’t be made.
So not librarians, but historians.
Reading your commentary about genius and tech levels, and unsure if this was canon or fanfic, but remember a story about Vandal Savage in DC comics, a literal cave man endowed with immortality and super intelligence, and his frustration with the fact that he’d figured out so much about the world, but still needed the infrastructure and technology to catch up with where his brain already was. Like, knowing HOW to build a computer in the 1400s doesn’t matter much if you don’t even have the materials to make wire much less circuit boards.
Or take smart phones. No one individual knows how to build an iPhone from raw materials to finished form, and how to build the equipment to build the parts for an iPhone. Shoot, there aren’t even any corporations that know how to do that. That’s why people are nervous about China invading Taiwan and accidentally burning TSMC to the ground.
Arise Darth Digit.
Digit may have learned a lot, but you know she’s going to just build another thing that launches harpoons instead of using it.
I’M sure they will be very shiny self guided harpoons that make Starbucks runs while pursuing a target,..