You (yes, you) are all such awesome people. Thank you for reading, and to those of you who are able to take the time to comment, thank you so much for your thoughts, they really mean a lot. 
(But goodness gracious, based on the response on the last page, you’re all so distrustful! What have the Myradi ever done to you? 
)
Huh, so there *was* a bit of discussion! My tv show quote went entirely unnoticed. XD
All the things this crew has been through (and Aria in particular), these two need a breather.
The Myradi turned me into a newt
Since you are able to operate a keyboard, I infer you got better. But we should approach this scientifically! Do the Myradi weigh the same as a duck?
Bonus points for Monty Python reference!
We don’t know brown goo about the Myradi. At most we have a vague comment that they are probably benevolent. I get that’s part of the point but there is wisdom in “prepare for the worst, hope for the best”.
What have the Myradi ever done to me? That’s just it. Most notable would have to be what they haven’t done. For example, this year once again its seems not one of them remembered my birthday.
Distrust seems endemic these days. Unfortunately I suspect it will get worse before it gets better.
Maybe the Myradi don’t like humans because they think of us as we think of Trump.
(cue the flame war).
I think the mistake might be start at the thought that “we” (humans) think that Myradi think like we do. About anything. That there are layers and layers of alien nature under which we can’t mentally penetrate and the same is true for them. They might have trouble telling Trump apart from Nixon or Kennedy.
I agree. There is no a-priori reason to assume that an alien mindset will have anything in common with a human mindset beyond the rock-bottom minimum common ground necessitated by the fact that they live in the same physical Universe, and are therefore implicitly constrained by the same set of “physical laws.”
(Albeit, even on this latter point it is not only possible but almost certain that an alien knowledge-base regarding those “physical laws” will only partially overlap the human knowledge-base regarding those laws. There are almost certainly data and concepts that members of an alien species have discovered that humans have not, and vice-versa — and moreover their expression and codification of those data and concepts may likewise differ from the human expression and codification of those data and concepts. Imagine, for example, how a cetacean-like species’ concept of “physics” might differ from a land-based species such as humans; “gravity” would probably seem much less relevant to them, and they would probably think much more “three-dimensionally” than humans do, rather than implicitly dividing the universe into “horizontal” and “vertical” directions that behave differently.)
A brief review of the TVtropes section on “Blue and Orange Morality” seems appropriate at this point:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMorality
Good points. However, barring some weird anisotopy in the universe, the laws of physics and evolution will be the same on distant worlds as they are here. Thus fish (and whales) will be the same shape everywhere. We may also assume that mathematics is the same everywhere, though given the abstruse theorems that some human mathematicians have come up with, aliens might indeed imagine some truly strange ideas. But at less complex levels, we should have enough in common to be able to communicate and – eventually – understand one another.
Human obsession with dominance derives from our past of living in small tribes. The alpha male sired many children, and the alpha female had more of her children survive (by recruiting other females to help care for them). Thus evolution favoured the reproduction of individuals who strove for status. Other sapient species with different backgrounds might be more or less socially cooperative than humans, but I would expect enough common ground that we could each “get” where the other is coming from.
I am hopeful that as we learn to communicate with other species on our own planet, including cetaceans but also elephants and of course great apes, we will develop skills – and maybe some humility – that will be very useful when (not “if”) we encounter intelligent extra-terrestrials.
Typo: that should be “anisotropy”, of course.
Yes, the laws of physics will most likely be the same everywhere within the local “Hubble Volume” centered on the Galaxion version of the Milky Way, and quite certainly will be the same on the Myradi Homeworld as on Earth.
It does not follow, however, that the limited understanding of those laws so far achieved by the Myradi will be the same as the limited understanding of those laws so far achieved by humans at the epoch Galaxion is occurring in. Science is, after all, “A series of Successive Approximations to Reality” — and there is absolutely no reason to expect that the set of approximations the Myradi have made will be identical to the set of approximations that the contemporaneous humans in the Galaxion Universe have made!
Consider, for example, how much human understanding of physical law has changed at the various steps along the historical path taken from Aristotle, to Galileo, to Newton, to Einstein, then Heisenberg and Schroedinger, then Yang and Mills, and finally Glashow, Weinberg, and Salam. At each of these steps, the laws themselves did not change, but human understanding of those laws changed — and on occasion quite drastically.
How much more so, then, might a totally alien understanding of those laws differ from the contemporaneous human understanding of those laws? There is no guarantee that the Myradi would have discovered exactly the same set of facts as humans did (let alone in the same order, except as constrained by contingent advances in technology), nor made exactly the same conceptual breakthroughs, in exactly the same order (again except as constrained by contingent advances in technology).
For example, the Myradi version of Leibniz might have prevailed over the Myradi version of Isaac Newton in a debate similar to the one that occurred between Leibniz and Newton’s supporter Samuel Clarke — leading to a “classical” physics that more nearly resembled the structure articulated by Ernst Mach in his “The Science of Mechanics” than it would Newton’s “Absolute Space” and “Absolute Time.” Under such an “Alternate History of Science,” many of the effects predicted by Einsteinian Physics would not have been the surprise that they were under the human history of science, but would have been entirely expected from a very early stage.
So again, even though the Myradi live in the same Universe governed by the same physical laws as humans do, due to the influence of contingency and chance, there is no guarantee at all that their understanding of that Universe will be the same as the contemporaneous human understanding of the Universe — and indeed, unless the Myradi exist at exactly the same stage of scientific and technological development as humans (which is so statistically implausible that mind-boggling does not even begin to describe it; it is far more likely that they will be either millennia or even aeons older or younger than humans as a species than exactly the same age — even if their star formed in the same cloud and at the same time as Sol did), it is virtually certain that their domain and stage of understanding in some fields will be different, and perhaps quite different from that achieved by that of contemporaneous humans.
The thing is that even with good communication and carefully earnest efforts of the crew, there can still so much that can go wrong. Actually, no, its even worse than that because we simply don’t know how many things can go wrong. We can’t, for example, guess how likely will an innocently invading ship be met with how much and what kind of irrationality? We can’t know. I don’t think the ship crew can know, cut off from communications as they are.
Keep in mind that the Myradi are probably doing something too. For all we know, they are in the middle of a civil war or equivalent, which would explain why contact is extremely delicate right now.
“Luckily the Galaxion’s entertainment archive has a complete selection of 21st century web-comics!”
And then it just loops back around to the first comic.
What’s the worst that could happen, right?
I love Aria’s outfit, especially in panel 1.
“I’m FINE really.” Really? Look at that body language. That’s not someone who is fine. Brilliant drawing Tara.
And…a seatbelt! Oh, man, almost brings tears to my eyes. Yay!
Umm . . . I think Tara just likes to draw fancy clothes. And hair.
Sorry, I was being obscure. Let me try again:
I note that in the first panel on the left side (and egain in the 4th panel), there is a grey chair that seems to be embedded by a central post into the floor, The chair is unique in the room in that it seems to include a clip for a seatbelt and shoulder harness. I am operating under the assumption that this is the captains office and the reason Tara includes this piece of furniture (among the many other items in the room) is that she is operating within a worldbuilding matrix where ships such as the Galaxion would always have at least one “safety seat” in every room so that personnel can quickly get to a restrained and safe location in the event that something might jostle the ship or otherwise interrupt artificial gravity. If my assumption about Tara’s motivation to do so this is correct, then she deserves kudos for this nice pragmatic and thoughtful detail.
I mentioned many years ago how pleased I was with Galaxion with the whole idea that bridge personnel are also restrained in seat harnesses. The idea that there ought to be seatbelts on spaceship chairs is wildly obvious — and yet strangely elusive within the realm of a certain fictitious 23rd century space fleet. Imagine how much easier it would have been to stay at helm during “turbulence” if someone had thought to put a seatbelt on those chairs on the deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise.
See also discussions http://galaxioncomics.com/1-comic/book-4/chapter-10/333colour/ and http://galaxioncomics.com/1-comic/book-4/chapter-11/344colour/ and for fun http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoSeatBelts
The “tvtropes” link actually references Galaxion (look under “web comics”) as a (rare) example of avoiding the NoSeatBelts trope.