Technobabble

On this 40th anniversary of the lunar landings, I was thinking about how we compare civilisations. A bit dull I know, but it passes the time. I think a fairly good measure is their physical size versus their sphere of exploration. The distinction is important. The ancient Roman Empire was the same approximate physical size as the United States, but the sphere of exploration of the Roman Empire didn’t extend much beyond their borders. By contrast the sphere of exploration of the USA can be taken as far as the lunar orbit.

Physical size would be a measure of that civilisation’s political or military might – its either been strong enough to expand of enlightened enough to form a political block – where as sphere of exploration is a measure of the civilisation’s technological and scientific ability. One could even split the sphere of exploration into that physically explored (humans have gone to the Moon) and that which they have direct, reasonably accurate information about (we’ve sent unmanned probes to the edge of the solar system).

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Green Arrow is one of those heroes who often comes off badly if his trick arrows aren’t taken seriously. They’re one of the real holdovers from the Silver Age – a miriad of gadgets and widgets that rivals anything Batman has in his Utility Belt. There were explosive arrows, boomerang arrows, gas arrows, fire fighting arrows, and the all time classic: the boxing glove arrow. Like so much of the whimsy of the Silver Age the trick arrows were boxed up and thrown into limbo by the new seriousness of the late 1980s. Yet, there is something about these things that just can’t be kept down. They’re just too fantastically goofy to die.

For me the first story that heralded the return of the Trick Arrows was Grant Morrison’s two-part JLA story featuring the second Green Arrow (Conner Hawke, Oliver Queen’s adult son) stranded alone on the JLA Watchtower taking on the Key with only his dad’s old weapons. A few years after that Kevin Smith’s relaunch of the Green Arrow title hearlded the return of everything cool about the Green Arrow and the addition of a real sense of fun to his franchise – I’m not one of those who ever took to Green Arrow as an urban-hunter, but those stories suited their time. And if there is one thing Green Arrow has always done it’s change to reflect his times.

Trick Arrows are a very visual motif and have worked surprisingly well on the small screen. The teaser for Initiation, the first episode of Justice League Unlimited, has the classic Neal Adams version of Green Arrow fighting a gang of masked gun-men. In under thirty seconds we see a tear-gas arrow, a net arrow, and the boxing-glove arrow deployed. Each of them is not only nicely animated, but works perfectly with the show’s physics. The trick arrows even work on Smallville. In her magazine column freelance writer Jayne Nelson (SFX #153, pg 120) comments on her initial skepticism about Green Arrow’s character :

Until, in episode four, he pulled out his bow and saved Lois’s life by shooting a bullet our of the air as it flew towards her.

Admittedly, Clark could’ve caught it just as easily, but he’d have use his hands in time-honoured Son of Krypton fashion. Green Arrow used a honking big bow with all sorts of bells and whistles and pointy bits far more sophisticated than a bit of palm action. His arrows give out clouds of gas or electro-magnetic pulses or just stun people. They are super, duper, frosty cool with knobs on. And now, thanks to these strings in his bow, I love the Green Arrow. A lot.

As any Dungeons and Dragons or rpg fan will know speciality arrows aren’t just the preserve of the comicbook archer. Many a gamehead has combed the pages of history trying to find that extra +1 to hit. Gamers have collected almost every varient on the standard pointed type going. They’d arm themselves with narrow-tipped piecering bodkin arrows, traditional broad-bladed cutting arrows, forked arrows for cutting ropes & rigging, and even the assassin’s poisoned arrows. But that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the range of exotic arrows that have been used through out history and are even still in use today. These include

• Medievil Europeans used a quenched steel arrow heads for piercing plate armour.
• The Kabura-ya signal arrow, a ritualised Japanese whistling arrow.
• Modern british archers can buy rubber tipped arrows for when they want to do less damage to small targets.
• American hunters can buy arrows with retractable blades!
• The first rockets in China were fireworks attached to arrows.

That doesn’t even cover the arrows that have been recently registered with the patent office. These include the “light grenade” arrow, an explosive hunting arrow, a rotating arrow that sounds suspiciously like Ollie’s old drill arrow, a tracker arrow and a drug injecting arrow. It isn’t even as if there is just one patent for each, but there is often multiple patents for each and I assume only a specialist would know the difference. Unfortunately most of the patents are involved with increasing the lethality of hunting arrows whereas Ollie’s trick arrows were really the solution to how a non-lethal superhero could use an otherwise lethal weapon.

As for Hawkeye’s grenade arrows, even they have their forerunner. The Romans had a type of incendiary arrow and as mentioned the Chinese used firework’s to extend the range of their arrows (the first rocket propelled projectiles). Even as late as the Vietnam war an American commando (Donnald Shepard) found that flaming arrows were perfect for flushing people out of flammable grass huts.

Some of the explanations of Green Arrow’s equipment may fall flat, but against many real historical arrows the trick one don’t really look that silly any more. Sure, there are still issues about balance and accuracy with some of the bulkier arrowsheads, but more and more of Ollie’s toys look feasible as ideas even if the Silver Age illustrations weren’t entirely practical.

According to Wikipedia a Batman was a ancient Persian measure of mass equal to about 2.97 kg or 6.5 pounds. That’d mean that Batman weights 32 batmans. The name was also used in parts of Russia for a unit equal to 16.4 metric tonnes. So you get 5500 Persian batmans or 172 Batmen to one Russan batman.

How many planets are there in our Solar System? Nine, you think. Yet, the body that regulates the naming and classification of astronomical objects, the IAU, is currently debating whether there should be more or less than nine. All this stems from the status of Pluto and how we differentiate a planet from the other space rock floating around the solar system.

The field of astronomy that I work in is called Star Formation and that’s closely related to the field of Planet Formation. The broad paradigm we’re currently working under is that the sun formed when a rotating cloud of gas collapsed along its axis of rotation to form a disc. The small proto-sun was at the centre of that disc and gas spiraling inwards from the disc was used feed its growth. After the Sun has finished forming the scattered rocky remnants of the disc started to bumb and stick together forming proto-planets. Some of those rocks become big enough to capture atmospheres from the remaining gas in the disc. This is a very violent era with proto-planets crashing into each other or being thrown out of the disc.

However, eventually things begin to settle down to a more recognisable state. Most of the mass is consolidated into eight major planets all orbiting in the what use to be the plane of the disc. There is still a fair amount of “builders rubble” left, but this is mainly left at the edge of the solar system in a massive extended shell of material called the Opik-Oort Cloud (which is where comets come from) and in a belt of larger objects called the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. The largest object in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt and the only one we were able to detect until recently is the object we call Pluto.

Pluto was discoverd in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and was added to the text books as the ninth planet. As we’ve come to understand Pluto’s place in the solar system there have been calls for it to be down graded from planet status and reclassified as just a Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt object. That has been constantly rejected by more historically minded astronomers. But it does create the problem that if Pluto is a planet then there are seveal other objects in the solar system which really should be considered as candidates for planet status.

Personally I think this is all a waste of time and man power. The latin root of the word Planet means “to wander” and that is pretty much the classical definition of a planet. They are objects in the night sky that appear to move, to wander, relative to the fixed pattern of background stars. Astronomy, like taxonomy, has always been a science fixated with the classification of things and we’ve constantly been searching for a more technical definition of a planet. However, we fail at every step and even if the IAU adopts the new scheme there will be legions of astronomers who will disagree or ignore it. And that’s side from the fact that American astronomers would never allow the only planet to be discovered by an American to be taken away from them

The solution isn’t to reclassify Pluto as that just confuses the public and vexes small children. Better to leave it where it is and use it as an excuse to teach people about the Kuiper Belt and the smaller members of our solar family.

Real scientific papers: “Black Holes with Flavors of Quantum Hair?”.

One can imagine Star Trek’s Captain Janeway saying “Tuvok, we’ve got a black hole to shave!”