Zibarro is Doomed
There’s almost no chance that a race of intelligent, non-backward life could arise from AllStar Superman’s Bizarro organism simply because evolution can’t find traction. Zibarro is a Superman copy like all the others but with an exceptional mutation allowing for intelligence. Chance mutation is a pillar of evolutionary theory but without the Zibarro reproducing his DNA- or whatever- then the whole hope of progressive complexity crumbles.
Zibarro’s positive features must outproduce the harmful features of other Superman copies in order for them to flourish in the Bizarro-pool. What’s upsetting is that Bizarro is so close to having the necessary ingredients for evolution: variation, replication, fitness. The organism does make copies and some of those copies are better at surviving than others. There’s just no way for the good features to feedback into the reproduction, or to be ‘remembered’ in the next generation.
As far as the future for Bizarro world, there’s no offspring to carry positive features forward or even a better than random chance at improvement for the next generation. So no matter how hard Zibarro works to build and educate, there’s no future for intelligence itself.
Bizarro Replication
Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman has one of the best Bizarro appearance’s I’ve ever read, which is admittedly not many. Bizarro is typically a degenerate Superman, from his backward logic (“I’ll save you” = ‘I will kill you’) right down to the backwards ‘S’ on his chest. But Morrison goes beyond a single perverse Superman, and introduces a Bizarro Superman originated from a replicating organism. The ‘Bizarro organism’ copies nearby entities yet most of the copies are dreadfully imperfect.
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Entropy for Babies
Today at my new job I was playing with kids in the large ballpit and, of course, I started thinking about entropy. Entropy is a fancy term in physics for ‘disorder’. Take this baby on the right for example: the Red balls are mixed in with all the others and there’s almost no chance that this happy 1 year old will separate them by willy-nilly splashing: entropy can’t decrease in a closed system* (ballpit). And, if the Red balls were all separated to one side, then this baby playing in the middle is only going to mix the Red in with all the rest: entropy increases in a closed system.
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Dr. Quintem’s Impossible Evolution
You’d be hard -pressed to find a better scientist than Dr. Leo Quintem in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman. A pioneer in multiple fields and leader of ‘the ultimate futurist think tank’ along with the DNA P.R.O.J.E.C.T., Quintem has limitless resources and an inexhaustible curiosity. His strangest cast of experiments are the ‘G-men’, beings genetically developed to flourish in extremely specific niches, like explaining the Unified Field Theory in Haiku form. Read more…
How to Turn Back the Earth (cont.)
After sitting down with an old high-school friend and working through my Math on Superman counter-rotating the Earth, we found a new mistake which is exciting. Obviously not because I like being wrong, but because we found a new way to be right. The question was: How much gravitational force does Superman need to ‘pull’ the Earth in a different rotation? If you’ll remember, my disappointing and small answer was 3.2. Here’s how I figure you have to think about it: Superman isn’t big enough to tug at the Earth normally but as he goes faster, he gets heavier. We know he gets heavier with higher speeds because he would need alot of energy to go that fast and, more energy means more mass according to Einstein’s famous equation Energy= mass*(c)speed of light2. Read more…
Drafting BSG: Intro to Morals and Finale Climax
“I’m just one being among others, and there is nothing to privelege my suffering. Living ethically is to think what its like for others affected by my actions“- Peter Singer
Nothing quite captures a morality of consciousness like the Golden Rule: Regard every living being as you do yourself, harming no one and being kind to all living beings. From this morality we get Human, Civil and Animal Rights along with, yes, the Human/Cylon alliance in Battlestar Galactica. But, if granting conscious beings equal moral consideration seems like an obvious and complete philosophy, it’s not. ‘Respecting others’ isn’t enough in BSG and, if we’re to believe the series’ ending, it isn’t enough for us either.
If you haven’t ever watched BSG, it’s an important note that every last Human and Cylon are fighting each other across the universe: they’re both all-in. After four seasons of chases, torture, shootouts, suicide bombings and genocidal destruction, the Cylon/Human conflict comes to a climax. Read more…
How to Turn Back the Earth… No Hands
Waiting for the professionals to callback, I went looking at the math of Superman myself and got a little ways toward an answer. Remember that in Superman 1 (the movie), the big guy circles our planet so fast that he reverses the direction of Earth’s rotation. But Superman never touches the Earth, he just circles it, so how does he pull it in another direction? Well, gravity of course.
When Superman begins traveling around and around the planet he picks up speed. In order to pick up speed he needs energy and that extra energy adds to his mass*. When Superman reaches the really high speeds, he will be at his most energetic and, therefore, at his most massive. Once massive enough he will have a gravitational attraction capable of ‘tugging’ the Earth, just like our super-massive Sun. I’m sure this point has been figured out and written on somewhere else but I want some numbers. So the questions are:
How massive is the Earth?
How much Force does Superman need to affect Earth’s Mass?
How massive does Superman need to be to get that Force?
How much energy/speed does Superman need to get that massive?
After doing alot of math on this post the answer came to an odd 3.2. Which can’t be right. I really need some help and, like my teachers always said, it’s best to show your work.
Here were my formulas:
to determine Momentum
to determine Acceleration
to determine Force
to determine Gravitational Force
to determine Object 1′s Mass
Here’s some numbers I got from Google, please allow me rounding:
Earth’s Weight = 589,670,081,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms [130 x 1023 pounds]
Earth’s Rotating Speed = 4470.4 meters per second [1,000 mph]
Heading over to Wikipedia’s ‘Mass Page’, we get this for figuring out the Earth’s Momentum(P) which is a product of its Mass(m) and Speed(v):
2,636,061,130,102,400,000,000,000,000 = 589,670,081,000,000,000,000,000 kg x 4470.4 m/s
[Disclaimer] I don’t know alot about Math but, I think, that the underlined number is the amount of mass moving through a meter every second. So, if the Earth were sitting still, and you wanted to get it up to this huge momentum it would then take a certain amount of force, just like brakes forcing a car to lose momentum. So we can find out the Force required to counter-rotate the Earth if we can figure out the Acceleration of the Earth’s Mass from 0 to 4,470.4 meters per second.
= 3.2
What went wrong?
