Re: 3600 Sectors?

Doug Haxton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]: 

> On 2 Dec 2003 07:32:09 GMT, "Michael S. Schiffer"
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
>>> For those who argue that it's the entire universe:  It's
>>> currently estimated that there are about 125 *billion*
>>> galaxies out there.  That works out to about 35 million
>>> galaxies to patrol per Green Lantern. 

>>> Assume that there's a one in one hundred chance that at any
>>> given moment there's a problem that requires a GL's attention
>>> in a particular galaxy. 

>>> This would mean that on average, a typical GL would have
>>> 350,000 major disasters requiring his attention....for every
>>> day of his entire career.
 
>>> It's our galaxy alone (or at most the Local Group)...no doubt
>>> about it.

Well, except for the fact that it's always been said to be the 
universe.  (Aside from Elliot S. Maggin's excellent, but non-
canonical, _Superman: Last Son of Krypton_.)

>>Which brings the requirement down to patrolling only a one or
>>two thousand stars per day, every day.  (Or several times that,
>>for the Local Group.)  Much more practical.

> It certainly is.  If we restrict things to the Milky Way galaxy,
> then it's perfectly plausible that there are on the order of
> 10,000 planets with sentient life (in the DC universe,
> anyway...).  This would give each GL about 3 worlds to patrol.  
>...

Which is still a heck of a lot.  (Give one person a GL ring and 
tell him to protect Des Moines, Iowa, and it's unclear that he 
could make a serious dent in the crime rate, other than by playing 
Big Brother and watching with ring-created cameras all the time.  
Planets are very big places.)  One person responsible for tens of 
billions of people, separated into three planets many light years 
apart is only practical by the same sort of handwave that permits 
one person to be responsible for multiple galaxies.  (It's like 
complaining that Superman shouldn't be able to move planets and so 
restricting him to lifting islands-- neither is possible using 
anything we'd recognize as physics or biology, so why is one more 
plausible than the other?)

Moreover, if you can say that three worlds in a galaxy are 
inhabited, you can also say that one galaxy in 50 is inhabited.    
Once you start plugging coefficients into the Drake equation, you 
can do whatever you want, as long as it doesn't conflict with the 
evidence you have.  (Especially since the presence of one inhabited 
planet in the DCU often causes the existence of others via 
colonization, resettlement by interfering aliens, etc.  A galaxy 
with one species would rapidly have several via the sorts of 
experiments that created the Psions or modified the Proteans, where 
a galaxy with no sapients wouldn't have that sort of uplifting and 
dispersion taking place.  So just as a planet with life anywhere 
rapidly has life everywhere, while lifeless planets tend to stay 
lifeless, the same could be true for galaxies in the DCU.)

Though either solution does conflict with the evidence seen in the 
DCU.  If we want to make the GL job easier by saying life is very 
rare, the area around Earth must be a huge outlier, since there are 
plenty of identified stars with inhabited planets in our own local 
neighborhood, and several stars with multiple inhabited planets.  
Hal's bailiwick manifestly included orders of magnitude more than 
the three planets posited as an average.  (Is there a list anywhere 
of every planet Hal visited that was clearly part of sector 2814-- 
nearly all of which, by the nature of superhero comics, had 
problems that day that needed a GL to solve?)   This supposedly 
unusual situation has never been commented on by any of the many 
GLs from other sectors who've visited Sector 2814, or by the 
Guardians.

Not that it can't be retconned-- anything can be retconned.  But if 
the retcon doesn't actually make the job plausible, then what's 
gained by it?  (Especially given that the whole sector system is 
history at this point.)

Mike

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
[EMAIL PROTECTED]