Context reminder: Based on the security camera footage Theo busted the girls on, he thinks the lasers come from the barrettes.
Today's edition of the Secret Commentary is empty, because Dave failed to come up with something for it.
Context reminder: Based on the security camera footage Theo busted the girls on, he thinks the lasers come from the barrettes.
I’m glad Theo is talking about it. Someone needs to. Thankfully he went about shutting down Marta and Selkie at the same time.
The grandparental foot came down in no uncertain terms.
Swords make ploughshares, but first they make swords.
But yeah, I would want that technology.
Good move on both Todd and Grandpa for shutting that convo down and not adding drama/mystery aka making the topic look that interesting or enticing. That’s legit how you handle NDA/topics too close to security risks.
No lies, no drama no wink, nudge hint. Just blah basic mundanity normality.
And also touching on the reality of WHY it’s being kept hushed. Aside from the very tangle cultural and spiritual aspects of what an Echo is to the society that has them- a whole truck of baggage itself- humans are humans and governments, no matter the people, are governments.
There’s reasons why echos are more or less trained in state run prison camps and there’s reasons selfies mom choose to hand her daughter over to humans rather than her own people.
So much complications….
Theo. Bless him and his father/grandfatherly words. <3
And THEO IN FOR THE SAVE! Insert Todd’s sigh of relief here. Good dad is gonna good dad.
I’d still give Avery a heads up though that Marta is even poking her head in and ask for advice on how to further dissuade her from prying into echoes and Sarnothi technology.
Considering her “wink, wink” comments, she couldn’t be trusted with the NDA. That option is entirely off the table. At least for now, she *can’t* be told.
Oh gee, that’s not conspicuous at all, like Marta doesn’t know to go to Selkie now.
Theo is mostly right, and it’s certainly the right answer to deflect this particular small-scale situation, but I’d argue Marta is much more right.
Assuming that Selkie’s world is in roughly the same ecological and global energy situation as our own, and the date is around today (I’ve forgotten what year it is in-comic, but it’s not that far back), the statistical chance that every one of the children in the story—Sarnothi or otherwise—are going to eventually die miserably in a climate disaster, is extremely high.
If Sarnothi technology is indeed capable of the kind of power output Marta’s group estimated, and has no major ecological side effects (e.g. nuclear waste), it’s already been demonstrated to be usable for “everyday” power, so attempting to harness it as clean energy isn’t just “oh, this would solve a bunch of problems”, it’s essentially a moral imperative. It’s not “Well, people will also abuse this, so we’d better keep it away from everyone.” it’s “Our children are going to starve or cook to death if we don’t so we should figure out how to minimize the destruction.”
Further, it’s an absolute guarantee that every major nation and bad-actor is gong to try to use it as a weapon anyway, so unless your plan is poisoning the lake or sinking a nuke in it to commit genocide and remove all Echos from the equation, you might as well figure out how to use it for good at the same time.
I’m late to replying here and I have mentioned this before, but if the problem you are trying to solve is enviromentally friendly energy production… that’s already solved. It’s been solved for over a decade.
We have hundreds of methods of producing the power we require without relying on fossil fuels or damaging the environment in any noticable way. There are lots of green renewable methods of producing power we already use, it’s just we haven’t replaced things like coal or oil with them yet.
(Of couse, ecological and geological surveys are required to know which solutions might work at what location, but those are things that should probably be done with any large construction project)
It’s also a problem Sarnothi power tech doesn’t actually help with, as it relies on echoes and thus is inherently not scalable enough. I didn’t mention that in my comment on the previous page because Marta doesn’t actually know that bit.
Concerning Nuclear Waste, that’s also a problem with existing solutions. Modern designs for nuclear power reactors don’t exactly produce any noticable nuclear waste, though it will take a very long time for those designs to replace existing nuclear plants, since they work well enough anyway and building a new power plant like that is more expensive.
An old design of nuclear power plant in Japan got hit by two earthquakes and a tsumani before there was a problem (in 2011), and even then there wasn’t a high impact to the environment or to humans.
And that was a design with known safety concerns and known ways of preventing most of them. (not much you can do against a tsumani when you are near the ocean).
We don’t build nuclear plants that badly anymore, and with that one a pretty much worst case scenario didn’t have much of an impact.
By far the most damage caused by it (and it was the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl) was caused by panic and the evacuation – an evacutation that wasn’t even needed.
Concerning weaponisation… Well, you may have a point.
From what we’ve seen of Sarnothi tech and weaponry, existing human weaponry is vastly superior (longer range, cheaper, deadlier, greater rates of fire, and much easier to mass produce) but that wouldn’t stop people wanting it.
Sarnothi or echo weapons aren’t enough to change status quo, they just aren’t effective enough. It could however lead to trying to produce child soldier echoes however (but luckily there are existing interational laws against such things)
Urge to laser the world (better) just hit the wall of responsible thinking. And by the looks of Selkie, it hit hard.