Grrl Power #1408 - Celestial self-refilling Xmas stocking (Patreon)

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It'll probably be a few pages before we see Nthaniel again. He's going to do a quick census of all humans in the universe. Or maybe just a statistically significant sample size.

I don't know why the starforge is that close to the star. (Besides it looking cool.) I assume the solar panels also convert heat and every other form of radiation into electricity as well. If you're wondering why everyone in space doesn't have one of these, well, the startup time is a lot. They also contain a lot of materials that are hard to replicate, so a Starforge starter kit is really, really expensive. Like, GDP of a planet for like a decade. And granted, part of that is that the people who know how to make them don't just put the specs out on Gal-net for anyone to try and build themselves. The galactic economy mostly revolves around energy, time, information, and entertainment, but it's also well understood that if everyone had unlimited access to matter replicators and unlimited power, the economy would probably fall apart. So how did Dabbler get her hands on one? The short version is she got a good look at one and figured out how to build her own. It was fidgety and had a much longer start-up time than an industrial one that a multi-planet empire could afford, but she found a star out in BFE and let it do its thing. 

Dabbler's automated construction process didn't build the entire base. Mostly it consumed a portion of that asteroid the base currently sits in, then constructed a few habitable rooms, which she started stocking with computers and fabricators to accelerate the next steps, then made a huuuuuge cavern to stockpile base construction materials, set up a bunch of automated defenses, then went off adventuring for like thirty years and totally forgot about it. Then she came back, found the base all built, albeit a tenth the size of it is now, and that it had been taken over by space pirates who were mad at her because her automated defenses whittled them down to like 30% of their starting numbers. But they had built themselves back up to a respectable number, so it turned into a really fun side mission where she had to infiltrate their ships one at a time and hack the main computers so they'd accidentally target each other instead of destroying the base when she took it back. And by took it back, I mean a stealth mission that inevitably deteriorates to ultra violent room clearing when the stealth portion fails. Because Dabbler's life is a video game. It's obviously also a XXX hentai seduction game, because... you know.

And now that I've had five seconds to think about it, I think she'd be more into seducing the low-rank ensign pirates who have the Yellow Key in their inventory than seducing the grizzled captains who have main computer core access. Yeah. That feels right. Also... there's less chance that the low rank pirate has gotten privileges with captured... stock. They're space pirates. Dabbler is a fan of CNC, but not NC.

It's a little odd that Cora is using the metric system, but I guess she's doing conversions for the Terrans' benefit. Unfortunately, they're Americans, so if her conversions are off by a factor of ten... Actually they probably wouldn't know. The metric system is kind of funny, though. 1 gram is supposedly 1 cm^3 of water. I assume fresh water at sea-level in 1 G of gravity at 4°C, which is for some reason when water is at its highest density. A lot of that in stuff that doesn't really hit on a universal scale. The reason I say it's funny is that while the metric system is all about powers of ten, a meter is defined as how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second. That's not a power of ten, and come to think of it, a second is pretty arbitrary. I mean, not arbitrary. It's 1/60/60/24/365.25, of a year of the planet that happens to be in the habitable zone of our solar system. Hardly a unit that would be adopted galaxy-wide. Of course, a second has retroactively been defined as 9,192,631,770 vibrations of a cesium atom, which is probably a pretty stable constant, but still feels a little arbitrary.

It got me thinking, what would be acceptable galactic standard units? I think the main problem with the metric system is that a meter is not terribly human friendly. People like round numbers and I think 90% of adult humans are between 5 and 6 feet tall. Which is 1.524 to 1.8288 meters tall. I think most metric countries actually use CM for height, but my point is, I think CMs are too small, Ms are too big. Decimeters aren't bad actually. They're almost 4 inches, so "a hand" in horse-imperial. I mean, I think literally the only time "hand" is used is for measuring horse-shoulder height, which is odd. Now that I think about it, it's super odd that a foot is the length of some arbitrary king's foot, while a hand is the width of a hand. Yeah, I'm not defending the imperial system either.

Anyway, I do like a measurement based on the speed of light, which is really just the universal speed limit for massless particles. You'd think that would be a pretty stable constant - except, the universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating, so a light-year from 14 billion years ago is a very different measurement than is it now. Which means even a light year isn't a constant. So I don't know what an actual proper constant would be. Probably molecular vibration, which is only good for time and not distance. Even that will change with the heat-death of the universe, but for now, it's probably pretty stable. If you don't factor gravity in. Something in a tall building does experience time at a different rate than something at sea level because its affected by less gravity. Granted, it's probably somewhere in the septillionth decimal place, but the difference between a planet with 1 gravity and 1.1 gravities might be in the billionth decimal place. So there goes that constant. 

Basically I'm pretty sure the way it would work is the dominant military or cultural race, or just the first one to spread across the galaxy gets to dictate what their standard units are, and everyone else has to do conversions.