In this episode, the Colony team goes on a dungeon adventure to fing the geo-god who gives them Jesus powers

TAAN: Well it seems I have my second set of midterms coming up. Thankfully, they’re all later in this week, so it’s not like I have to cram like cra- oh wait, I do… crap. and I have an essay draft or something due tomorrow… huh, well I’ll make this quick. Unfortunately, I’m probably going to have relatively few screen shots this time around, which is a shame because I downloaded the sub straight from Dattebayo for nice shiny quality.

I guess they wanted to explore the possibilities of QEXs or something this time. Or more like 40 million years of evolution in a separate dimension. There’s almost no story to speak of, besides the guy who reviews the Colony team’s memories being pissed at how Tom is always looking at Hannah, and the discovery of a mysterious artificial-looking object. Instead, we get lots of nice random info about various things that may or may not be important, and also a very interesting QEX to think about.

Random stuff:

I’m not going to bother with actual explanations or anything right now as I am incredibly pressed for time. And yet blogging takes priority over homework at times like this. I know I have the worst prioritizing skills ever.

• Apparently, Juno is programmed with Dr. Carr’s genius. I guess that means there are really 2 Dr. Carrs, or something.
• Rodney’s opinion of Hannah gets better, which is a shame because most of it is due to her manipulation. I’ll bet he’s just a Hannah fan in denial.
• There’s someone on the colony (apparently a director from a news show) whose job is to review the memories of their team’s hunts. It would be an interesting job, if it weren’t so boring, apparently.
• Homi has either a more sensitive nose than the other two, or he is weak to the smell of sulfur.
• Hannah lies too much, which Tom (or Rodney, I forget) thinks points to (through kinda bad logic) some kind of secret she can’t reveal. But we knew that already through dramatic irony from previous episodes.
• Tom builds a high powered robotic x-ray scanner with treads. Why it needs treads when they carry it around, or why the scanner was necessary in the first place given that they knew it would cause problems is a mystery.
• I’m kind of confused about the whole elements going back 40 million years thing. They say that, but they could mean 40 million from the Nega-Earth they travel too, or 40 million from the “current” Nega-Earth, and they travel back in time too. Ok, I said no explanations, but… The problem is that it seems the Nega-Earth’s time-space moves concurrently at the same rate as Earth’s, which means QEXs are created in real time. This was proven by gold QEXs appearing only and immediately after the dematerialization of gold on Earth, and when Rodney and tom scanned some local wildlife saying they had 4 posi-elements already and could QEX at any time. This means that positive elements are flowing to the Nega-Earth the teams travel to, not the Nega-Earth in the past or in the future. However, Dr. Carr and others talk as if the elements flowed to Nega-Earth 40 million years before the Nega-Earth they travel to, and affected evolution and stuff then, which results in all the strange species of stuff in the current Nega-Earth. It seems that if this had not happened, Nega-Earth would be a direct parallel of Earth. Therefore, the strange life forms are a result of Nega-Earth’s evolution being altered by the inflow of positive elements 40 million years ago, but the QEXs are a result of the inflow of elements to the current Nega-Earth. This doesn’t match with the statements they say, unless you interpret them to mean that the elements have flowed to Nega-Earth throughout the span of 4 million years, and that for some reason it’s only recently that QEXs have started appearing, aka it’s taken 40 million years for life forms to acquire 5 positive elements. I guess you could also say that there’s always been QEXs, but that doesn’t seem to make sense, seeing as all the ones they fight were created recently (otherwise they’d have been detected already). Most other theories I can think of seem to lead to time paradoxes, so I guess that’s the best one for now.
• (from last episode, which I forgot to mention) Carr is going to recruit Ally to be her physical manifestation.

it's also the mandatory hot spring ep

it retroactively allows you to walk on water

Where do they get all this equipment?

Interesting QEX (named Sekishuobi):

N0 .068: "Once an insectivore, this plant's tastes have broadened"

Now this… I don’t want to waste more time, but I’ll probably go ranting about the definition of lifeforms and evolution and the possibilities of inorganic life. Well, actually, I’m off to grab some food before it’s too late. Don’t want to get screwed like last time.

So, it’s been a while, but the QEX this time is featured at least as prominently as the teams. It’s some kind of living mineral, which normally wouldn’t make sense. After all, all known life is made of organic molecules, and minerals don’t have that. Organic molecules however are kind of named backwards, as it’s not that they are literally the building blocks of life, it’s more like all known life is made out of them.

Atoms are a good comparison, I guess. Atoms were named atoms because they were thought to be the absolute undividable base of all matter. They weren’t named that way because they were known to be undividable, but because they were observed to be so (well, ok that’s not exactly true. Some scientists (or more like Greek philosophers, I think) theorized that there was a limit to how much you could divide matter. The theory implied the existence of a unit of matter that couldn’t be divided and this theoretical particle was named the atom. Later, scientists discovered a particle that fit the description of the theoretical atom and so they assumed the particle they discovered and the theoretical particle were the same). Then, with the discovery of subatomic particles, people understood that the atom was not indivisible, rendering the original meaning of its name incorrect.

Now, apply this to organic molecules and you find that their name doesn’t imply that life can only be created from them, but rather that all known life is made of them. This isn’t a new concept though and life forms not based on organic molecules have already been theorised (and given the rather obvious title “inorganic life”). Among the top candidates for inorganic life are scilicon based life forms, due to scilicon’s similarity to carbon, the base of organic life. In any case, it’s probably possible that any molecule (except probably those unstable radioactive ones) can become the basis for some kind of life given the right environment, and with luck (of course, they fail to list the nega-elements since no one actually knows of what a non-carbon-based life form would be made of).

Of course, this then begs the question how is life defined, after all, a living mineral is hardly what most people would call alive …unless you count gorons).  It’s not easy to make a good definition for this, as it’s possible to find exceptions to a lot of different lines of reasoning.

One definition is that life is anything that can self-replicate. If you think about it, life originally becan when clusters of molecules combined in such a way that they were able to reproduce their structure somehow. Otherwise, the cluster would have just eventually been broken down by some outside process and cease to exist (unless by chance it was created again somewhere else). Only stable molecular structures that can produce other stable molecular structures (which could then in turn produce more stable molecular structures, etc.) would “survive,” in that that particular combination of molecules would not be lost over time, simply because there’d be enough so that any destructive force would be unlikely to wipe out all of them at once. Mutations in the form of other atoms or molecules being added to the original structure probably let to single celled organisms and whatever.

However, this definition fails on both the microscopic and the macroscopic scale. Say for instance you got shot by massive amounts of raadiation and were rendered infertile. You’d still be living, and consider yourself a form of life, right? Also, suppose that you found some of these original self replication structures. I doubt you’d consider them alive, as they’re about the same as a machine built to produce machines duplicates of itself (unless of course you consider the possibility that machines like that are alive as well, which is I suppose an interesting philosophical problem). There’s also things like virus, which can’t reproduce on their own and are more like molecular machines, but they do have the ability to create copies of themselves through manipulating cells.

The problem here is that macroscopic views of life fail on microscopic levels, and microscopic views are usually too simple. That and machines (like Juno) and digital data (like Dr. Carr) screw over all theories and turn them into philosophical questions.

that's deep

…

yeah anyways this time’s QEX. It looks like a stone rose (lol castlevania) of some sort, only is has the ability to self replicate and create smaller versions of itself. what’s not explained is:

• how it creates these smaller versions and what the dispersal mechanism is
• if a huge one makes small ones, wouldn’t a small one make ridiculously small ones, with each generation becoming smaller?
  • one solution would be they grow, but then you have to wonder what their intake mechanism is, and how they convert it into mass, and then into mass for their “offspring”
• how it moves
• if QEXs can only be forms of life. I mean, before they scanned a cliff and found it had a high percentage of posi-gold, though it was just part of the cliff in the form of ores. What would happen if some piece of land got 5+ positive elements? Or rather, what makes life special that it transforms with 5 elements. Or actually, just what do positive elements do to negi-life?

Commentary:
Alright, sorry for the massive wall of text and wild speculation (unless you liked it). The episode was kind of average itself. It shows a bunch of random tidbits about everyone, but nothing significant happens plot-wise, or even character relationships-wise (unless you count Rodney thinking better of Hannah, but that seems to happen a lot without any lasting consequences). It’s more of an interesting episode due to its topic, rather than what happens in the episode itself.