Author notes

144 - Famous Last Words

El Cid

on Jan. 28, 2017

As far as famous last words go, “I need to pee” won't be making many Top Ten lists.

In the third panel, Jetta mentions hijacking construction supplies as a typical space pirate activity. That probably sounds a bit odd, so I should explain what she's talking about. In a very ancient science blurb, I pondered what kinds of shenanigans real space pirates would get up to, because outer space is nothing like the high seas. It's not easy to sneak up on vessels in space, or get away from a heist undetected, and it's also very, very difficult to intercept and overtake a ship mid-trajectory. You're basically trying to hit a missile with another missile. So space pirates would mostly attack stationary targets like depots or colonies or something like that, and if they did attack a ship, they're best off hitting it when it's docked. Ransom tactics would probably be a big thing, too (“Transfer xxx amount of lira to our crytocurrencey account, or we'll blast ye to dust!”).

One kind of skulduggery a pirate could make a living at is for-profit sabotage. There's always a lot of construction going on in orbit over Triton and Neptune, and the surrounding areas, and a lot of building materials and finished products need to be shipped to work sites. An enterprising thug in a relatively lawless area could charge builders a “tax” if they want their supplies to arrive on time or at all. Such a nefarious individual might employ someone like Jetta to sabotage supply shipments and make life miserable for the poor schmucks who don't pay. That's probably the type of gig Jetta is referring to. A lot of the dirty work probably isn't even done by pirate “ships;” they'd employ malicious attack drones on a one-way trip and use cyber tactics for the most part.



Also, the line about breaking someone out of space prison actually refers to one of the early plots I was considering doing a comic about instead of this one. I shelved it because I felt it wasn't ambitious enough, but it was nice little cyberpunk noir type of story. Looking back, I think this comic may have been a bit over-ambitious for a first sci-fi effort, but then the grass is always greener, I guess…



It's always interesting doing a sci fi comic just what seemingly minor thing is going to send you off on a research bender. When Jetta mentions that the Sun Eater could “wipe out billions of people,” it inevitably led me to wonder, just how many people are alive in this future colonized solar system she lives in?

It's often stated that there are more people alive today than the total number of people who ever lived. That's probably not true, in fact one estimate puts the total number of people who have ever lived at 106 billion over the last 52,000 years. However, it could be true in the future if human civilization were to branch out into space. According to a (very old) Stanford/NASA study, there are enough resources in space to comfortably support a population of ten trillion (a trillion is a thousand billion, in case you weren't sure).

Those kinds of numbers are not terribly realistic in my opinion. Assuming we stay somewhere near current technology levels, it's generally anticipated that the world population should peak at between 8 and 9 billion people over the next century and then level off and likely even decrease over time after that. But is that the maximum number of people the Earth can support? Not even close. You could comfortably house all of the Earth's 7 billion people in the state of Texas. The limiting factors on population are going to be whether you can sustainably provide food and energy for all these people. If that's the case, say if we develop something like fusion energy or something even more far out than that, then there's no reason we couldn't have two, three, or even four times the current Earth population. That doesn't even factor in that those future citizens of Earth may be transhuman cyborgs (like the people in this comic), in which case they may consume less resources than purely biological inhabitants… and we haven't even begun to colonize the oceans yet.



As far as people living in space, I'm still somewhat skeptical that Mars will ever be densely populated or terraformed. But there's virtually no limit to the number of people you could support in a Dyson swarm. That's probably where that “ten trillion” number comes from. You could also easily have tens of billions of people living in orbit around the gas giants and ice giant outer planets, taking advantage of the near-endless supplies of fusion fuel stored in their atmospheres. The rest of the solar system (Main Asteroid Belt, trojan belts, Kuiper Belt, Hill Sphere and Oort Cloud, and possibly Planet Nine) would all be sparsely populated, but it's still a lot of real estate so it would all add up.

So how many people would I guess are living in this totally made up sci fi future of mine? I wouldn't call it an official number, but I'd believe anything between 50 and 100 billion people. Taking into consideration these colonists are able to continue having children well past their 200th birthday, I may be lowballing it there, but talking about trillions of people just sounds crazy to me.

Here's a snazzy (but long) video by futurist Isaac Arthur, about the Kardashev Scale, a classification system that measures what level of technological advancement a spacefaring civilization has reached, and can also loosely be used for estimating at least potential population. Isaac Arthur has put together a pretty impressive library of high quality videos on futurism subjects ranging from Dyson Spheres to transhumanism to terraforming. If you're interested in that type of thing, you should definitely check out his Youtube channel. There's quite a bit of stuff there though, so you can end up burning through a whole afternoon.



Have a great weekend, everybody!