These trivia bits are generated randomly.
Raharrs are warm-blooded creatures and are accustomed to temperature range a bit warmer than Earth's.
"Dawn" class mothership and "Lake" class tankers are the only spacecraft in the Exploration fleet that can create artificial gravity while not under acceleration.
If a space ship accelerates at the same rate as it would in a free-fall under Earth's gravity (Otherwise known as "1G acceleration"), it can reach Jupiter from Earth in just under 6 days. It would need to flip in the middle of the travel, to start decelerating and enter the planet's orbit.
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.
The names of every species of the Alliance (besides Insectoids) are words taken directly from their respective native languages that they use to refer to themselves. They all have same translation:
"a human".
Azinarsi relationship to death is different from the rest of the civilizations of the Alliance: they do not care about it. Death would mean loss of information and experience gathered by that instance of a person's mind, though, and these two things are about the only valuables for an Uploaded mind, so Azinarsi try to avoid it when possible.
A lot of backgrounds and other elements in the comic are actually 3d models. It helps reduce the time each page takes to make.
Raharrs descended from the evolutionary branch that can be described as "apelike cats" by their evolutionary niche. Although initially carnivorous and solitary, they were forced to become omnivorous and form persistent packs during the latest of the rare ice ages of their homeworld, approximately 30 million years ago.
It takes more than a year to cross the Alliance space even with the fastest FTL drive.
Prior to becoming a webcomic, Leaving The Cradle was initially developed as a modification for Source engine, back in 2007. It was vastly different back then, much closer to the usual space opera look and feel, and the plot had nothing in common with the webcomic version, sharing only exactly two characters and nothing else.
Many homeworlds of the respective species are still divided into countries, but freshly established colonies on other planets are almost always monolithic and basically independent, since they sprawled from a single initial outpost, and time lag involved due to interstellar distances making remote management of the colony from a homeworld to be ineffective and frustrating at best.
There's no way to communicate faster than light. If you want to send your message to another solar system, your best bet is to use a courier spaceship. It can take even a month for it to finally reach the destination, but it still beats sending it as a transmission and expecting it to arrive decades or thousands of years later.
So far there hasn't been a single instance of a massive interstellar war. Due to the vastness of space, there's no territorial or economic gain from it. The presence of armed spaceships is still warranted for keeping space travel safe and for peacekeeping or policing missions since unexpected events or rogue states can still happen and might require force as a solution.
The Alliance space stretches for an impressive 16 thousand light years along the longest axis, and contains approximately twelve billion star systems. Despite that, 99.99% of those star systems weren't explored even by an automatic mapping drone yet, and the borders of the Alliance space are defined mostly by the reach of spaceships from the nearest colony or space station.
Comments (47)
I'm kind of puzzled that Dan can't come up with a more casual-seeming response. Doesn't seem hard to come up with replies that would seem to anyone else like he's just playing along with the prankster.
God, I wish this comic updated more often.
To tell whether it is Gharr's alien friends or US government you would need to involve Gharrr.... to phrase something that aliens would understand but US government would not. And even then you have problem that US government could be listening and come for you first.
The problem there being that you would have to know what the aliens alone would understand…which, being a human, you wouldn’t. You couldn’t even ask Gharr for help, because you couldn’t be sure that the army wouldn’t also know it.
The army can only know what the other shuttle crew members knew/know. They weren't privy to, for example, Gharr's conversations with Zane, or a number of other crew who are still aboard the fleet. Heck, Gharr could simply ask for the name/number/coordinates/shortscent/... of the exact room page 8 took place in.
They wouldn’t have to know anything, just where the message is coming from. If it’s coming from the area near where the shuttle crashed, they’d be interested.
No, they could authenticate using Gharr. He and the Trio Upstairs are old friends, which means they likely have all kinds of old in-jokes, media references and anecdotes they could call on. If Gharr asks for a selection of those, the military would have no way of knowing the answers, even in a worst-case scenario where they had fully interrogated multiple prisoners and cracked the shuttle's computer.
Methinks you underestimate the Army…on top of that, there’s always the likelihood that the government is keeping an eye on the Web for anything that might help them find Gharr, and they’d probably be able to reach him before his friends did.
Okay, this I gotta hear. How exactly will the Army divine the answer, if Gharr asked "We Are Aliens" what was that funny line Ahshu's character said during a space-D&D game two years ago, or asked them to summarize an obscure Iss novel Hekaht introduced him to?
The army wouldn’t have to divine an answer. They’d just have to determine if the message is referring to Gharr (which it is) and determine its point of origin (which probably wouldn’t be too hard to do). They would then see that it was coming from a location not too far away from the crash site. Mind you, this wouldn’t tell them Gharr was actually there, but it would likely attract their interest and warrant a closer look.
Oh yes. Be prepared for the awesome power that is Army Intelligence! (That's a joke!)
Gharr: [counters the amassed military intelligence by quoting the first line of the dumbest Raharr joke he can muster]
Well this kid is an even bigger moron than I thought if he doesn’t find it strange that aliens are using an online chat room.
wdym? He clearly is totally weirded out by this, but it's just too specific to write off.
What are the odds that an ALIEN RACE with NO prior knowledge of humankind would be able to identify the Internet, discern the purpose of the Internet, discern the purpose of a chatroom, learn to use it, and flawlessly communicate on it using the ONE language (out of THOUSANDS) that he happens to understand? This kid is either giving them WAY too much credit, or is just plain gullible.
What are the odds that a spacefaring race would not already know all about Internet and chatrooms, by virtue of having those things themselves? As for language, Quantum has already reported creating "adequate" translation modules, this post's language was selected simply by being the language of the forum, and Internet chatrooms are designed to be simple and user-friendly.
Once you eliminate transferable knowledge from their own culture, and stuff that's of general utility for examining humanity, there's really not much to do for this specific effort; just finding fringe/paranormal/alienist websites, writing the post itself, and monitoring for replies. And that's stuff you could write a bot for, only jumping in yourself when one of the bots pings you with news that someone has replied to it.
Pretty long odds, I’d say, since there’s no guarantee that they WOULD have such things, or that they’d be in a form similar enough to ours that they could recognize our version of them for what they are.
At least as far as the language barrier is concerned, you might want to remember that there's one of them aliens on the other floor who mastered the local language (might not be English) to almost the same level on his lonesome within what, hours? Couple days?, right in front of Dan's ears. (And, seen from our perspective, the fleet has been working on connecting to our nets since before he even set out planetward.)
Gharr isn't nearly that fluent, and it took him two weeks to get that far, but your point stands. Unlike the fleet, Gharr is actually having to learn the language with his meat brain, rather than crunching it on giant supercomputers, building an auto-translate program, and then just running their comments through that.
Yeah, but he’s had the advantage of being among us, and he still can’t speak the language very well at all. Although it is true that the fleet was connecting to our communications, there’s no reason for them to be using them in this way, and no way for them to know what the right language to use would be, and there’s no way they’d be able to speak it any better than Gharr would at this point. Everything about this message is a red flag.
While I agree with your last sentence (but for entirely different reasons!), the ability to read this board should readily answer a) what language is used on it, b) what it is about, and c) how to peruse it (since we tend to provide direct links to instructions for our own kin on those).
(And don't let Nea hear your statement about "advantage of being among us", lest she removes parts you didn't know you have. :-S )
You're right that the Trio Upstairs aren't likely to speak Protagonese even as well as Gharr, let alone better, but they are not in fact speaking it. They're using translation software, created using a starship-grade computer grid and an all-you-can-eat stream of sample text in every language spoken online. Gharr is skilled, highly motivated, and working exclusively on Dan's language of choice, but there's just no substitute for having enough bandwidth* and computing power to download and analyze entire libraries' worth of data in hours.
*No, I have no idea what the bandwidth of Quantum's leech-sat is, but my own personal Internet connection has a bit rate over a million times higher than speech, and theirs is surely orders of magnitude faster.
"Have you tried Area 51? If you hurry, you could arrive before the dissection!"
https://cdn.images.express....
Meanwhile, Gharr is busy thinking how he's going to get out of this situation...
This is like one of those old TV sitcoms!
I still think his best course of action is turning Gharr and himself in at the nearest military checkpoint.
Away from the math folks are doing to figure out what's what in terms of hard science practicalities (right on fellas), there is still the general uncertainty of what's really going on. Which actors are involved, and doing what. What does each know. Though certainly, one who can reference one entity by name is suggestive of who one might be....
We know that, but that's because we know Pronin. All Gharr knows is that the human military shot down his ship (expected behavior if they saw it, but still), and Dan thinks they're all professional psychopaths.
Probably true. Unfortunately for Dan, Dan is a bit of an idiot where such things are concerned, and so probably regards that as the wrong course of action.
You do realize you have to be careful and make sure yo are actually talking to the aliens right?.....RIGHT?
Ask for their names.
... no, wait, 1h and some is *SINGLE* trip! It's an imposter!! 8-o
78 minutes two-way = 39 light-minutes = ~700 million kilometers, which is well within the range of Jupiter's distance from Earth (588-968 gigameters)
AI alien doing the interfacing with human internet, and likely faster than light travel... that also gives way more flexibility if required. A tiny probe could be located closer than the main fleet with enough of AI to do the conversation, and/or act as a relay to main fleet in some sort of faster than light communication. (If you can travel faster than light you might be able to communicate faster too).
[Its a lot easier to interface with human internet from much closer to earth than jupiter... with something similar to a human microsatellite, being so tiny it could be as hard for humans to spot as the main fleet at jupiter]
They have a probe closer by, but FTL communication is effectively reduced to sending messengers by FTL travel, because reasons.
They don't have FTL comms, they're using laser links. Quantum attached a parasite probe to one of our biggest telecommunication satellites, and has been working through that. I imagine that it's a pretty powerful computer in its own right, and semi-autonomously exploring the Internet using a variety of software bots. For communicating with the fleet, it's probably sending back both the results of specific jobs Quantum gives it, and a stream of "big data" for things like language-crunching and trend analysis. Quantum in turn would be sending back updated translation modules so the bots can actually read what they see, and orders to check out specific things, as well as new customized bots.
Not necessarily. It can take up to 50 minutes for a signal to travel from earth to Jupiter. The average time is actually 42 minutes.
...yes, 39 light-minutes is "within the range" of 32 to 53.
Actually, Jupiter is probably a bit closer than 39 light-minutes at the time of this exchange, since whoever's typing probably took at least a couple minutes to get back to their keyboard and compose a reply. Unless it's Quantum.
If it’s the Raharr, it would probably be Quantum.
Hmmm, 1h18 round trip time, that seems to fit The Real Ones™ ...
Inbetween, LOL guy stole the timestamp from two posts earlier X-D