Ooh! Press conference bombshell!

Okay, before everyone gets too excited, Cora’s first line on the next page is, “Well, mostly.” For further explanation, you’ll have to actually wait for the actual page.

The great filters Cora talks about, if it’s not obvious from her next word bubble, is one of those things that scientists bring up when they’re speculating about why the galaxy isn’t apparently teeming with advanced civilizations. Basically, we estimate there’s between 100 and 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and more and more, we’re learning that probably most if not nearly all of the stars have planets around them. So that’s two parts of the Drake Equation answered. We can make some estimates about how many of those planets are in the Goldilocks zone, but there are some unknowns, like how often life will arise even when conditions are ideal. But even if we plug in some really pessimistic numbers into the rest of the equation, there should be tens of thousands of planets out there with life. So where is it?

The filters are things that would prevent life from living long enough to advance to galactic exploration. Anything from runaway global climate change, extinction from super viruses, famine from overpopulation, self destruction from nuclear or virological war, extermination from AI, or destruction by a superior alien race that wipes out species that approach a certain level of technology, a la Mass Effect Reapers. The list goes on.

Obviously in this case, there aren’t any Reaper like aliens in the Grrl-verse, otherwise Fracture Station wouldn’t have been nearly as populated. (Admittedly we don’t know what Sydney was fighting on the Alari homeworld.) The filters Cora is talking about are the ones that races have to slip through on their own. She also is exaggerating slightly about us needing to build our own warp drives. It’s preferred if a race can manage that on their own, but there are quite a few species that are part of the galactic community which never would have figured that stuff out on their own. You know, space orcs or whatever. Well, not space orcs. Just regular orcs, in space. Or an orc like equivalent. In a lot of cases, those species were brought into space because another race needed a bunch of brutes for something. War, construction… I don’t know. Bodyguards. Brute stuff. Some planets had more than one intelligent race, and the ones that advanced to space travel first brought the other ones along with them. In the cases where the more advanced race didn’t wipe out the less advanced one.

This page colored by Keith.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!