Don’t worry, guys. Carl is clearly a brachiosaurus, which lived during the Jurassic period. (And before anyone says our lil’ boy Steve is a velociraptor and therefore puts our comic in the late cretaceous, aka the time of the comet–that lil guy could easily be a compsognathus or a caudipteryx, both Jurassic-era species of small theropod dinosaurs. So the light getting bigger every night is going to pass by harmlessly, and Steve and Carl can go on enjoying the stars together until they die of old age, since Carl has very few natural predators at his size and I bet he’ll protect Steve, if he needs it (though small, fast and carnivorous as Steve is, he probably won’t).
So it’s all good!!
That entire response explaining how these two characters didn’t die a fiery death but instead lived long and happy lives literally made my day.
OH GOD THOSE POOR BABIES i am sobbing i am laughing so hard
In the last pic the cat is all “oh thank god I found ground NO WAIT COME BACK GROUND”
THOSE POOR BABIES OMG WHY AM I LAUGHING AT THIS
Astronaut: We need to fund 1.4 billion dollars. NASA: FOR WHAT?! Astronaut: We want to put kitties in space and have them float around in zero gravity. NASA: Here is all the money. God bless.
Those cats are just ?????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!
The beautiful chaos of watching 12 frantic astrophysics students try to save a theoretical astronaut from falling into a black hole. I’ve never seen a group of people work so quickly and efficiently before.
Space mermaids? As in: alien mermaids that live in the vacuum of space and swim between the stars? A setting that uses the analogy of deep space as the open ocean but keeps all the sea monsters? DO WANT!!
Luring astronauts into black holes with a song that carries across the void where no one can hear you scream
Not audible song, though—maybe they sing in frequencies that ship’s sensors pick up—as distress beacons, as spaceports, as fleets. They would have to be huge, to travel between stars, massive space-black bodes with biolumescent patterns, photosynthesizing pure starlight into fuel, too enormous and frail to hold up in the atmosphere of a world. Fins that catch solar radiation instead of water, schools of them slingshotting between stars. Eggs laid in the tails of comets that warm and hatch as they rocket around suns. Voices that are heard in the slow radio pulses of quasars; language of half-light. Homes in the shelters of nebulae, like clownfish and sea anemone. They gather together star-stuff, shape solar systems like we build houses. Maybe, like certain breeds of lobsters, they never stop growing, so there are a few really ancient ones, star-eaters, curled up and sleeping in the warm glow of red suns, layered over with a crust of asteroids; so big passing ships assume they are young worlds, the slow thrum of their heartbeats like the pulsing of a binary system. Mermaids so large a fleet of ships is little more than krill; the universe is vast, and they live in the darkness between tiny islands of light.
The sun is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to a true Eldritch Abomination. Hear me out here-
Older than recorded history; was here longer than any of us and will be here long after we leave. Has a finite beginning and end but is still incomprehensibly ancient
Burns itself into your vision instantly and can blind you if you look for too long
Further prolonged exposure can cause cancerous growths
Non-humanoid shape floating through space; colossal flaming tentacles angrily lash out on occasion
Sort of just appeared one day and is now surrounded by the corpses of its stillborn children
People used to sacrifice other people to appease it
I just had this hyper-realistic dream and like. I don’t even know what to make of this lmao
I was sitting in this park, on a bench, looking up at the night sky and all the stars and stuff, and I blinked and suddenly the entire sky was different. I’m talking different constellations, the sky absolutely packed with billions more stars, some so close they’re massive. I’m like wtf and suddenly I realise there’s an old man sitting next to me, dressed in like 1940s clothing, also looking up at the sky.
before I can ask him if he’s you know, noticed, he speaks, without looking away from the sky.
“this is what the universe really looks like,” he tells me.
“oh,” I say. a pause. “…can you put it back?”
he smiles and nods. I look up. the sky has gone back to normal.
“what do I do with this information?” I ask, looking at him again.
he turns his head and, smiling, looks me dead in the face. "be careful.“
So there’s a recurring theme in Sci-Fi/Space Fantasy where humans are off having battles in space and everyone’s lined up on a horizontal axis like it’s a naval battle or something (star wars is particularly notable for this) or the use of “Up and Down” being revolutionary concepts (That one scene in Ender’s Game).
From a Doyalist perespective, it’s very aesthetic and easier to represent on a 2D screen, but let’s assume this is Watsonian for a moment: By and large, most humans suck at spatial reasoning in three dimensions. (Which, given that my beloved didn’t realize that I can toss stuff down to him from the second floor… makes this somewhat plausible to me).
So maybe humans do okay fighting in the upperatmosphere (where “down” is “In the direction of the dirtball”) but in open space, the majority of huamns get wiggy and slow on the controls. Humans that are good at 3D reasoning become the rockstars of thier repsective factions, but they’re few and far between.
Until someone goes, Why are we making humans do this job?
Sure, we have extremely advanced AI at this point- the ships very nearly fly themselves, but things designed by humans still have human flaws, and they still jam up when faced with collisions and other moral quandaries. So we still need pilots, but what if you could find pilots who were USED to this 3D nonsense, coordination and communication, and even with an understanding of tactics?
They exist already, and with a playfully sadistic streak to boot! Sure, they’ll need some substantial biological alterations to be able to survive in space, and to integrate them into the ship’s systems effectively, but by the time massive space empires come around, bespoke GMO organisms will probably be a thing too.
Cosider: Cyborg spaceships, where the organic part is an extremely genetically modified dolphin.
And where would Octopi fit into this scenario, because clearly they’ve got to be there somewhere. Tricksy little buggers.
Adapting to life inside gas giants, where they may grow to spectacular size and unfathomable intellect as both God and Nature intended.
“Gretchen: On the International Space Station, you have astronauts from the US and from other English speaking countries and you have cosmonauts from Russia. And obviously it’s very important to get your communication right if you’re on a tiny metal box circling the Earth or going somewhere. You don’t want to have a miscommunication there because you could end up floating in space in the wrong way. And so one of the things that they do on the ISS – so first of all every astronaut and cosmonaut needs to be bilingual in English and Russian because those are the languages of space. Lauren: Yep. Wait, the language of space are English and Russian? I’m sorry, I just said ‘yep’ and I didn’t really think about it, so that’s a fact is it? Gretchen: I mean, pretty much, yeah, if you go on astronaut training recruitment forums, which I have gone on to research this episode… Lauren: You’re got to have a backup job, Gretchen. Gretchen: I don’t think I’m going to become an astronaut, but I would like to do astronaut linguistics. And one of the things these forums say, is, you need to know stuff about math and engineering and, like, how to fly planes and so on. But they also say, you either have to arrive knowing English and Russian or they put you through an intensive language training course. But then when they’re up in space, one of the things that they do is have the English native speakers speak Russian and the Russian speakers speak English. Because the idea is, if you speak your native language, maybe you’re speaking too fast or maybe you’re not sure if the other person’s really understanding you. Whereas if you both speak the language you’re not as fluent in, then you arrive at a level where both people can be sure that the other person’s understanding. And by now, there’s kind of this hybrid English-Russian language that’s developed. Not a full-fledged language but kind of a- Lauren: Space Creole! Gretchen: Yeah, a Space Pidgin that the astronauts use to speak with each other! I don’t know if anyone’s written a grammar of it, but I really want to see a grammar of Space Pidgin.”
wupacing 