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(Jon sez:) 
Most of the comments I read about A Miracle of Science state that the
scientific explanations in these columns are part of what makes the comic
nifty. With that in mind, I'll explain a little about the location of Von
Hayek Station.
Von Hayek sits at a Lagrange point,
specifically at the L4 point in the Moon's orbit. Lagrange points are
places where the gravitational pull of two large masses precisely equals the
centripetal force required to rotate with them. This means that an object
put in a Lagrange point will stay in that point, rotating at a speed that
keeps the object in position with respect to the two masses (in Von Hayek's
case, the Earth and Moon). Because the L4 point is stable, the station will
generally stay there without expending mass or energy on stabilizing
rockets.
By the way, if you want any other science questions answered, email me. You can also email Mark and ask him about the art.
Lines are open and operators are standing by.
*crickets chirp*
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(Mark sez:) 
At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical webcomic artist, I want to say that it was true anguish to tear myself away from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City long enough to CG and upload today's page. I hope you all appreciate the sacrifice I'm making.
In the first panel, Benjamin is holding up a 1000 TB memory card: that's one thousand terabytes, equal to one million gigabytes or, to put it another way, fifteen billion times as much memory as my old Commodore 64. By the real year 2148 such an amount of memory will probably seem comically archaic, like the "futuristic" computers in sixties sci-fi movies that were room-filling monstrosities complete with madly whirling tape drives. I am diligently trying to avoid the obvious joke about how you'll need at least fifteen hundred terabytes just to get Windows 2150 to run. |
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