So, I really liked how the trippy effects came out on the previous page… but this page, not so much. The last panel especially, really crossed over from psychedelic sensuality and into funhouse horror territory. Oh well. If you never go too far, then you're testing the limits nearly enough.
In case it's not crystal clear what's going on: Avram is wearing a special collar that constricts to cut off circulation to his brain in order to increase his orgasm. It's autoerotic asphyxiation for lazy people. And that's why we're getting all these trippy effects and techno graffiti. Avram's cybernetic systems are flipping out, and he's also hallucinating from lack of oxygen… and, from that last panel, it looks like he may have taken things a bit too far…
Our last science blurb was more shameless Mars-bashing on my part, so I figured I might as well pile on some more. As I mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of Mars. And here's the reason why: Sasquatch.
Why are people so captivated by fanciful stories of a mysterious Sasquatch (or Bigfoot, or Skunk Ape, or whatever) roaming through the wilderness? Is it because deep down, we're all amateur primatology enthusiasts? No. It's because Sasquatch has a narrative. How many times have we heard stories about a hunter having the big hairy beast at gunpoint, but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger “because it had the face of a man!” That's the subtext of the whole Sasquatch mythos: It's Just Like Us. It's some long-lost relative history forgot; a missing link to our primeval past.
Except it's not. Our ape ancestors were diminutive little runts. They were all smaller than us. We're Sasquatch to them. The whole unspoken narrative about Sasquatch being some sort of distant cousin of ours just doesn't make evolutionary sense, but people wouldn't be nearly as mystified by the stories if all we're talking about is some big undiscovered North American gorilla. We only talk ourselves into caring because we're subconsciously drawn in by the subtext.
It's the same thing with Mars. Mars is intriguing to us because It's A Place Just Like Earth. Some of the more popular theories about Mars suggest that it was once a very Earthlike planet, with a thick atmosphere and shallow oceans, and at some point in time something went wonky and it ended up the dry, dead husk of a world that it is today.
Except Mars isn't really a Place Just Like Earth. It's completely different, and it's made of completely different stuff. Earth and Venus are sister planets. They both formed in the same part of the solar system, from the same materials. They're even virtually the same size. Mars, on the other hand, is much smaller than the Earth and ten times less massive. Its composition also has a lot more in common with meteorites and asteroids than with the other inner planets. It's basically a giant overgrown asteroid, like Ceres or Vesta.
The silicate isotopes found on Mars suggest it actually formed much further away from the sun than where it currently sits; much closer to where Jupiter orbits today, and it migrated inward due to Jupiter's gravitational influence. If this is true, it would throw a monkey wrench into theories about Mars once being a watery oasis, because it would have been far too cold to maintain stable liquid water on its surface. Mars may have temporarily had liquid water when it warmed up due to large collisions, like the massive impact which flattened its northern hemisphere, and also subsurface upwellings from volcanic activity. But it's possible that Mars may never have had liquid surface oceans for any prolonged period of time.
It's worth pointing out that this is, as of yet, not the prevailing theory on the origins of Mars. And it may never be, because a lot of what drives the funding for space projects there is the belief that (A) Mars either was once or is currently the home to extraterrestrial life, and (B) that Mars was once a second Earth, and by turning a few knobs we can make it that again. While I'd never rule anything out, I don't think it's safe to automatically accept those assumptions.
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