When monotheism comes a-knockin'

[arbre_rieur.insanejournal.com]

...on planet Krypton.

From the same comics (The Krypton Chronicles #3), we also get the El family tree:

Comments

[04nbod.insanejournal.com]

That family tree is pure hilarity, I can only imagine the grief Nox-El got for being an entertainer in a family of scientists. And of course every family has a Don! Very few female El's though, I counted 4 through the bloodline.

[icon_uk.insanejournal.com]

Actually I liked the diversity of the older El's, the latter era's predominance of scientists to the exclusion of all else which strikes me as a sign of a desperately dull family (and considering that only Jor-El and Zor-El realise the truth of "Krypton go Kablooey" , it hardly speaks well for their combined intelligence)

[raattgift.insanejournal.com]

To be fair, we don't actually know what branches of science these scientists specialize in. Why would a biologist studying the life cycle of Kryptonian sea sponges have any special insights into the pressure-pressure-tension relationships between the planetary "uranium core"'s criticality and the whole planet's self-gravitation?

Given a hot dense slurry of heavy radionuclides at the core it is unsurprising that there is active volcanism on Krypton, with enormous internal shear stresses and explosive ejections of lavas high in metal content. Volcanic gold vapour condensing in the upper atmosphere? Plausible from a physical perspective. However such a dynamic environment means It would be interesting to know why the planet was ever stable enough for intelligent life to evolve there in the first place. On the other hand, the reciprocal questions of how life (once there) managed to fill the available niches with the assortment of Kryptonian life forms we know about are also interesting, possibly more so than here on Earth with our relatively mild and less dynamic planetary environment and consequently weaker natural selection pressures.

Perhaps it was just trendier to study the latter sort of question, at least in the extended El clan, so the family scientists other than Jor-El II and Zor-El might have been more the type who would travel to faraway islands to study bird beaks or be lab geeks studying the electron transport chains of extremophile microbes than the type to write down theories of gravitation and particle physics directly relevant to the local environment's structural metastability, or to set up lots of sub-microradian angular measurement and gravimetry stations all over the surface, or to do VLBI, etc.

Non-specialists might not notice any rapidly "goes blooey!" trend any more than specialists in Krypton planetary physics would be au fait with the latest problems in materials science and aerodynamics with respect to aircraft efficiency in the presence of gold vapour storms in the upper troposphere. Specialists might be annoyed by the interference with communications from or the integrity of data from satellite-borne instruments studying Krypton's surface. "Damn it, all this really cool Krypton Observer instrument data is highly unreliable because of that damn gold volcano, so keep a lid on your wild speculating until we can confirm how much of it is usefully correct, Kal-El!"

Wild speculation about surprising results at practical observational limits or from attempts to model the evolution of very large scale dynamical systems by extrapolating through data points whose provenances are suboptimal is a pretty common feature of science here on Earth... (that's where testable hypotheses often come from).

Think of what would have happened if Krypton did not go blooey -- what would people (and the law) say about shooting young children into space on the strength of a weakly formed and untested hypothesis that turned out to be completely wrong?

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

AAAUUGGH, THE SCIENCE! IT IS SPLITTING MY BRAIN! Oh, my poor little brain! It has an owie!

[mari_redstar.insanejournal.com]

While I really doubt that it's what they meant, is there any reason some of those Wirs and Hatus and Noxes couldn't be women who passed on the El to their kids for some reason? No reason the naming traditions couldn't work differently on Krypton, maybe the kid takes the surname of the family with more political influence, or they flip a coin for it, or something.