[1276] Fire In The Sky, Page 2
└ posted on Tuesday, 29 June 2021, by Novil
- Larisa: What’s the point of these nonsense examinations?! Have you balloon brains ever heard of Wikipedia?
- Commander Xul: We prefer to trust only our own research.
- Larisa: Oh yeah? I have a different theory, shorty!
- Larisa: You’re just trying to convince yourselves that we haven’t changed that much in the last two hundred years.
- Larisa: But look how far we’ve come! And this is just the beginning! The age of man has come!
- Commander Xul: Get off the examination chair!
S&W in German/auf Deutsch
![[1276] Fire In The Sky, Page 2](/comics/2021-06-29-1276-fire-in-the-sky-page-2.png "[1276] Fire In The Sky, Page 2")
That smile in panel three should worry them.
If Larisa’s pajamas are bright enough to go as ‘white’ in a black-and-white comic, a bloodstain would show. What kind of sample is Xul taking with that scalpel that isn’t drawing blood? If it was body hair, a pair of tiny scissors or surgical tweezers (depending on how much they were willing to avoid harm to the human subject) seem better-suited to the task.
@ AnotherBear:
That smile in panel 3 should worry anybody.
@ DTIBA:
The sound effect is “scrape scrape”, so I’m guessing just the outer layer of the skin (stratum corneum).
Technologically? Sure. But the anal probe’s not looking at your email. Now bend over.
Things happened in the last 200 years, by anyone’s scale. Run those skin cells past their super-precise Geiger counter.
I mean, I’m not waiting to see anal probing, but I just wonder what Larissa’s immediate reactions of anal probed would be?
It takes a large volume of excrement to distill enough for an explosive, after all. So no, she can’t just blow them up.
I smell Imperial Saint…
I presume this is after they helped Nick locate Earth.
Forget the Age of Man – I want the Age of Elves back.
That ‘get off the chair’ is exactly how a human would tell a cat or dog to get off the furniture.
Brandon Schubert wrote:
Burn the heretic*
Slay the Xeno**
Kill the Mutant***
Purge the Unclean****
*Except Mechanicus, Astartes, Custodes
**Except… well… Eldar right now as long as Ynnari behave
***Except Navigators, Ogrins, Astropaths, Astartes, Squats
****Except Inquisition radicals, Imperial saints…
You know, human rsearchers do not rely only on wikipedia but actually also do research. Then they publish research articles, the content of which is then sometimes summarized on wikipedia. That’s how knowledge progresses.
He seems like a perfectly respectable scientist doing his job.
Vicious Sand wrote:
A super-efficient Geiger counter is not a thing you would expect an ultra-advanced alien to have. Essentially, your normal, run-of-the-mill Geiger counter is already super-efficient: it will detect any gamma photon entering its detection space. It is relatively straight-forward to build a geiger counter setup that detects more than 90 % of the total activity of the specimen. The point is that the activity is the number of nuclear reactions per second in the sample. If you have e.g. 1 Bq activity, i.e. one reaction per second, a detector with 90 % activity will count a pulse about every 1.1 seconds. A theoretical detector with 100 % detector will give you a count of a pulse every second, and calibration factor will give you the same measurement result from both setups. If your activity is 0.001 Bq, you will have a count every 1000 seconds, and you will need a couple of days of measurement time to get a stable reading (and heavy shielding to get rid of natural background). If you want faster readings, you will need to concentrate your sample by some method. A better counter doesn’t help at all.
The same goes also for gamma spectrum measurements. The normal lab devices (e.g. HPGe detectors) are good enough for detecting extremely low count rates. The problem is getting a sample with enough activity, and distinguishing the artificial signal from background noise. In particular, the human body has a rather large amount of naturally occurring radioisotopes: K-40, natural uranium and thorium series, C-14 etc. The amount of artificial C-14 and H-3 in human body is minuscule compared to natural background of those isotopes. The only artificial isotopes you might detect would be Cs-137. An average human body in Northern Europe has about 100 Bq of Cs-137, mostly deposited in bones. In US, where Chernobyl fallout was much smaller, the activity is at least an order of magnitude smaller. A scratch sample of the skin is unlikely to hold enough Cs-137 to give you a readable spike in gamma spectrum, no matter how good your measurement setup is.
So, if you wish to show the difference in body composition due to industrialisation, I would recommend using other spectrometric methods: show presence of heavy metals using x-ray fluoresence spectrometry, analyse for synthetic organic compounds using nuclear magnetoresonance spectrometry and gas chromatography mass spectrometry, etc.
Soon the xenos filth will be purged by fire and faith in the God Emperor of Mankind!
@ WoozyDragon:
That smile in panel 3 definitely worries me
I mean, aside from increased levels of radioactivity from all the nuclear testing we did and a probably worrying amount of microplastics, we *haven’t* changed all that much in the last two hundred years. Most of the exciting developments were in the information storage and communication methods that are letting us stand on a stack of giants arbitrarily tall, a la Newton’s “If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
So …. has she got anal probe’d yet ? LOL!
@ AnotherBear:
I was gonna say….that look would worry Thanos!
@ WoozyDragon:
Generally, if Larisa is smiling at you,you should be worried.
@ DTIBA:
As the panel states: It is a skin scraping … not a cut. Does not break the skin so no blood.
Damn. Earth is a popular cosmic destination… http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2012/05/24/0379-abducted/ Shame these visitors are not as altruistic :[
@ Mykolas Slapsys:
Not just data and communications, the first passenger railway opened in 1825, steam ships, internal combustion engine, aircraft, all happened in the last 200 years.
But these are our machines, as you say, we haven’t changed much, though more of us are surviving into old age.
Russell wrote:
Not likely, given current events.
Russell wrote:
Not likely, given current events.
@ PS2kid:
Something tells me Larisa would be glad to make her probing/colonoscopy easier by turning around and mooning the alien, who would be unnerved (at least) to have a subject drop trou so willingly and enthusiastically. On the bright side, the scientist (should he recover from n the mental trauma) may be able to treat Larisa’s Wolfram Syndrome, if he has enough knowledge of xeno diseases and human biochemistry.
@ DTIBA:
Come to think of it, I’m surprised Larisa wears such modest pajamas, if any at all! You’d think she’d prefer to wear something more kinky rather than a pajama suit.