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Asteroid Mission
Lander, this is Houston. There's been a request that you turn clipping back on and instead set the mass to 1kg. The theorists believe that will be pretty funny.
Title text: Lander, this is Houston. There's been a request that you turn clipping back on and instead set the mass to 1kg. The theorists believe that will be pretty funny.

    Explanation

    The comic shows the scenario of an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, and the crewed space mission sent to prevent this, as in the films Armageddon, Deep Impact and various other stories not dating from 1998. Typically, such fictional missions are sent to blow the offending objects up or, more realistically, redirect them, but here they are attempting to gain access to the asteroid electronically and activate "noclip".

    In video games, "noclip mode" is a common cheat code where the player can move their character through normally impenetrable objects, usually walls and obstacles, as well as ceilings and floors if the cheat code also allows the character to fly. The etymology of the term "clipping" in this context is a little complicated, as it originally referred to the graphics, not to the collisions between objects, although the code used to decide whether something in the game environment is visible within a given display/viewport shares many features with typical 'hitbox' calculations and so may be treated as separate aspects of the same principle. In general, cheat codes like this are used to shortcut some aspects of gameplay testing, and are then left in either as an Easter Egg or just because they have been forgotten. The term "no clipping mode" as a cheat code goes as far back as Doom from 1993. More recently, "noclipping out of reality" is part of the mythology of The Backrooms, an internet horror project that has recently been adapted into a film.

    By enabling noclip on an asteroid headed for Earth, the crew eliminate interaction between the asteroid and Earth, thus theoretically saving the planet. However, due to them both being free-floating the astronauts may now be unable to walk back across the asteroid to return to the ship. This problem could be trivial to solve if they were tethered to the ship or possessed personal propulsion units, but the mission does not seem to have had enough foresight to include either of these (unless there are propulsion units left un-drawn due to the stick figure art style), leaving open the question of what other preparations the full mission involved beyond just getting into the position of hacking into the asteroid.

    A kind of noclip mode within actual real life physics was discussed in What-if #20, "Diamond". Randall's analysis there concludes that accelerating an asteroid to 99% of the speed of light would cause the asteroid's atoms to literally pass through the atoms making up Earth and everything on it, just like noclip mode. However, for reasons explained in that article, NASA is unlikely to pursue this strategy for dealing with potentially-impacting asteroids.

    The title text is a transmission from Mission Control to the astronauts. Mission Control for manned NASA space missions since 1965 (the Christopher C. Kraft Jr. Mission Control Center) is located in Houston, Texas, and famously uses the city’s name as its callsign, which means the mission in the comic is probably a NASA mission too. Mission Control suggests that rather than enabling noclip, the astronauts should instead just reduce the asteroid's mass to 1 kg. If the asteroid is assumed to have a volume of about 1000 km3, this would reduce its density to 10-15 g/cm3 and its energy to a few kJ. This relatively small amount of energy would be rapidly dissipated by friction with the outer atmosphere. The asteroid would then float at an altitude where the density of the atmosphere matches that of the asteroid, probably until solar wind blew it away. During this event, the asteroid would rapidly approach the Earth, looming large in the sky, presumably terrifying much of the world's population. Their claim that this would be "pretty funny" would depend significantly on your sense of humor.

    Transcript

    [Miss Lenhart, as a news anchor, sits at a desk, with an image of a rocket behind her.]
    Miss Lenhart: The asteroid is headed for Earth, but a mission has been launched to intercept it.
    [Cueball and Megan, wearing space helmets, are walking from a lander on a rocky asteroid, carrying some equipment.]
    [A laptop is on the ground, and Megan plugs a peripheral from the laptop to the asteroid.]
    [Cueball types into the laptop.]
    Console: >noclip on

             View comic discussion



    This Week's Explanation for Improvement

    As part of the Explanation Improvement Project, each week the community selects one older, neglected, or otherwise stagnant explanation to expand and polish together. This week's pick is comic 331: Photoshops; help us by editing its explanation! To get involved with the project, you can also nominate an explanation that you think should be improved, or vote on current nominations!

    Photoshops
    When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.
    Title text: When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.

      Explanation

      Welcome to This Week's Explanation for Improvement! Anyone is encouraged to help explain comic 331: Photoshops; click here to get started! If you are new to wiki editing, you can read our editing FAQ for guidance. Here are some suggestions for improving this explanation:

        The explanation only does a surface graze of the topic of photoshopping images.
        Add parallels to today's AI image editing.
        Better explain the meme this comic is based on and the context behind it.
        Better explain what JPEG artifacts are.

      This is another comic in the My Hobby series. This whole comic, including the title text, is a play on the then-popular internet meme "This Looks Shopped". It may also be making fun of how everything and anything you find on the internet has someone insisting that it's 'fake', 'photoshopped', or, more recently, 'AI', regardless of whether it's true in actuality.

      Adobe Photoshop is a popular image manipulation tool used to manipulate photographic images and for drawing. One particular popular usage is image compositing: combining two or more images together. This allows the digital artist to create humorous and/or falsified scenarios, like making someone who does not hold a rapier hold one. Of course, Photoshop and similar tools like Paint Shop Pro can only be used for imagery, not for real life objects.[citation needed]

      The title text contains the second part of the internet meme, the complete text of which is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME." JPEG is an image compression algorithm that works by finding frequencies in blocks of 8x8 pixels and saving that instead of the original pixels. This works remarkably well, but sometimes leaves artifacts that can be seen when zooming in enough. The iris of an eye contains all kinds of odd colored spots - and there's not a JPEG algorithm in sight.

      Fifteen years later, it became much more of a common phenomenon to accuse files of being algorithmically generated using technologies such as ChatGPT (texts, images, videos, and audio files), than merely 'shopped, but the underlying complaint is similar.

      Transcript

      [Megan holds a sword, handle outward, to Cueball. A dark blotch is on the center of the blade, and hangs off it slightly.]
      My hobby: Insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped.
      Megan: This sabre is a 19th-century family heirloom.
      Cueball: It looks photoshopped.
      Megan: Huh?
      Cueball: Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.

               View comic discussion

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