Author notes

295 - Very Dead Men

El Cid

on June 6, 2019

Wow, ever since I took up game design I can't type worth a damn anymore.

Hopefully it's clear enough that that's Agent Shadid with shorter hair in the third panel, and not some random topless chick who enjoys sipping wine while dismembering her victims.

So Agent Six is going rogue to take down the supervillain who murdered his friend. Wasn't this the plot to 'License to Kill?' I still haven't watched that one.








A while back I did a blurb about how a lot of the focus on Mars and its possible long-extinct oceans is more than just innocent speculation about Martian history because it's interesting; it's part of a larger narrative that Mars is A Place Like Earth that may have once harbored life or may someday be a second home for humans. It's not a prominent discussion point in and of itself because it's independently interesting, just like Sasquatch isn't interesting because we're all closet amateur primatologists who want to know everything there is to know about an undiscovered North American ape species. Sasquatch is interesting because of the underlying – if however implausible – narrative that maybe just maybe it's a long-lost evolutionary cousin of ours.

Mars isn't the only planet with a narrative. It's rare that you'll watch a documentary on Venus where the narrator doesn't mention that Venus is a boiling hellhole because it's atmosphere is (*gasp!*) 95 percent carbon dioxide. The reason why this fact absolutely needs to be put out there is obvious: They want to promote clean energy and get people focused on climate change. I've even heard it put less subtly many times that human activity is “turning Earth into Venus.” This use of space science to promote activism here on Earth is commendable. It's also deeply dishonest.



Earth's atmosphere is less than 1 percent carbon dioxide. Hellhouse Venus by contrast has an atmosphere that is 95 percent carbon dioxide. But there's another planet with a 95 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere: Mars. Yes, frozen desolate Mars also has an atmosphere that is almost entirely CO2. So what gives? Well, the reason Mars is a frozen wasteland and Venus is a boiling soup planet is not due to the composition of their atmospheres; it's due to the *density* of their atmospheres. Specifically, it's the atmospheric pressure. You probably learned about the ideal gas law in middle school physics… and then promptly forgot it, but basically the temperature of a gas is dependent on its pressure and volume:



This is one reason why you'll have cold temperatures at the top of the Grand Canyon South Rim, where the air is thinner, but it will be much warmer 5000 feet below at the bottom, where the atmospheric pressure is higher.

This is, of course, not at all to suggest that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas. Of course it is, and climate change and human impact on the environment are all serious concerns. However, as I've grumbled about in the past, I worry that scientists risk their credibility when they play fast and loose with facts this way, or even when they choose not to correct popular misconceptions because it promotes a certain narrative. It's clear today, at least here in the Western world, that the tenets of modern scientific materialism – religious agnosticism, Darwinism, Big Bang cosmology – have captured the hearts and minds of the mainstream general public… but by my observation, that's not because most average people fully understand the science behind these ideas. I find that a lot of people who claim to believe in these things are ignorant of basic fundamental concepts. They adhere to these beliefs largely because it's viewed that they have decisively won the ideological battle, and people want to back a winner. But if people become disenchanted with science, that leaves the door open for other ideologies lurking in the shadows to swoop in and scoop them up, especially as they come to realize that maybe science can't answer all of our questions, or bring us true happiness.



Okay, so that was a somewhat dark and maybe controversial science blurb, but it's the last one I'll be doing for a while, as there is only one page left in this chapter. Might as well go out with a bang. I'll see you next time (hopefully)!