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 (16)
Wiki's and Google are not history, they are what is wanted to be seen. Controlled and edited to fit the narrative. I am really enjoying the story line and the author is doing a very good job of putting every day things in the story. Be well and prosper Biomech.
Dan, log in under your own account, please.
Love this shutdown of "Humans are the real monsters", every species is going to have a dark spot in its history, or multiples of them. It's the sad part of being sapient, knowing that your kind has done bad.
Gharr's response that his own kind has done its dark deeds is in a way, hopeful. That they can rise above their past to be better, so can we. It also makes them easier to relate to knowing that they're not some all perfect beings like our human friend here is expecting them to be.
"Humans suck!"
"So does everybody else."
"No, but we REALLY suck! Like, especially so!"
"This is starting to sound like a personal issue."
I just thought of something, wouldn't Gharrs internet/Wikipedia searches raise some red flags here?
Assuming the entire town is under surveillance by now, the sudden & unprompted searches for human history & language would draw some attention. (At least if those doing the surveilling know they're looking for an alien.)
I wonder if this is how the government/Quantum/"the ghosts" would find Gharr.
Quantum has, thus far, been very restricted in his searching to avoid detection, due mostly to the rules around contact. It's possible that he can be more direct now the leaders of Earth, at least, are aware but it depends if the revelation of these "ghost's" presence would require additional caution.
I'm uncertain if searches on human history and language in Wikipedia would really draw any attention. It'd be more searches about conspiracy stuff and alien landings but they have two things in their favour:
1. Dan is likely paranoid enough he has some protections in place for his browsing
2. Even if those protections aren't enough, searches about aliens and conspiracies probably aren't out of the norm for Dan's search history anyway
Gharr: "Did you know we have warships in our exploration fleet? Wonder why?"
Honestly, if more than half of the 500 known civilizations were discovered due to indications of large scale nuclear war then you'd think that would permit another exemption to the first contact rule that once they hit nuclear weapons technology it's time to say hello and hold their hand a little through that part.
Then again, maybe its better for peace in the Alliance that the members have managed to reach space WITHOUT destroying themselves.
The "Great Filter" of unworthy civilisations. Rule 1: Don't kill yourselves. Rule 2: See Rule 1...
"How would we know, given that the only side to have opened fire on the other so far is us!?"
(The proof is in the pudding...ification of something expendable.)
235U would be unused fuel of nukes, rather than fallout produced from those that did explode. For long-extinct-by-nuclear-war civilizations, 241Am would be a better indicator (as 137Cs, 131I and 90Sr have shorter half-times) ...
I wonder if unusually high concentrations of 43Tc would be an indicator of past civs, since its really rare in nature, mostly lab made on earth.
Sorry, 97/98Tc, 43 is the atomic number not the isotope.
97Tc and 98Tc are extremely long-lived (half-life of 4.2some million years), even when compared to 241Am (432.2 years), so, given that the war has been long enough since, they will become the better indicators. However, there aren't lots of either produced in nuclear warfare.
60Co and 152Eu are said to be particularly indicative of nuclear weapons blasts, and 137Cs and 90Sr would be the best gauges on how deadly the contamination would have been for lifeforms such as ourselves, but all those have much shorter half-lives, between a couple years and somewhat over a century.
Thanks, been decades since I worried about these things and frankly. I was more worried about patient survival/decontamination because that's what I did for a living. I never had time to worry draining the Nile when I'm up to my eyebrows in Hippopotami. I say it that way because it's way more serious than swamps and alligators.
Gharr looking at some of the darker spots of human history on Wikipedia:
"Why does it say on the top of this list of genocides... You can improve this list by adding to it."?!
Dan: "Don't worry, that's just a Wikipedia thing..."
Wikipedia being run by hostile aliens confirmed.
(Hi there, Virus!)