Latest blog post: Redraw of chapter 1 is happening (2024-05-11)

Author's comment:



Add Comment

* Required information
30000
Powered by Commentics

Comments (6)

Avatar
Visitor

very easy to describe everything you don't know as "anomalous"

Avatar
Senior

I wonder if that jar is human-built, or if it was taken from the ship and human stickers slapped on it.

Avatar
Senior

It's a human one. Perhaps I went a little too far with the design. =D

Avatar
Senior

There's an upper limit to how anomalous it can be, then, if you can store it in materials we can make (and transparent ones at that).

Is it just an unknown element or chemistry, or actual exotic matter?

Avatar
Senior

Scientists are still on the fence about this one. It looks like it is made out of atoms, but it refuses to behave like atoms do.

Avatar
Senior

Interesting. Our scientists, or their scientists?

Tangentially related, I had a ttrpg setting once where the deep lore was that fantastical metals like mythril and orichalcum did fall on the periodic table; they were particular isotopes of normal elements which attracted/manifested particles of magic, which radically changed their material properties.

Avatar
New

Element Zero! The mass effect! And of course it’s magenta — the color that doesn’t physically exist and is our brain throwing an error.

Speaking of no analog on the periodic table. Scientists did spectrographic analysis on the suspected “dark matter ring” around a number of galaxies (you know, the theorized extra ring of invisible matter that allows galaxies to rotate at the speed they do, which is impossible with observed data). A scan of dozens of galaxies revealed spectral lines that are previously unknown! Exciting stuff.

Avatar
New

Dark matter is "dark" because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic energy. It doesn't absorb light (which would produce absorption lines in spectra) or emit light (which would produce emission lines in spectra). The spectrographic analysis of dark matter rings appears to be looking for photons (units of electromagnetic energy) that might be decay (annihilation, breakdown) products of dark matter, specifically high-energy gamma rays.

Avatar
Senior

Nitpick: we think dark matter doesn't interact with electromagnetism. A few theories predict that it's just garden-variety dark.

Most of those still don't predict it to produce spectral lines, though, since they mostly talk about non-atomic, exotic forms of mass, like strangelets or tiny black holes.

Avatar
Senior

collected samples of [a substance]

Avatar
Senior

which [have] been only [theorized] to be possible

or if you prefer British spelling,
which [have] been only [theorised] to be possible

or even more alternately,
which [have] been only [theoretical or highly experimental]

Avatar
Senior

The Alien Technology he's talking about is a representation of their combined members knowledge so it exceeds that of each contributing race by some degree. And how much of that technology is secret even to the member race? Or too complex for many of the aliens to fully understand?

Avatar
Senior
Or too complex for many of the aliens to fully understand?


Our earthly technology is already mostly too complex for non-specialists to know how it works. futuristic tech will be even worse.

Avatar
Senior

Yes. Exactly what I meant by that. "Everybody knows" what an integrated circuit is, but only a select few could make one for a specific purpose, or even use one without the associated hardware to just plug it in.

Avatar
Regular

Ooh, this sounds like a fresh MacGuffin!
Makes me think of Elerium-115.

Avatar
Senior

This is likely that "hephrene" that Zane mentioned detecting in Jupiter.

Avatar
Senior

They'll probably use whatever they can to push the feelings in the right direction.






Share this comic



The author is against any kind of application of AI to his artwork.

TRIVIA
Insectoids in a lot of ways are the weird ones among the Alliance members. Besides having a completely unpronounceable name of the species, they have dextero amino acid biochemistry, which makes their food and biosphere to be inedible by the rest of the Alliance, and vice versa.