Ambrose Chase had the ability to create a non-reality bubble around him, in which he got to choose what physics actually did do and didn’t do. In his bubble, he stopped time. Because he was only affecting the bubble around him, time continued for everyone else. Drummer explains major problems with building a time machine: Turning on a time machine could collapse all future probability waves at once, and your left with one straight path of a future. Later, everyone of this universe’s possible future universes who could show up do show up, and all possible future timelines that could stem from the moment you turned on the time machine are laid out before you. This doesn’t involve other universes where a time machine was built by planetary, only this universe. At the end, when they do turn it on, I can’t figure out whether or not the probability waves collapsed, because so many different future planetary groups showed up. I don’t think they did, because the Drummer appears to be surprised by the result and tells Snow, “you knew”. The drummer should be a little worried about what the future might hold for him, though, as one of the future groups appears to only consist of Ambrose, Jakita, and Elijah. Overall, the comics were great, and I’ve come to like the ending a lot more than I originally did. The issues weren’t about the four, so they didn’t need more ‘screen time’ than they ended up getting. The issues were about planetary, and their fight to help keep the world strange and safe.
Planetary vol. 4 25-26
Stone turns out to be somewhat working for the four, and explains that the four didn’t get their powers simply by entering the bleed, but by striking a deal with posthumans from a different earth. The power and want of knowledge is a huge focus of this whole series, and the posthumans want two things: knowledge and safety. Even the four go through the gate because “it’s an adventure” and they know they will be able to harbor all the information and knowledge they want away from normal humans. Knowledge is power in Planetary, and that’s how Snow beats the four. He lures Dowling in to the trap with the location of the shift ship, and then defeats Kim and Dowling by using just one thing they didn’t know against them. Some science in the chapters: Dowling doesn’t actually stretch parts of his body, but stretches his ‘mind’ into others. This could be done through information, rearranging other people’s minds to more resemble his own, or biologically, actually changing people’s brains. Snow threatens the posthumans with deletion from the informational superstructure of reality, and although information can not be visibly seen, toying with it brings major consequences, good or bad.
Planetary vol. 4 23-24
The focus of tech and science is constantly switching, and the next big thing could be laughed at in its earliest stages. Snow knows this, and when Jakita comments that computers are for playing games, Snow knows that if the four think its important, its important. At an earlier stage, the internet would be considered “basically radio”, and its potential for information might be missed. Scientific exposition runs thin throughout the issue, but Ambrose freezes time and Drummer screws up the information in the computers until they blow up. In the next issue, Elijah theorizes that Drummer is part of a group of new humans that are hooked into an informational underspace, an agent for something no one can see. Century babies are a neat idea of our universe at work for the universe’s sake, with unseen but powerful laws of the universe keeping the universe functioning. Snow guesses that Ambrose is still alive based on the fact that all information around him, even information that should have been trailing from his corpse, is gone. The four level their building, and planetary gets angry at the four again.
Planetary vol. 4 21-22
For as much attention as the macroscale gets, such as planets, galaxies, and the entire multiverse, the microscale is equally as important, and to some may seem more important. The microscale focuses on the building blocks of everything in the universe, even us. Melanctha gets oddly specific when talking about work on the microscale, stating “Already, physicists are achieving femtotechnological change with hundred-thousand-dollar lasers…Imagine: remodelling individual atoms with light.” What could we do if we changed the building blocks of the universe themselves? Instead of concerning ourselves with what we could build with atoms and particles, we could focus on what we could change those particles into and how it would affect structure. Mr. Snow is shown a much-more-possible-but-still-improbable afterlife, and the ideas of souls as electromagnetic fields is elaborated on again. The next chapter involves John Leather’s lone ranger story, with a twist that he’s sent to the same afterlife Snow saw before his revenge.
Planetary vol. 4 19-20
When we look at our visible universe and everything in it, some terms, to apply to anything tangible, can be warped. In the earlier issues, Stone referred to electromagnetic forces that make up every human being as ‘souls’, and now a group of information-craving aliens is referred to as angels. And why not? They were sent from an almost god-like group of defenders to ‘look over’ the galaxy. The ‘angels’ not only document information and retain knowledge, but also appear to feed off of the physical information of the universe, as their bodies resemble something along the lines of a humanoid storage-device. The angels’ ship rewrites information and constantly reconstructs itself to produce a forward motion. Size is relative in our universe, as men run around like insects while a giant(whose body resembles Galactus’s armor) rots and large insect like humanoids fly around caverns of their hive. Jacob Greene has gone through the worst mutations, as organs bulge through his now inhuman skin. The angels show no sadness at their ship exploding, as their existence’s joy revolves around receiving physical information, and they’re trapped in wreckage with a thousand years’ worth.
Planetary vol. 3 issues 17-18
Along the lines of different civilizations being on different scientific timelines, this amazonian city is made out of complete gold. It shifts and falls into a beautiful square when they decide to hate foreigners, so that’s pretty neat. The really early space pod shot into space in the last issue has no independent power and so makes an oval around both the earth and moon as a whole until it finally crashes back to earth. If modern scientists looked at the fictional flight plan of that pod today, they’d probably be able to decide quickly what will go wrong. Trial and error isn’t really a main focus of live-subject experiments, but can be implemented accidentally. Leather has his final fight with Planetary. It’s also interesting to think about the direction space-tech would have gone had something like this been made and succeeded. I now realize Leather’s powers are a lot more flame-like than I had before, because I was thinking it was sort of his energy just being displayed around him. It still is energy, but it reminds me a whole lot more of the human torch’s fire. That being said, Leather’s powers are still shown in a ‘realistic’ manner, with metal burning and melting around his body.
Planetary vol. 3 issues 15-16
The first issue doesn’t talk about the creation of the universe as much as it does the creation of reality, which are too very different things. In our universe, there are specific laws that dictate everything. In another universe in our multiverse, everything might be different, such as the amount of planets and stars or even the possibility that a universe never formed anything tangible, but it would be dictated by the same laws. Zoom out as far as you can, and that is our reality. We may not be able to reach everything in our reality, but it is there and follows the same laws. There is basically no chance for an alternate reality unless you want to start talking about religion(which might be best, because in our reality, souls, if anything, are pretty much just information, and an alt. reality afterlife wouldn’t be so bad, even given the possible scientific downsides). With the ancients waking up and singing reality into shape I got the same vibes as when we observe the universe, although our observations are probably limited to just deciding universal facts. But then again, if we do turn out to be in a multiverse, would looking at another universe create it, and, in the small-small-small chance it had life and science, also create scientists who in turn have supposedly already been creating pieces of their universe by observing it? Issue 16 was fine, not much to talk about.
Planetary vol. 3 issues 13-14
The first issue takes a lot from ideas like frankenstein, with a perfectly evil and decrepit looking castle standing at the end of a cliff. This science of creating monsters is put in a very dark light here, but could also be seen as an analogy to all walks of science. Science can easily bring horrors to life if taken down a wrong path. Near the end of issue 2, John Griffith, an invisible man, is mentioned. I’m guessing he’s got goggles. This also implies that not everyone’s on the same scientific timelines, as the four later try to turn a man invisible but blind him(they could also just be testing a new better invisibility chemical). Issue 2 has lot to do with entangled particles and information all around the universe allowing two completely different objects to interact and make decisions with one another. Here, it is a stick and (basically Thor’s) hammer. Suskind shows up at Antartica, and all theories that the four only shared an origin story with the fantastic four are lost. Suskind is invisible woman, this time with goggles that keep her from going blind when she turns invisible, as light would pass straight through her eyes. After the whole ordeal is over, Dowling Abducts the whole facility via personal UFO, using a machine that most likely scans particle for particle and then moves the whole thing where he wants. Either that, or everyone involved is extremely unlucky, and the base has been destroyed to the molecule and everything Dowling now has is just a reconstruction.
251-260
Everyone has their basic idea of the big bang. A singularity explodes into a huge array of different things, sending matter this way and that to create our universe. However, it’s a lot more complicated when you try to view how the higgs field plays into both the big bang and our universe today.
Wheeler document
I’m worried that a lot of kids are going to take that fog analogy literally, but it was still a good analogy. Wheeler is an important guy, having named black holes, been a colleague to Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and been a mentor to many of today’s leading scientists. So if he thinks the effect our observation has on the universe is important, it probably is. The annoying thing about the idea of the similarities between our observation of the universe and our observation of quantum photons is that, by this time, a lot of our earth and nearby space is ‘irreparably’ observed. Quantum photons are still important in our universe, but it would be nice to find if this same observer effect on the past happened on anything else. All this leaves a confusing question of whether or not our universe would continue to exist without some form of consciousness, and what passes for conscious life. Would it all stop, or would the observed areas still kick?
Nathan Gibbons 