Out of time…!: We’re now at the next major stepping stone in the Rarg attack… the VACHOOM! As seen on pages 7.52 onwards, it didn’t go well for the Magellans last time… how will they fare with some possible preventative in place in this time??
Patrons: Page 7.194 is now up on Patreon… 7.195 published soon…
Next update: February 26, 2023: Onomatopoeia!
The story so far…
[1] Wannabe
[#] History
[2] Great Leap Forward
[3] Daze
[4] Bad Karma
[#] Gifford: Hero [back soon]
[#] Buying the Stairway to Heaven
[5] Worst Fieldtrip Ever
[#] Redux: Gola Beh
[6] Lock(e)down
[#] The Things That Matter
[7] PaRARGdox
Tales from the MagellanVerse…
Olga & Brelvis
Dr Spooky & Otto
The Olaf Mystery
Legacy
Crossoverkill [a crossover!]
Magellan stuff
About
Cast
Contact [email]
Fan Art [back soon]
Fan Fiction
Magellan Miscellany[back soon]
Magellan TV Tropes Page
We have not seen the remaining rod hit ground exactly.
Sun Moon does not seem like she had magnetically caught the rebound rod.
Sister Superior is still potentially useful as a bound Superhuman shield for those less invulnerable.
Dane and Trios may be working on something.
We have not seen the speedsters since the resolution to return.
Olaf is still a potential help/threat (Depending on perspective) for those the rods do not save in the towers.
Magellan USA securing Prometheus, hopefully will soon secure operational ability to begin work on shutting down the not yet deployed Singularity Generator.
In previous timeline, Charisma had just been bandaged, and had not gotten up to go to the boat yet. Euro Magellan did not arrive until they had already returned to the main island.
Truth is that human causalities are not important. Important is prevent the drilling and destroying whole planet.
I disagree, casualties remain important no matter the circumstances. Saving the entire planet and humanity is of course more important. It has priority. But even though the death of everyone is at stake, it does not make the death of one unimportant.
It is still just as important, if you ask me. I do think that everyone is roughly 7 billion times more important just by adding up the individuals, then about a magnitude more than that because it is the loss of humanity as a whole. Then all the other species on this planet, and the planet itself. I’m thinking a few hundred billion times more important than the death of one person. A few hundred billion is a very large ratio.
Yet the death of one person is still just as important as it ever was, to me.
The scale of importance has a wide range, spanning many orders of magnitude. In physics we tend to say that things are not significant if they are more than one order of magnitude smaller than the total, that is less than 10%. For significance in statistics we tend to use 5%, sometimes 1% which is two orders of magnitude. (Yes that does mean we accept to have the wrong conclusion in about one out of twenty, or about one out of a hundred, of the scientific papers that have to rely on statistics – which is most.) In engineering we sometimes have precisions at about 0.1%, 3 orders of magnitude, that is, something that is supposed to be a metre long can be about a millimetre off. More often about 0.5%.
When I count money I tend closer to 10% with smaller amounts and closer to 1% with larger amounts. $0.9 and $1 are equal to me, $90 and $100 not so much, $99 and $100 do feel equal.
Maybe if you think in such terms, the loss of one life is not significant compared to the loss of ten lives, or to a hundred, or to a thousand. Or to 7 billion.
But when it comes to importance, especially when it comes to human life, I don’t think that way. I count lives like Scrooge McDuck counts money. Even if there are multiple billions of them each one is still just as important. There’s no such thing as insignificant, there isn’t a limit to the precision. Counting money in a bank is somewhat similar: even if there’s a billion dollars flowing through the system, each and every cent is still important.
From a programmers or mathematicians point of view, it is the difference between absolute precision of integer numbers and the finite precision of real values. The latter can never be exact, they always have a round-off error. The former doesn’t and rounding of such a number doesn’t really make sense. Every single unit counts, no matter how many there are.
Panel 2: Scioni using his Always-Wrong power again, it survived the Rarg VOMM intact.
Just like Ivan Ackerman! I wonder where he is now? 🙃
Something -just- dawned on me.
The Rarg have a gravity nuke, right? Why not deploy it first at some remote part of earth and just be done with it?
The Rarg wanted a conflict, but human* resistance kept mounting, and the Rarg kept escalating.
*(well, terran residents, since not everyone fighting back is human)
The theme of this chapter was hinted at being sacrifice. “Would you kill one to save many?”
What if there’s a ritual murder of penance that the Rarg expect from the people of earth, but the constant fighting-back communicates to the Rarg that humanity has decided they are not repentant? After all, the Rarg are a hive-consciousness species, not a culturally-sensitive one.
Just a thought. Not sure it’s correct, but I wanted to share.
Dunno VT… the reason for not just immediately deploying the singularity device isn’t clear, but the impression I had from Tros’s and Glom’s riffs on Rarg psychology is that the bugs are just into kill or be killed combat once provoked. Maybe they were still working on the doomsday weapon the whole time? Or maybe my earlier speculation, that they just like getting in the face of their enemies, is right?
Absolutely, but the thing to remember about Tros, Glom, and Dane is that all of them have an alien (please excuse the pun) perspective on the Rarg. Given that these three all get along well enough with the Magellan folks suggest that their perspectives are at least congruent enough to foster that connection. It may just be an assumption about the Rarg. Whatever assumptions humans are making about the Rarg up to this point are based on -those- assumptions, which means that an understanding of Rarg psychology and social behaviour is still incomplete.
Naturally, we’ll have to wait and see, as Grace doesn’t generally give explicit spoilers for her work in advance.
Although I will absolutely want to pick her brain on how she feels about the community reactions and engagement over the course of this particular story. It’s been a bit of a roller coaster in the comments section for this one, after all.
It continues to amaze me how when you write something in this comment section, I really could’ve written the same thing myself. I was thinking along similar lines about the Rarg a few pages ago when Kaycee and Charisma spoke about it, our understanding of the Rarg is incomplete. Given their track record of annihilating every civilisation they come into contact with, if that is even remotely correct then everyone in the universe knows pretty much nothing about them.
And yeah, roller coaster for sure, and I do wonder what Grace thinks of it and feels about it. I hope I have not been too much of a downer myself but… I’ve been on a rather crazy emotional roller coaster IRL too and I guess I’ve written a few of my comments during the last 9 months with too much tears in my eyes to even be able to read what I’m writing. That might not have been entirely advisable. I’m guessing both the story and the comment section overall helped me through. I do not remember, and I don’t feel stable enough to go check, yet. Will do in the future. Maybe I have things to apologize for.
It’s been great – I always appreciate comments and constructive feedback! 😀
I guess I haven’t been way too off the rails then, if the feedback has been generally constructive 🙂 We always appreciate having a great story to read, even if we’re occasionally confused or disheartened or both by what appears to us to be happening in said story.
I guess if we’re more permanently confused and/or disheartened we might stop considering the story as great. I think I was there at one point during this chapter, but that was probably equal parts an artifact of the slow-mowing webcomic format and an artifact of my own state of mind in general. Reading it at full comic-reading speed the tough stretch is far shorter, probably short enough. I will re-read and review this point specifically when the chapter is finished. And now I’m looking forward to that, and feeling quite grateful to have something to look forward to! 🙂