618: Asteroid

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Asteroid

Title text: My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.

Explanation

The comic begins with Blondie as a news anchor reporting that an asteroid is headed for Earth.

The end of the world has been envisioned in many ways. One of the most common is with a really big rock hitting Earth. This has been depicted in movies several times, most famously, and released in the same year, are Armageddon and Deep Impact, but also The Day the Sky Exploded and many more. These lists of films with asteroids and meteors show how popular this theme is.

There is an online calculator for asteroid impacts, but don't worry, as any rock that does hit Earth isn't likely to kill everyone. And, as seen in the what if? Diamond, speed counts too.

The joke here, though, is that, after sending up a robot to blow the asteroid to smithereens, said rock is actually the home of the Little Prince from the famous tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. To save our world, we must destroy his. And probably the prince along with it. If the only way to save our species is by killing off another species, is the act still ethical? In none of the world-destroying asteroid stories were said rocks actually home to intelligent life. Or any life, for that matter. A second joke that can be seen is that in said movies the "heroic" mission always involves humans in some way imperiling themselves to save humanity, rather than, say, staying safely at home and using a robotic rover to do all the dangerous stuff.

The title text is a reference to the 1998 asteroid movie Deep Impact. "Crossover" is a term used to refer to a technique of taking two independent (and usually already existing) stories and creating a scene or short story in which characters from both worlds collide and interact with each other. Or, in other words, characters from one story "crossover" into the second. Fanfic is short for Fan Fiction, e.g. a fictional story written by someone who loves a particular story/series/idea so much they wanted to write their own tale about it (or one who hated said story so much they felt compelled to fix it). It suggests that most people were unwilling to read a story about people nuking miniature kingdoms to save civilization. A tough entertainment call any day.

The Little Prince was referenced already back in 2: Petit Trees (sketch) and later again in 1350: Lorenz at the end of the space trip branch.

Transcript

[Blondie as a news anchor is standing in front of a screen pointing to a diagram of an asteroid's trajectory path with Earth in the path. There is a caption below the screen:]

Blondie: Astronomers have confirmed that the asteroid is headed for Earth.

Caption: Breaking news

[In a frame-less panel Blondie narrates above a picture of a rocket with fire out the end of its two lifter rockets on either side of the central main part of the rocket. It flies up and right. In an inset picture to the right and below the rocket there is an image of a rover with text on it. The rower has two legs and a drill below it, and an antenna above the main body of the rower.]

Blondie (narrating): NASA has launched a heroic mission to land a rover on the asteroid, drill into it, and destroy it with nuclear bombs.

Rover: NASA

[Ponytail is sitting in an office chair at the control panel of a large unit using it. Cueball stands in front of it looking away from her to the right. Both are wearing headsets with microphones. A voice speaks to them from off-panel right.]

Ponytail: The robot has landed successfully and planted the nukes! We're saved!

Cueball: Hooray!

Voice (off-panel): We're heroes!

[The Little Prince is standing on his small asteroid next to his rose and a very small volcano. He is looking at the NASA rover which is partly outside the panel to the right and up. Two legs and the drill can be seen as well as part of the antenna and the part of the body with the text. The rover has drilled into the asteroid. There is a digital countdown emanating from the rover above the Prince.]

0:05...

0:04...

0:03...

Rover: NASA

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Discussion

Could someone please help me with the picture, I don't know how to get it to display right...--7OO Tnega Terces (talk) 08:24, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Fix'd. Davidy²²[talk] 08:44, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

THANKS!--7OO Tnega Terces (talk) 07:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.

I think that is because nobody wants to believe NASA would design the spacecraft upside-down. I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 08:22, 29 January 2015 (UTC)

Wouldn't the Little Prince be killed by the impact anyway? 108.162.238.187 00:30, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes if NASA did nothing he would also die. But would you be happy seeing a movie where we choose a solution that saves us and kills the little prince? Could they not have deflected the asteroid instead? ;-) --Kynde (talk) 09:46, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

That one question in What If 2 about the earth spinning like a basketball could be a reference to this comic. (asteroid with the little prince colliding with earth.) IJustWantToEditStuff (talk) 07:01, 29 January 2023 (UTC)

that rocket looks like the artemis sls TenGolf MathHacker (talk) 19:18, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

It also looks very like several other twin-boostered rockets, real and fictional, because it does the kind of job necessary. More likely convergent evolution than true prognostication of how SLS would actually ended up. Even with his NASA background and connections.

But interesting that he landed on a heavy-launch (or beyond-orbit, in this case) design that is still considered valid. There could easily have been a paradigm shift betwixt then and now, rendering that a strictly old-school design (even given the development lead-time at which a design gets all but frozen in). 172.71.242.173 01:11, 23 March 2023 (UTC)