Wait. Wait, wait, wait.

[conuly]

I just realized something, and talk about beating a dead horse but... Superman's not happening either, is he?

Man, real life physics sucks sometimes. (Suck sometimes? Now I'm doing that math/maths thing, aren't I? Damn it, I have no idea how to speak anymore AND there's no earthly or even kryptonly way for Superman to fly.)

Comments

[mc776]

No one ever talks about a single physic, at least not within the meaning of "physics" as a field of study.

I don't think they do that for math either, even in the wild backwaters of Englandistan or otherwise.

[conuly]

That doesn't mean it isn't a plurale tantum. Like scissors. Or pants. Please don't combine scissors and pants, it never ends well.

[rho]

Have you seen man of steel, woman of kleenex?

[ysobel]

Physics, like mathematics, is singular.

"in the names of sciences or disciplines (acoustics, aerobics, economics, etc.) [-ics] represents a 16c. revival of the classical custom of using the neuter plural of adjectives with -ikos (see -ic) to mean "matters relevant to" and also as the titles of treatises about them. Subject matters that acquired their names in English before c.1500, however, tend to remain in singular (e.g. arithmetic, logic)."

</etymology dork>

[conuly]

Funny, the other person to link to that today ALSO has a 3 letter name :)

And yes, though I try to forget it.

[conuly]

At one point, I think as recently as last week, I definitely knew that.

[ncp.livejournal.com]

You have read "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex", haven't you?

[conuly]

Yes. I try to forget it!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

ROFLMAO, I was just coming in with a link to that story.

Problem's even more fundamental than that, though: cell-wall permeability. If all his cell-walls are impermeable to non-Kryptonian molecules, he wouldn't live long enough to die of thirst; he'd suffocate first.

[ncp.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's such a thing a Kryptonian biochemistry and Terrestrial biochemistry. It's just biochemistry.

Great, now I'm trying to figure out the divergent evolution responsible for Kryptonian physiology vs. Terrestrial physiology, if everything starts out as "just biochemistry".

*shakes fist* DAMN YOU, CONULY!!!!

[conuly]

Um, you're welcome?

[conuly]

What's *really* hilarious is that huge swathes of this conversation have been going over my head, though I try. It's all you guys.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Alas, there couldn't be any divergent evolution, either. The road to becoming mammals (let alone humans) was so long and complex, with so many evolutionary bottlenecks, that the likelihood of the conditions that created that road existing anywhere else is impossibly slim. Then add in the fact that Space is really big, Time is really long, and planets (let alone species) are rare and ephemeral by comparison: what are the odds of parallel mammalian evolution taking place in the same time/space 'neighborhood'?

We can get around this by assuming that the Kryptonians were originally Terran, planted on Krypton by some other advanced species for reasons of their own - probably having to do with the effects of Kryptonite. Apparently the Kryptonians did not have super-powers on Krypton - they only have them when they get away from Kryptonite - but it seems reasonable to assume that the development of super-power was an adaptive response to the presence of the stuff. Probably an artificial adaptation, because if Kryptonite is so debilitating that it requires such drastic biochemical changes, it's not likely that the first generations would have survived on their own.

Therefore I say that the Kryptonians, including Superdog, are all the result of somebody else's experiments: Terrestrial mammals genetically altered to adapt to Krypton's radiation.

That still doesn't explain the flying, of course, and the impermeable cell-walls ought to kill them pretty fast in a non-Kryptonian environment - which would probably be considered an advantage by whoever designed them. After all, one doesn't really want one's unstoppable super-powered bio-weapons getting out of hand, like they did in Bladerunner and Aliens. But "Life will find a way", right? I expect the Kryptonians found a way, destroyed the civilization that created them, and appropriated their cool technology.

However, it's possible that the whole planet-Krypton-blows-up deal was the last fail-safe containment device. We already know why Kryptonian mammals can't breed with Terrestrial mammals; I wouldn't be surprised if there's another fail-safe built in, such as Kryptonian life-forms requiring Kryptonian radiation to develop in the womb. The cell-wall impermeability question would definitely be relevant there.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

*sends hugs* Bless you, Conuly; I love this kind of stuff, and none of my nearby real-time compadres are of the turn of mind to take any interest in such things.

[conuly]

Then add in the fact that Space is really big, Time is really long, and planets (let alone species) are rare and ephemeral by comparison: what are the odds of parallel mammalian evolution taking place in the same time/space 'neighborhood'?

Well, we don't really know the odds. We don't even know what the odds of life are because we haven't been out far enough.

At any rate, let's say the odds are bad, a billion to one. If there are a billion or so time/space neighborhoods there's no promise that this weird coincidence will show up in one of them, but it's at least possible, yes?

Though whether it's more probable than interstellar mad science remains to be seen. Or, preferably, not. You ever read that one where they found out that humans had been moved to the asteroid belt (back when it was a planet) by people trying to improve their biosphere so it could last longer? That didn't work out, the original inhabitants left, and nearly all the humans on that other planet died when they blew themselves up in a final ice-age-avoiding war. The survivors came back to Earth (unaware that they were coming back) and proceeded to wipe out their cousins who had developed at a slower pace, not having impending doom to hurry them along.

[conuly]

Sucks to be them?

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

True enough, we don't know the odds. It's possible that there are NO other planets with life, or at least life beyond the most basic level (whatever that may actually be) - somebody has to be first, after all; maybe it's us. Maybe we're last - maybe life has blossomed and died all through the Universe, and we're the sole remaining place that still has any. Or maybe life is common; maybe there's dozens or millions of different circumstances under which it tends to develop, so just about every planet with an atmosphere, or even some without, has life of some sort.

If I had to bet, I wouldn't bet on any of those three options. I'd bet that life in the Universe has existed before us, and will exist after us - ah, but how long before, and how long after? Time is really long; we've only been around for a relative instant of it, and will only last for another relative instant, and the same is necessarily true of any other planetary life-form.

I wouldn't bet that life spontaneously emerges on every decent-sized rock, either. I would bet that there is an optimal range of temperature, pressure, chemistry and radiation in which its emergence is possible, so it won't emerge in places outside that range. I would also bet that it doesn't always emerge even where conditions are optimal; doesn't always survive even where it emerges; doesn't always develop past the basic consume-and-reproduce level even where it survives. Still, there are a LOT of planets out there, even within the teensy fragment of the Universe we're able to observe, and a good many of them may have life.

This is where the part about Space being really big cuts in: even at the speed of light, it's a LONG way to even the nearest stars. A light-year is ten trillion kilometers; of all the zillion star-systems out there, only two are less than five light-years away; only about 50 are within five parsecs (16 light-years) of us.

Imagine that over the course of a thousand years, a thousand people set out onto the ocean at random from all over the world, in their little canoes and coracles and kayaks. What are the odds of any of them ever meeting? Only the ones who set out within a few years of each other will have any chance of meeting at all. Many of them won't survive a year. Some may be lucky enough to keep voyaging for 80 years; may make it from Iceland to Patagonia and back - imagine just two of those sailors, one from Iceland, one from Patagonia, setting sail the same year and both sailing for 80 years; what are the odds of their meeting? How about one from Iceland, one from the Hebrides? Even then, the odds of their meeting are poor. They could fish the same waters all their lives, and never even catch sight of each other.

Even if most planets have life, and most life eventually develops sentience, and most sentient life tries to explore space, and most space-exloring life-forms are smart, skillful, cooperative, lucky and physically adaptable enough to make a go of exploring their own systems, it is still a long, long, long, mind-bogglingly long way from any one star-system to any other.

Picture a room 20 miles high, 20 miles long, 20 miles wide, and in it is one single grain of sand. Now picture that one sand-grain crushed to dust, and the dust blown into the air of that vast room: that's all the matter in the Universe, dispersed in all the space.

*grins* Fortunately, by the grace of the Great God Gravity, if the particles ever do meet, they tend to stick together. I no longer hope we'll meet other intelligent spacefarers out past Barnard's Star; I'll be happy if we find fossil evidence of algae on Mars, and overjoyed if we manage to send a few little robots to the gas-giant moons to even look. We still don't have so much as a base on our own Moon, let alone a spaceport - if other supposedly space-faring senient life isn't a whole lot better at this stuff than we are, I'd say we don't have a snowflake's chance of ever meeting them. And if they're as aggressive as we are, that's a very good thing.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I don't think I read that one, but in Larry Niven's Known Universe novels, humans are a neotenous form of the Pak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector), who are appalled to discover that their failed colony 'survived' to mutate into these weird creatures, and send to wipe us out.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

*wry grin* Sucks to be me, more like, since I'm the one who feels the lack. They are wonderful people, whom I love dearly, but THEY DON'T READ, and thus they have no conversation.

Not that this means they don't talk, of course. They talk incessantly. On and on, about their jobs and their families and their relationships and their car problems and their financial problems; what movies they saw and who all the actors in them were; where they went shopping, what they bought, what it cost; where they ate, what that cost; what they want to buy, what they wish they could buy, what they need to buy but can't afford. All about whatever celebrities they currently favor, and what they heard on talk radio, and how dicked-around they've been by whatever branch of The System is currently dicking them around.

I feel like Simon Tam much of the time - LOL, even more than I feel like River, these days - because except for my daughter, who lives in Seattle now, but still visits a few days a month, there's no one in my immediate social circle whom I regard as an intellectual equal. We have fun together anyway - we make things, we go places, we tend the kids and gardens and beasties, we organize events and attend each others' performances - and then I go online for actual conversation with people who actually do read.

Thank you for being here.

[darkpoole.livejournal.com]

A few decades back, comic book writer John Byrne speculated that Superman's powers were primarily telekinesis and clairvoyance. (The editors didn't exactly let him do that when he eventually got to write Superman, but it was a good explanation). Nearly everything Superman can do could be explained by telekinetics (flying, his apparent strength, "heat vision" being mentally exciting molecules) and clairvoyance ("x-ray vision", super-hearing, telescopic vision, that sort of thing.) Even his apparently indestructability was a subconsciously-generated force field. Since Superman didn't actually know what his powers were, they manifested as he imagined them to be.

Of course, there is zero scientific basis for telekinetics, clairvoyance, or force fields. But it was an elegant explanation all the same, and sidestepped biology completely.