Lately there’s been a lot of talk about science in the movies. People who are fans of science, scientists who are fans of movies all want Hollywood to get science right in the movies so we don’t get another Armageddon, Independence Day or The Core. This discussion, however has directed me more towards a similar topic, science as its portrayed in comics.

Now, in Jet-Pack Jenny, I’m really wanting to make it as scientifically accurate as possible. While I don’t want to let it ake over the tone of the story, I don’t want innaccurate science to take away from the story. I don’t want to have crap like the X-Men version of genetic mutation staring at the reader and going “Hey, I know that I’m not correct, but it’s a comic, so ignore it.” I also don’t want to have to explain every single futuristic thing that shows up. That’s just bad storytelling.

SO, how in comics, does one do accurate science without bogging the story down in details? Well, what I’m trying is starting with a world much like our own, aand adding just a few details to advance everyday life, such as TV on any flat surface in Jenny’s apartment, or the computer completely integrated into her home. Yes, there are androids, and those will probably get explained more thoroughly than anything else in the story, just because it’s vital to the story. What’s not vital to the story is how the jet-pack works, or how the cars fly. I know how the jet-pack works; I’ve got that figured out, and I have a one-sentence answer to the cars, and the bulk of theother little details that come up. Essentially, the world is the same, just to keep it relatable. I worry that if I make it too alien then it doesn’t seem real, much like the interiors of Kamino in Attack of the Clones.

In related news, I just returned from HeroesCon where I purchased Strathmore Bristol Board pre-cut into 5 x 17 pads.  It means that the re-drawn  strips will be a little shorter in height than the originals, but it will make storing the original art a heck of a lot easier, as well as a lot easier to scan. The re-drawing is going good, and right now, strip #2 is on the docket to be the next one posted. Drawing the half-hour a day that I’m home at lunch makes for a little slow movement, but it’s movement, so I won’t complain.

More on my trip to HeroesCon tomorrow. That and I hope to get a links page done.

I know a lot of people that read this probably don’t read Pharyngula, but I feel appropriate in posting this because so much of the science that I’ve learned (and put into Jet-Pack Jenny) comes from Carl Sagan’s work and those that have built on his work.

Okay, got directed to this clip through Hardball:

Really? Dr. Edgar Mitchell is a rabid believer in paranormal and pseudoscience, and walking on the moon doen’t give you a pass to say stupid things.  Mitchell cites his sources for his priveledged information as many people, all now dead, and an unnamed high-level person at the Pentagon. We should believe him because he walked on the moon. Mitchell won’t reveal his sources so we can’t verify them.  Mitchell also believes he was remotely, psychically cured of kidney cancer, although he was never diagnosed with kidney cancer. Maybe when you’re up awake at 4 AM, with only AM Coast-to-Coast to keep you company, you’ll believe that Edgar Mitchell is always right because after all, he walked on the moon.  John Glenn was the first American in Space but he still had such poor judgement in acepting campaign donations that he became one of the Keating Five.

Would I like to think that we’ve been visited by aliens? Sure, that would be special.  Would I like to think that they’ve given us advanced technology? Sure. However that just isn’t that likely. 90% of UFO sightings are not genuine alien aircraft, as Edgar Mitchell and those that believe him would like to believe. They’re mistaken identities. Clouds, stars, Venus, reflections, and sometimes, outright hoaxes and lies. the rest remain just what their full name desribes, unidentified. To say that our scientific acheivements were done with help from extraterrestrials who gave us the technology is a slap in the face to the men and women whose research and hard work enabled Edgar Mitchell to fly through space and be one of the priveledged few that can look up in the night sky, see the Moon and “I was there.” It degrades the hard work of men and women who spend years unravelling the mysteries of our universe that may one day proove, with evidence and not heresay that we are not alone, but for right now, we are alone in this universe, but we’re working very hard to develop the means to determine for certain if we are or not. The odds are that we are probably not going to find that in Edgar Mitchell’s lifetime and we may not find it in our lifetimes, but because dilligent human beings pass on their knowledge to other men and women, instead of keeping it secret, our descendants may one day find life out there, somewhere, in the cosmos. However, for right now, we’re alone, but every wonderous step gets us closer to truth about our place in the universe.

In regards to Ryan from Seattle who wants the truth, I think Jack Nicholson said it best, “You Can’t Handle the Truth.”

Before we get started, I can hear some of you now, but it’s just a comic book. Well, that excuse doesn’t buy it. To accept a comic book story, we already have to suspend disbelief. When a mistake like the cover I’m about to show you happens, we’re asked for a further suspension of disbelief for the sake of artistic license. That’s one suspension too many.

Yeah, that moon is way too big. The reason that so many comic artists make this mistake is that when the moon is rising, it looks larger than it does at its apex. Here‘s about as plain explanation of this illusion as possible. The moon simply cannot get larger if we get closer to it, elevation-wise, simply because it is so freakin’ far away.

Now, I wouldn’t be doing any good here in pointing this out if I didn’t point out that this is a good shot, and it can work, with the two most important elements involved, namely the characters/picnic table, and the moon.  There’s an extraneous element in there, and that’s the horizon. Take the horizon out and there’s no frame of reference for the viewer, and the scene can work, science wise. With the horizon as a guide, we use our memory of how big the moon is, and frankly, it’s never that big. Remove it, and we have no sense of anything to place it against in terms of scale

Less is more, Less is more.

Thanks to Jake Mullender for sending me this link.

Lookslike I have another entry for the Skeptics’ Songbook.

In last week’s strip I casually mentioned that I would eventually be re-drawing Flight of the Virginia Dare. I’ve planned to re-draw it for some time, if for no reason than I just don’t like a majority of the artwork that I did 8-9 years ago. I also don’t like the way the romance between Jenny and Officer Duett just kind of happens. In the revision, we’ll get a tour of the Virginia Dare and a real sense of why a conventional bomb in the ballroom will damage the ship past the point where it would be space worthy, since it’s a BIG ship.

There’s also a bit of science that needs to be cleared up. The effort with Jet-Pack Jenny, despite the absurd name she goes by, is that the science fiction is supposed to be scientifically accurate. It’s just something that really irks me when science fiction gets science wrong. Of course, it’s one thing if the science fiction is from an era and the science that’s wrong simply wasn’t known, yet. Getting the atmosphere of Venus as habitable is fine if you’re writing a story in 1952. but it’s bad science if you’re writing it in 2002. Ignorance doesn’t count, either. That’s why I’m redrawing the story.

I came across this article in my daily news reading today, from the New York Times:

A previously unknown kind of human group vanished so completely that it has left behind the merest wisp of evidence that it ever existed — a single bone from the little finger of a child, buried in a cave in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia.

Researchers extracted DNA from the bone and reported Wednesday that it differed conspicuously from that of modern humans and of Neanderthals, the archaic human species that inhabited Europe until the arrival of modern humans on the continent about 44,000 years ago.

The child was probably 5 to 7 years old, but it is not yet known if it was a boy or a girl. The finger bone was excavated by Russian archaeologists in 2008 from a place known as the Denisova cave.

The researchers were led by Johannes Krause and Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They are careful not to call the Denisova child a new human species, though it may prove to be so, because the evidence is preliminary.

But they say the genetic material, an element called mitochondrial DNA, extracted from the bone belonged to a distinct human lineage that migrated out of Africa at a different time from the two known archaic human species. Homo erectus, found in East Asia, left Africa 2 million years ago, and the ancestor of Neanderthals emigrated about 500,000 years ago. The number of differences found in the child’s DNA indicate that its ancestors left Africa about 1 million years ago, the researchers say. Their report is published online in the journal Nature.

Now, science learned some time ago that Neanderthals were not a precursor to modern humans, but a separate species that lived concurrent with homo sapiens, even competing in Europe. This isn’t any definite proof that another hominid species tried to claw it’s way up the evolutionary ladder yet, but if it is, then the past gets more interesting, and would mean that early hominids began to leave Africa long before we previously thought. This implies a lot about our ancestors and could give indications for behavior we’ve not credited to our ancestors. Early man becomes an explorer much sooner, and becomes much more interesting.

Keep in mind, this is data discovered just two years ago and to extrapolate knowledge without data is just foolish, so don’t think I’m assuming blindly that this is a definite new species and despite many headlines around this story, the scientists that are studying this specimen are even more cautious in calling it a new species until they have more proof. The lessons of Piltdown Man still hang in the air.