posted
So with all the xenophobia and anti-alien sentiment on Earth, how will Gates fare in his transition to this new (old) Legion? His unsolicited political rantings will now be certainly justified in any case. Perhaps he'll be able to rally the non-humanoid UP races to stand up and speak out against prejudice-with the help of his new best pal Tellus of course!
From: elizabeth,nj | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
So now we discover Chameleon Boy is also cold-blooded! Perhaps Cham & Gates will bond while laying on flat rocks in the sun!!
From: elizabeth,nj | Registered: Jul 2003
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Eryk Davis Ester
Created from the Cosmic Legends of the Universe!
posted
Xenophobia against the cold-blooded is ironic, because in the present day Foreigners are Hot-Blooded!
From: Liberty City | Registered: Jul 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
I gotta admit, the cold-blooded thing is odd to me, since The Universo Project implied that Durlans cells are not the same as human cells, and they wouldn't actually have blood (or vessels, or organs) unless they specifically shapeshifted to have such things.
Having blood implies the need for blood, and since Cham (and other Durlans) can turn into things that don't have blood, he must not need blood...
It's a conundrum!
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
Garth is about 3 seconds from punching Gates right in the back of the head in that panel, lol...
Does anyone know why Geoff Johns left XS and Gates with this Legion? It obviously wasn't something Levitz requested, because Gates has barely been used and we haven't seen XS at all...it just seems really weird to separate them from the team they're associated with when nothing has really been done with that?
Re: Durlans being cold-blooded, I really don't like that at all. Like Set, I don't see why they would necessarily have conventional anatomy given that they can turn into forms there's no way that anatomy could fit?
-------------------- Read the alternate adventures of the Legion after Legion of Three Worlds! postlo3w
Registered: Nov 2009
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Silver Age Lad
Part-time member living in another century
posted
quote:Originally posted by razsolo: Does anyone know why Geoff Johns left XS and Gates with this Legion? It obviously wasn't something Levitz requested, because Gates has barely been used and we haven't seen XS at all...it just seems really weird to separate them from the team they're associated with when nothing has really been done with that?
having the two reboot characters perceived as being the most liked stay with the retro Legion was a hook for reboot fans.
Also XS being Barry Allen's grand-daughter but living in a different universe had to be explained and it was a logical next step for XS to be included in the published Legion for future Flash storylines.
I get the impression that Geoff Johns did this before Paul Levitz came back into the creative picture.
-------------------- "Our devotion to each other was unexplainable" "You were kids" "No Batman, we were Legion"
From: Ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, UK | Registered: Aug 2007
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posted
I think that I remember Durlans as having a heart and brain before, they just move around his body.
If Cham had an open circulatory system, like insects, blood vessels wouldn't get in the way. A series of small hearts and even brains, rather than one large organ, might work better, too.
He HAS to have some sort of circulation and thinking organs, after all, especially since he's NOT an energy based shapeshifter.
And when he becomes something, I thought that it's been stated that he doesn't actually become that copy but just outwardly so. Bugs and beasts and people would work with his original make-up, somewhat, but rocks and cans, etc., are just mock-ups, right?
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Candlelight: He HAS to have some sort of circulation and thinking organs, after all, especially since he's NOT an energy based shapeshifter.
Proto-cells can function as any kind of cell, as can the single-celled body of an amoeba. It's a skeletal cell, in that it's membrane can stiffen up, it's a muscular cell, in that cytokinesis can move it around, it's a reproductive cell, in that it can split, it's a digestive cell, able to consume nearby stuff, and it's a sensory cell, aware of it's surroundings (through photosensitivity or chemical reactancy).
In theory, if Durlans are made up of amoeba-like 'omni-cells,' able to perform all of these functions, and able to chemically (or perhaps even electrically) communicate with each other through direct contact between their membranes, and able to pool their individually inconsequential processing power like a giant networked computer hive-mind (just as the individual cells in my brain don't do squat, but, working together, make me able to chew bubblegum and walk at the same time), Cham wouldn't need to have blood, or brains, or bones, or muscles, or lungs, or gonads. Every single cell in his body would be capable of functioning as a muscle, through manipulation of the plasma within it, or as a 'bone,' by remaining rigid and perhaps even transferring some of it's cytoplasm to adjacent cells, making it 'dried up' and 'hard,' instead of malleable.
Every cell would be part of his body-wide 'brain,' and every cell would be part of his body-wide circulatory system and respiratory system and digestive system, transferring nurtrients and fuel from cell to cell across selectively permeable membranes.
Similarly, every cell would be, more or less, depending on how the fluid inside of it is assigned, sensitive to vibrations (touch and hearing) and chemical composition of the surrounding environment (taste and smell) and the presence or absence of light (sight), making his entire body one gigantic sensory organ. Since none of the cells are hyperspecialized for these functions, he'd have much better all-around awareness than a sentient with 'eyes in front' or 'their taste in their mouth,' but he wouldn't necessarily be as keenly aware with any specific sense, as someone who has, for instance, hundreds of thousands of very specific cells that do nothing at all other than collect visual information. (Although even proto-cells couuld be manipulated to make them more or less useful for any given role. Proto-cells filled to the point of humming with surface tension would be better at collecting vibratory information, making them good cells to use as 'ears,' while clusters of thousands of cells filled with translucent watery fluids, or light-absorbing darker fluids, instead of generic colorful cytoplasm, might make better 'eyes.')
Threeboot Cham seemed very much to be such a critter, as Brainy was able to hack his arm off without any significant injury other than 'loss of mass' (as his 'arm' wasn't really an arm, it was Durlan tissue, shaped like an arm, and he just needed to extrude new tissue in the shape of an arm to replace it).
Classic Durlans are also not humanoid, but are natively green tentacle monsters, suggesting that their 'bones' aren't really bones, but Durlan tissue acting like bones, while their in humanoid form.
While it seemed clear that Waid enjoyed putting a lot of thought into this sort of stuff, I'm not sure if it's ever really been hammered out in this level of detail.
Shapeshifting and size-changing are two of the more scientifically implausible powers.
Even the proto-celled thing I'm talking about above would take time to move fluids around internally from cell to cell, expanding some, contracting others, 'drying out' yet others to serve a 'bone' or 'chitin' or 'armor,' etc. Such a shapeshifter would only be able to add or subtract mass by expelling internal fluid (or gas) from cells, and turning into something smaller than itself, such as a bird, would likely result in a misty discharge and a rude farting noise, as millions of cells squirt out their contents to pack themselves up for ease of transport. It might even smell bad...
And then, to re-enlarge, the proto-cell shapeshifter would need to inhale surrounding air (which would be the emergency choice, with water being a better choice, and nutrient-enriched organic fluids the best of all choices) to re-inflate those compressed cells, which would make such a shapeshifter incapable of enlarging in space (nothing to absorb), and prone to popping like a balloon if hit with certain kinds of attacks, while temporarily forced to enlarge by filling it's cells with gas instead of liquid. (which could be hilarious, seeing Cham fly backwards like a ruptured balloon, frantically ordering undamaged cells forward to cover the 'leaking' cells, which would be cannibalized by surrounding healthy cells, which would them mitose to replace them, just as human cells do, eating the wounded to replace them with new healthy tissue)
Perhaps that what the Durlan 'blood' we've seen on-panel actually is, the fluid inside of Durlan cells. It serves the same function as blood, transporting fuel and nutrients, and engorging soft tissues (to simulate muscle function), and flushing harmful things away from healthy tissue, but it's cytoplasm, not 'blood.'
Perhaps not. That's how I like to think of it, just because it makes sense in my head, and then, from that squiffy pseudo-science base, to expand it into actual super-power territory by saying that Cham has the power to make these internal proto-cellular fluid exchanges at 'super-human' speeds.
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
That's wonderful stuff, Set, but I don't think that it has much to do with the original Durlans, any more than the tenacled creatures do. Later, way later, I think the cold blooded or tentacled Durlans came into being, certainly after the Archives issues, I think, but I'll try to look it up during the next few days.
I much prefer your indiviual colony idea, sort of like coral or sponges. But, on Earth anyway, that only really works with very low functioning water based creatures. There has to be some way to ingest food and oxygen if you're not getting it directly from the environment as in silt, water currents, plankton. The water environment also helps lessen gravity stress, allowing minor movement.
That's the general problem with cell based stuff, it's highly differentiated because there's only so many things that a single cell can accomplish effeciently, I think. Micro biology is incredibly fascinating and complex.
Retroboot, I haven't seen that kind of environment on Durla. They seem to have a land based lifestyle. Have you seen something else?
They also weren't mentioned as cold blooded before, were they? I don't remember it, anyway.
There just aren't any true shapeshifters here, but anything more than the before mentioned coral and sponges and single celled creatures have brain bundles and hearts and some form of gonads and guts.
Even with tugor pressure for cell structural strength and form, a water/fluid source would be needed. And heathy nutrients have to come from somewhere, too. Cell to cell osmosis is not all that efficient without the individual systems to expedite the processes.
So, I agree with you that true cellular based shapeshifters like Durlan are very been portrayed, are highly unlikely, imo.
Proty actually makes a little more sense in someways, as he's a simple protoplasm based entity.
I think that he should have always been shown with much more simplistic forms.
odo was plasma/energy based, I think. The other shapeshifter on ST was totally energy based. Drawing sustenance from light and heat makes more sense, I think. Then, the creature just used energy/matter exchanges for shapes.
I love thinking about shapeshifters. If I could have a superpower, that's the one I'd want, for sure.
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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I might have kind of lost my way in the writing and rewriting.
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Candlelight: There has to be some way to ingest food and oxygen if you're not getting it directly from the environment as in silt, water currents, plankton.
That's true, but there's no reason a Durlan can't take advantage of their ability to move faster than an amoeba and just travel to where the food is and shove it inside of themselves, where it will be digested from all sides by the various cells around it. While I had envisioned the cells using a kind of brownian motion to distribute nutrients around between themselves across the cell membranes, there's also the possibility of individual cells moving within the Durlan's bodymass to where the food is, or the food itself being shifted around so that 'everybody gets some.'
The oxygen would likely just be absorbed by the surface cells and transfered to those below the surface osmotically, but, again, the Durlan could cause cells to cycle, so that cells that haven't gotten to 'breathe' lately could be rotated up to the surface for oxygenation, and then subsumed back to the center mass while the next 'ready to breathe' cells move up to take their turn. Or, the Durlan could make a cavity within itself and pull air into it, to increase it's 'surface area' for oxygen absorbtion, which, in a completely different mechanic, would functionally do the exact same things that lungs do. It could even put them in the place where humanoids put their lungs, since it's not doing anything with that part of it's chest cavity anyway...
quote:The water environment also helps lessen gravity stress, allowing minor movement.
Durlan cell membranes would have to be unlike terrestrial cell membranes, that's for sure. They'd have to be, like that of an amoeba, both flexible and osmotically permeable, and yet tougher than a multi-celled organism's cell membranes (and, if able to be dehydrated, perhaps even as tough as a plant's cell walls, making that 'armor' that Cham grows in some of his forms at least as tough as hardwood, even before he uses his big ol' brain to arrange them in structurally reinforced patterns (such as cylinders or hexagons or some sort of fractal self-reinforcing spiral pattern)).
quote: That's the general problem with cell based stuff, it's highly differentiated because there's only so many things that a single cell can accomplish effeciently, I think. Micro biology is incredibly fascinating and complex.
Very true. I definitely am using Star Trek-esque pseudo-scientific technobabble to get away with a plausible-sounding biological shapeshifting mechanic that wouldn't be viable with an earth critter. (Although it's infinitely more feasible than Kryptonian biology, where a 10 second exposure to sunlight can fuel the ability to bench-press a billion tons!)
I would imagine that, to do all of these things, the individual cells of a Durlan would have to be larger than human cells. At 10x scale, they'd still be microscopic, but have a lot more room for the shiny features like a photosensitive outer membrane and a coating that allows them to chemically conduct signals to the adjacent cells (allowing each to function as a brain or nerve cell, in a massive billion cell bodywide distributed network 'brain').
quote: They also weren't mentioned as cold blooded before, were they? I don't remember it, anyway.
It's the first I've heard of cold-blooded or egg-laying, but I haven't read a lot of the older stories.
If the Durlans have no circulatory system, the lack of internal thermal regulation would make sense. To warm cells, my 'proto-cell' shifter would have to move them up to the surface to be warmed by the light of the sun, or attempt to transfer warmer cytoplasm from cells that retain previous warmth to the colder outer cells (a losing proposition, if the Durlan doesn't have an external heat source to replenish warmth, as it's reducing it's core temperature to prevent it's outer surface from suffering damage...).
So, ironically, 'cold-blooded' would be the logical side-effect of my conception. (Well, not blooded, but incapable of generating it's own body heat, anyway.)
A shapeshifter able to draw in mass extradimensionally, or convert surrounding mass into it's own mass through some quantum process, would have no logical reason at all to not be able to absorb ambient heat in the same way (indeed, by taking in surrounding matter, it would be incapable of *not* taking in the properties, such as heat, of that matter).
quote:Even with tugor pressure for cell structural strength and form, a water/fluid source would be needed.
Very true. While Iceman can apparently generate 10,000 lbs of ice from the 'water moisture in the air' (without dehydrating and killing everyone in a 100 yard radius...), that's a comic-book invention, and a shapeshifter that needed to use fluid expansion to shoot up to twelve feet tall would need to be standing in a hundred gallons of water...
quote: I love thinking about shapeshifters. If I could have a superpower, that's the one I'd want, for sure. [/QB]
Ditto. My favorite power ever. Even if it wasn't Chameleon Boy level shapeshifting, but more like Mystique-level shapeshifting, that's still only limited by your understanding of your own cellular and chemical biology! Self-healing? Easy-peasy. Healing others by sending your own mentally directed tissue to plug their wounds? Do-able, as a temporary solution. Fun endless possibilities!
Registered: Aug 2006
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posted
I had a zoology teacher tell the class that our guts are actually a hollow tube that runs through us to hold the rotting substances that we ingest SEPARATE from our body cells because those substances, as the are, are toxic to us.
That until our digestive acids and enzymes break down the foods, not only are they unusable but they're destructive to us.
When something is ingested by an amoeba, they form a vacule/membrane sack around the food until enzymes break it down into nutrient components.
A Cham sized creature poring itself around something might work, but not really effeciently or quickly.
Spiders injecting digestive fluids into bugs works because of the chitin that holds in the bugs cells. Liquifed innards are held in the 'skeleton' cup and sucked out.
As for thermal regulation, in warm bloods, the heat of the body is concentrated on the brain and trunk, especially the trunk where the circulatory and resperatory systems issue from. The limbs are 'expendable'. That's why eating snow when you're lost in the wilderness is a very bad thing.
Cold bloods hybernate/shutdown in cold and can't live at all in cooler climates, depending on their size, I think. I'm not sure because while I know that alligators can live in Florida, crocodiles can only live in Florida if they are in the area around the radioactive powerplant waste/heated water. But I don't know the structural differences in the two that make that so.
In 'Fringe', their limited shapeshifters are android based and have to connect with the original to take it's shape.
One of the characters on 'Criminal Minds' said the Star Trek didn't really use pseudoscience. Their concepts may have been taken past the point of possibility but their concepts were almost all based on sound science concepts.
-------------------- 'In the twinkling of an eye' I'll be dancing in the sky!
Come, join me!
From: Salem, Oregon USA | Registered: Aug 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Candlelight: [QB] I had a zoology teacher tell the class that our guts are actually a hollow tube that runs through us to hold the rotting substances that we ingest SEPARATE from our body cells because those substances, as the are, are toxic to us.
Since every one of these larger proto-cells would be expected to replicate the functions of other cells, I'd imagine that they would have to have some means of resisting injury from toxic concentrations of digested substances, or, like liver cells, when compromised by a toxic concentration of something, gorge themselves on it and 'carry it down with the ship,' removing themselves from the body. Being microscopic (albeit bigger than human cells), other than perrhaps an odd odor when Cham had 'eaten' a large quantity of something toxic, as cells stuffed with the toxin leap free of his body and carry their cargo of poison away from the whole, there wouldn't necessarily be a visible effect.
On the other hand, it's the concentration that causes cell damage, in most cases. A species capable of both moving digesting matter around throughout it's body *and* moving individual cells towards or away from toxic concentrations of otherwise yummy nutrients, has little fear of such things, as it can both move cells in danger of eating too much of a nutrient (and reaching toxic concentrations) away from the 'food,' and also squish the food around to dilute the concentrations, scattering it around the entire body in pockets, smooshed between hungry cells, while moving cells away as they get 'full' and bringing in new hungry cells.
Just as with human digestion, I don't think that a Durlan would actually *think* about this sort of stuff. It just happens. Only in unusual situations would a Durlan note that it's 'feeling sick' and have to consciously 'purge' a meal. For the most part, digestive, respiratory, circulatory, etc. processes would just happen in the background, just as we don't have to consciously remind our heart to beat or our diaphagm to pull air into our lungs.
Anywho, at a certain level, it's unworkable as a biological process, and becomes a super-power. Once Cham is transforming in under a second, he's *wildly* exceeding what a shapeshifter of this sort could reasonably do, and that's not even accounting for his mass changing abilities (since he doesn't have to absorb or expel surrounding matter to increase or decrease his mass by factors of several hundred).
The cold-blooded thing also interacts oddly with the nature of a shapechanger. As with Odo, something capable of rapid extreme changes should be *humming* with energy (or made of energy that can convert into matter forms, or something), and have ridiculous amounts of stored energy (chemical, whatever). Being cold-blooded, it gives the superficial impression that Durlans are like terrestrial cold-blooded creatures, often associated with sluggish, low-energy metabolisms and extended periods of rest, punctuated by sudden bursts of speed, and then another long period of rest.
Cold-blooded or not, Durlans certainly don't seem to be sluggish or low-energy. Cham's never shown lounging around or idle, the way 'hot-blooded' Dirk is. (Obviously that's part of their characterization, with Dirk being the one to most often have an insouciant or cavalier posture, and Cham always being ramrod straight and actively engaged in any conversation or activity, but it suggests that 'cold-blooded' doesn't carry 'sluggish' or 'low-energy' associations.)
quote: One of the characters on 'Criminal Minds' said the Star Trek didn't really use pseudoscience. Their concepts may have been taken past the point of possibility but their concepts were almost all based on sound science concepts.
During the Next Gen days, when Roddenberry was still running the ship, he had 'science advisors' either on call or on staff that checked over what they were doing, but the writers had the option to ignore their advice if necessary to serve the story.
In later years, after he passed, that sort of nod towards scientific versimilitude wasn't taken as seriously by his successors, I have heard.
(Granted, to some, any excuse to bash Berman and Braga is sufficient to spread unflattering comparisons, so I'm not sure whether or not this is smack-talk or fact...)
[ March 06, 2011, 06:11 PM: Message edited by: Set ]
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