Religious cosmology gets weird fast when you live in the cosmos.
Transcript
It's dark outside in the dome. Gillie and Idrisah put their shoes on as they stand in the open door of Talita's apartment.Idrisah: Thank you so much for having us!
Talita: Thank you for coming over!
Idrisah: Sorry to be running out right after bing bong. I have to—
Gillie: (ASL) Let’s hurry. Your parents are awake by now.
Idrisah: (ASL) I know… Don’t tell them we celebrated before I called for Eid prayers.
Talita: Is Eid on a different day in the Nexus?
Idrisah: Well… on Earth, it’s based on the local sighting of Luna in its crescent phase after the 10th month of the Islamic calendar. In space, everyone usually goes with Mecca’s sighting. But Nexus Jovia is on Martian Valley Time… and Dirtball’s on 23/7 Human-Avian Standard…
Inset panel: Human home system showing Earth, Luna, Mars, and Jupiter with Nexus Jovia where Idrisah's parents live. A segment of Avian Territories shows a little star marked "Ixion-3 or Shikaviil-3 (a.k.a. Dirtball)."
Idrisah: –I just try to celebrate when the rest of my family does.
Talita: I see.
51 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 56”
foxqlove
I just love how much thought goes into everything! It’s so cool and such an inspiration for my work. Like, I feel like I could actually live in this story
Sean McKnight
Any reason why Calisto isn’t being terraformed? I get why Ganymede and Europa aren’t options, but Calisto orbits outside of the Jovian radiation belt, and has a tremendous amount of water-ice. Have Bugferrets not figured out how to create worldhouses/paraterraforming yet?
Jay Eaton
Callisto currently doesn’t have a high enough population to justify the cost of terraforming. Most humans in orbit of Jupiter live on Nexus Jovia because of infrastructural inertia, and also, unlike the Jovian moons, the gravity is a consistent 1g (inside the rotating habitats).
SheTheTDE
I guess this civilisation hasn’t worked out a galactic standard time based on the orbit of some easy to spot cosmic landmark around the galactic center yet.
Jay Eaton
Oh, I’m sure there’s several dozen galactic time standards. Standards do love to multiply.
40
I’d love to see more of Nexus Jovia’s design
Origamigryphon
Click on “world” in the upper left corner, then “locations” 😀
Jay Eaton
Unfortunately a Blender crash ate the first Nexus Jovia model I made. I’m hoping to model it again soon.
Gar G
Sure sounds confusing XD;
BullCityFats
I wonder if Christians on alien worlds would calculate Easter from the local vernal equinox? Having more or fewer than one moon would pose a difficulty.
sam
I feel this would lead to some schism and/or heretic beliefs. Or at least, it would be quite a debate for the first decades or space life
Jay Eaton
…There is a Martian sect of the Catholic church that schismed off pre-WWIII. I haven’t written about it much yet though.
Rad Internet Stranger
HAPPY TRUNK
Guest
Reminds me of the analysis done by UNIGE where they found that people blind from birth in different parts of the world still made the same facial expressions as sighted people. They did it instinctively, but not all could do it on command (fake it). It’s cool to see that applied to aliens in this webcomic.
Yay
it’s so interesting to see that she’s doing a happy trunk (probably unconsciously) but also a human grin (maybe also unconsciously?). either way talita is cute
rdm
Speaking as one of the people on the Timezone Database list, Idrisah has my every sympathy.
(The TZ database covers not only current timezones, but also historical ones. Want to know the local time for Tahiti in 1972 on June 5 at 10:00UTC? It can tell you.)
40
At long last, we have finally created the Timezone Database from classic Tom Scott video Don’t Create The Timezone Database
Ardzruni
The absolute giggle fit I just collapsed into was sublime, thank you for this gift 😂
Ashran
Does anyone have the link to the animation with the skyhook picking and dropping off cargo?
Its not indexed in the lore website sadly
Peter Jensen
It’s on the Dirtball location page:
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Locations/SkyhookAnimation.gif
Peter Jensen
The other day someone mentioned the anachronistic (but realistic) floppy disk as a save icon, and here we have another fun one with the ASL sign for “call”. I suspect a good chunk of the audience here has never used a phone with the shape that’s mimicking.
As a side note, I very much love the inclusion of sign language in general, even though I don’t know much of it. Gives me an excuse to look up sign words and phrases.
Michi
I can imagine that in the future you’d have a speaker in your thumb and a mic in your pinky. So the gesture is relevant again. To be fair slate phones today have that layout.
PS: I wonder what my avatar is going to be 😀
Yay
skeuomorphism!
TotallySomebody
That’s a new word, thank you!
Viashino_wizard
I’ve heard that the sign for phone/call has started to change to laying a palm flat against the side of the head like a smartphone
claire
What a sneaky little shot to show another physical aspect of Gillie- notably, the way her pinky toes area pulled way back.
evileeyore
Not the “pinky” toes, those are her “big” toes. Her “thumbs” if they were front “feets”.
And now I’m sure there are a bunch of peeps out here wanting some toe bean shots…
Claire
Oh!! You’re right- thank you for the correction!
Fallingfeather
Ohhh telling time in space sounds like Hell.
evileeyore
I’m sure there’s an app for that….
Trees
Look out, it’s Swatch internet time making a surprise comeback in the 2300s!
Arcstone
*cough*theoryofrelativity*cough*
Aidan Thomas Weber
that applies to the speed and gravity of relative bodies affecting time dilation. It does not affect people’s ability to celebrate. They talk about how the different time systems don’t always line up in the panel of all the different systems. Ultimately Idrisah just celebrates when her family celebrates, which could mean that her celebrations happen more/less often for her relative to her family but that’s neither clarified nor important. She just waits for her family to celebrate, *whenever* that is, and has a good time with them.
Arcstone
Oh they are WAY out in space then. I just sort of assumed dirtball was someplace in the outer sol asteroid belt or something.
Arcstone
Actually, am I interpreting this right? Shikaviil-3 being a distant star, and not just a highlighted rock someplace around jupiter somewhere?
Licorish
I think that Shikaviil-3/Ixion-3/Dirtball would be the planet, not the star, but yeah, you’re correct. The “-3” implies to me that we have a star somewhere that is called Shikaviil/Ixion and that we’re talking about the third planet on its orbit (like calling Earth “Sol-3”, scifi works will often do that).
…I’m pretty sure that previously the official avian name for the planet was just Shikaviil, without the “-3”, though that may have been changed. I always assumed that avians gave it an actual name instead of just using star+suffix like humans did because they care about it, given it is located in their space and all that. I also considered that maybe they just didn’t use that naming convention at all and instead elected to give a unique name to every single planet they found, but there are just so many planets out there that I assume it wouldn’t be a viable/reasonable course of action (though I wouldn’t put it past bug ferrets to try). Some variation of simply counting up from the star sounds straightforward enough for different species/governments/entities to come up with as a solution for planet designation purposes anyway.
Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe the avian use of the “-3” suffix is actually just a coincidence and has an entirely different reasoning behind it! You never know it with Jay, everything they do is so incredibly well thought out. It could also be just a simple mistake or misremembrance on their part, I guess 😛 nobody is perfect after all. Sorry about the rant, I’m clinically unable to conjure less than 200 words whenever I decide to say something /j
Arcstone
I suppose one way of solving the whole planet naming thing would be to just give planets and suns just letter-number designations, and only give them actual 𝘯𝘢𝘮𝘦 names if anything particularly bespoke happens or is discovered there.
Feels like thats what we would actually do in real life once we get to the whole interstellar civilization stage.
Zidane
I’m fairly sure you’re right, it doesn’t say specifically where Dirtball is in the worldbuilding section, but considering Dirtball was originally run by the Avians before they stripped it of resources, I’d I assume they’re in the Avian homeplanet’s solar system, or a completely different one from theirs or humans. Either way, very far from Earth or the Sun
the Inmara
Interestingly, this complicates time further, due to relativity, the speed of light, and faster than light communications.
So, Idrisah is most likely coordinating time with her parents via faster than light communication and travel. So, counting how fast signals travel via those channels, not by how light (and regular time) travels from Sol to Dirtball and back.
But considering the physics of that, it’s probably not super consistent. Because if that communication requires the gates/wormholes, and those gates orbit their stars at different rates than the planets in question, you may have a changing delay of minutes to days depending on where they are in their orbits.
And the way that spacetime works is that you count simultaneity differently depending on where you are in relation to two signals.
And Jay can absolutely wave their hand over all of that and say, “We’re not worrying about that. The narrative structure of the story doesn’t concern that, or the technology takes that into account and calculates it for everyone, or wristwatches have tiny wormholes in them, whatever.” And that would be totally cool and fine. It’s a grand sci-fi tradition and all authors do it.
But if Idrisah gets into an argument with her parents about timing, it is a thing she could refer to to try to defend herself.
Hyratel
if you check the worldbuilding section, …. the entire technology page is Under Construction. and the relevant blog posts are Way Back There.
Hm.
Anyway, the wormhole gates are space stations with two wormhole generators: the Ship Transit Gate and the Internet Gate. the way I understand it, The internet gate is opened for burst transfers to avoid having to keep it open constantly, so Forums take more of a front seat than Messengers for interstellar communications. So Interstellar Relativity Does Not Have An Effect on the Narrative Timeline
Zuorai
I wish i knew how much all this is in proximity to each other
Teod
Holy moly, the Mars is terraformed! That sort of implies a very dense colonization of the entire Sol system, unless there’s some miracle tech made specifically for terraformation.
Peter Jensen
Mars is partially terraformed, with the help of bug ferret technology. There’s an ocean now and more atmosphere, but not yet enough for humans. Also an artificial magnetic field for radiation and atmosphere protection:
https://jayeaton.site/RunawayToTheStars/Locations/Mars
Arcstone
The “world” section of this website has all the lore you could ever hope for, if you wanna read about it. Just click “world” along the top of the page and then locations.
Alternatively sophonts and then humans and you’ll get a whole lot of history describing what has happened in the sol system between now and when the comic takes place.
Claire
Hmm… No information on Venus, so I presume Venus isn’t colonized. Which is a shame- ideas of colonizing Venus via floating habitats is one I’d love to see more of.
un_pogaz
Dude, terraformed Mars is hard enough to do, even with a lot of resources, but Venus is on a whole new level of Nope.
The surface temperature is 450°C (867°F), enough to melt lead. Any material that makes it to the surface has to be able to function in a high-temperature environment. But with we’re at such high temperatures that any cooling or insulation system will only serve to slow down the moment your more fragile inter composant fry.
AND temperature was just one part of teh problem with this bitch of Venus.
There’s also the atmospheric pressure, capable of crushing any deep-sea submarine. The OceanGate incident reminded everyone just how difficult it is to make a deep-sea submersible, and how catastrophic the failure.
So, the two factors alone are already difficult, but the two at the same time, that fuck up: heat is a huge stress factor and weakness, so all your shielding loss a absurdly amount of efficieny. We’ve sent 3 probes to the surface of Venus, which were designed for 30 minutes, 2 survived 1 hour, the last one 2 hours (pure miraculous), and none of them are done 100% of their job because a least 2 intrument was fail before working.
Also, the atmospheric composition itself: 96.5% carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is made up of CO2. At this level, any treatment of the atmosphere is an absolutely titanic project we don’t understand the excessiveness.
And that’s if the atmosphere will let it, because the remaining 4% is a mixture that produces sulfuric acid rain. Yeah, joy. So if anything manages to survive more than a few days, at the first rainfall, the structure of the device will be eaten away, compromised and weakened, and the atmospheric pressure will be happy to destroy it for good.
So no, Venus isn’t just hot, with a greenhouse effect a little more intense than Earth:
*Venus doesn’t want anything exist on its surface.*
Venus is dead.
By the way, here’s a fun fact: Conditions on the surface of venus are so absurd and out of the ordinary, in terms of pressure and temperature, that the atmosphere is in a state of “super critical fluid”, a 4th state of matter that’s neither really liquid nor really gaseous.
It’s far more relevant and viable to treat Venus as a gas giant than as a terrestrial planet. And you can’t terra-forming a gas giant.
Joysweeper
It could be but hasn’t come up! Mid-atmosphere situations on Venus are a lot of fun to speculate about, but I do think that just because there isn’t a “floor” to build on that limits the size of a colony.
Amanda/OwlBear
different conflicting calendar systems has long been a fascination of mine, livng in space and on other planets is always going to complicate things with so much of it being based on the movement of the spheres
BobisOnlyBob
I love the fact that the logistics of Islamic prayer times and directions has come multiple times in the science fiction I’ve read. It’s a genuine conundrum for an Earth-centric faith with such components, yet one with adherents who acknowledge and appreciate both the possibility and likelihood of extraplanetary and extrasolar humanity. I’m an atheist myself, but I just think it’s very neat to see humans overcoming such problems, even ones which seem arbitrary through a faithless lens.
Liza
So interesting! The minutiae of how Islam has adapted to life in space is fascinating! Also, there’s an error in the transcript. The comic says “I just try to celebrate when the rest of my family does” but the transcript says “I just try to keep to the spirit of the holiday”
Jay Eaton
Fixed transcript.