I definitely botched this animation pretty badly, and it's not easy to follow what's going on. So, what happens is, after the captain blew away all the guards in the previous animation, she doesn't take sides between her client (“James”) and the spider queen lady. Instead, she's sort of auctioning the two against each other, and whoever can pay her the most doesn't get their face shot off. Unfortunately, all spider lady has to offer is her crappy spider lady jewelry, which probably isn't even real, so she gets her face shot off. And that's it. Sorry you had to sit through that.
AUTHOR'S NOTES
So she somehow survived having acid injected directly into her brain. How is that possible? I have no frickin' idea; I'm not a doctor! If I were a doctor, I'd be doing doctor stuff right now! Maybe the acid only ate part of her brain? Or maybe the syringes didn't make it all the way in; that's how she got those acid burns around her eyes. The acid filled up her eye sockets and then overflowed back out, maybe? I dunno. Jeez! The writing in this comic… it's bad, man! It's just not good.
The last few pages are on their way. This thing should all be wrapped up by the end of next week! Yay! The ending is pretty straightforward, but it leaves room for some interesting interpretations.
Carl Sagan famously pointed out that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the Earth's beaches. I'm not sure if he originated that, or just popularized it, but he's getting the blame for it here. It's one of those observations that really makes you stop and think about our place in the grand scheme of things. But was he correct? Well, the question appears to have multiple answers: Maybe, yes, and… well, I'll get to third one in a minute…
How many stars are there in the observable universe? I've seen lots of different estimates, and they vary tremendously. Taking the more conservative route, there are approximately 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy (by mass), and approximately 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which gives us 10 sextillion stars (that's 10 billion billion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).
So how about sand? There are roughly 8,000 grains of sand in one cubic centimeter. Going with an estimated 700 trillion cubic meters of sandy coastline (source), it comes out to 5.6 sextillion total grains of sand. So that's definitely less than the 10 sextillion we estimated for the number of stars, but both are rough estimates and they're clearly within the same ball park of each other.
HOWEVER, that's just the OBSERVABLE universe. There's more universe out there that we're not able to see because the light from it has not reached us and, due to cosmic expansion, in some cases never will reach us. So the observable universe may be less than 1 percent of what's actually out there. So, taking that into account, it's safe to say that there are more stars in the entire universe than there are grains of sand on our beaches. Probably hundreds or millions of times more, in fact. But then, that leads us to the third response to this quandary, which is…
As a catalyst to bring about deep thoughts and flights of imagination, it's a powerful statement. But all too often, it's followed up by something along the lines of “So of course there must be zillions of alien civilizations out there” or something to that effect. Well, yeah, but how would that matter if the aliens are billions of light years away from us? Aliens 100 light years away will see the Earth as it was 100 years ago, and aliens on the edge of the Andromeda galaxy will see it as it was millions of years ago. Even if they are out there, there's no way they could know we exist, or communicate with us, so there's not much to get excited about. So as far as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence goes, we're not dealing with sextillions of grains of sand; we're looking at the 14,600 or so stars within 100 light years of us.
So do you think there is at least one technologically advanced civilization within 100 light years of us? If so, then you believe there is at least a 1/14,600 probability of intelligent life for every star. That's really high. By that prediction, there should be 6,849 technologically advanced civilizations currently active in our galaxy. And that is AT PRESENT. Meaning, there must have been thousands more that came about and went extinct over the past billion or so years, so it's actually a much higher probability than 1/14,600. The idea that the universe could be that crowded without us seeing any sign of it seems unlikely. Just extrapolating from what we are able to see within our local galactic neighborhood, it stands to reason that intelligent alien life is extremely rare and far between.
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