I gotta go with sending the kid off alone, as either parent, because the various “Elseworlds/Imaginary stories” that play around with the basics tend to end badly.
Is the Phantom Zone torture in the “burning sulfur” sense, or just in some “total sensory deprivation and the horror of nothingness sense”? If it’s the latter, then unless the P.Z. also includes some kind of time distortion (a single minute in the Phantom Zone is as ten thousand years on Krypton!) it would probably make sense to gamble on “I could take a week or even a month of being maximally bored without going permanently insane”. Especially if you’re a bigshot scientist like Jor-El, who could probably just while away the time thinking Deep Thoughts. He’d probably revolutionize Kryptonian science once he came out!
It was my understanding that Phantom Zone inmates basically can’t do anything at all, to each other or otherwise.
And if the evidence for it being torture is just that a guy who was in there for a millennium would rather die than return, that sounds to me like it could well just be extreme boredom. I don’t actually think that it’s all that torturous, though, given that nobody who’s come out of it seems to show signs of PTSD.
And yes, I know that all of this is fighting the hypothetical, anyway. So be it. Moral beings have an obligation to fight hypotheticals.
Sort of. It’s basically mind without form. Only physicality is missing - you can interact with the other people - see them, hear them, converse with them, and see and hear (but not interact with) the real world.
Mon-El’s problem was primarily the fact that he was stuck there with a bunch of jerks who made his life as miserable as it could be made without actually having physical form, and only had brief contacts with anyone who wasn’t a jerk. 1000 years of the only interaction he had with other people being insults, taunts, and other mental cruelty. That’ll wear on a person.
But it only happened because he was the only person in there who wasn’t a psychopathic criminal.
Yep. Through no fault of his own, Jor-El was inadequately prepared.
Moot question IMO. The story, as I remember it, is that the ship was small like an experimental ship and there was no way to fit Lara in it. It was probably meant for a monkey or some other small animal. So it was Kal-El or no one. Since Jor-El did not have the support of the Kryptonian big wigs on his experiments, he was lucky to even have a small ship available.
Alone?
Jor-el had already sent every pet around the house, and a few poor animals who just happened to wander by into space. Kal could expect a full Kryptonian zoo waiting for him on Earthfall.
(Personally I would go for “Die as a family, together, instead of leaving my child more completely alone than anyone had ever been before.” There is no way with even Kryptonian super-science he could have predicted the kindly couple. A certainty of dying among your family, friends and entire culture or a slim chance of surviving alone among barbarians? Better a clean death than alingering one.)
Seventy-five percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water. I’m guessing that at the very minimum, 50% of the land surface is insufficiently densely populated to make the landing of a very small spacecraft likely to be noticed by humans with '30s or '40s era technology. I’m not up on Superman’s abilities or history, but it seems to me that it’s an insane chance to take with a child, and that the chances are hugely weighted against the infant Kal El being found and raised by humans. So I would either send Lara with the infant, or die together as a family. Certainly I wouldn’t send the baby alone.
Jor-El considered it, but sunspot activity or something – presumably correlated with the impending cataclysmic event – was interfering with access to the Phantom Zone.
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Seventy-five percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water. I’m guessing that at the very minimum, 50% of the land surface is insufficiently densely populated to make the landing of a very small spacecraft likely to be noticed by humans with '30s or '40s era technology.
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For what it’s worth, LAST SON OF KRYPTON had Jor-El include a scanner that sent out a prerecorded telepathic message to the most advanced mind on the planet as the rocket approached Earth, whereupon Professor Einstein hopped a bus to Smallville and had all the time in the world to select a kind-hearted couple and direct them to X location at Y time. “Ja, mein brother just died und left me ze farm in his will, but vat do I need mit a brand-new tractor? Go to ze cornfield at zat address in one hour and it’s yours!”
I build a bigger ship.
You don’t have time. You’re making this call as the final, planet-busting quake is building. If you had your super-powers you might accomplish it, but if you had your super-powers you could just fly off anyway.
My recollection of the Phantom Zone is (I believe) “Silver Age”. The inmates just floated around and were apparently able to observe the real world, much like the dead grandparents in the execrable Family Circus. How they propelled themselves around and got from the then vicinity of Krypton to Earth was never explained.
I’d send my son alone. If *Smallville *has shown me anything, it’s that all adult Krypton-raised Kryptonians are megalomaniacal assholes, myself included. I’d want to spare Kal that.
I’ve never seen an entire episode of Smallville; the girl who plays Lana annoys me, though the blonde lass is winsome. So I can’t comment there.
Anyway, megalomaniacal assholes rarely believe they are megalomanical assholes, and they never, ever, think there’s anything wrong with being a megalomanical assehole in the first place. That’s not what megalomanical asshole means.
To the people saying the Phantom Zone is all cuddly: I prefer the versions of the Zone that have it filled with horrible, unkillable monsters preying upon all poor fool unfortunate enough to be zapped into a desolate landscape from which even death is no escape. Basically Detroit, in other words, except with mental telepathy. Admittedly this chickmight occasionally waft through, but otherwise it’s Hell.
I send the kid on his own. The last thing I want in my dying moments is to hear a goddamn baby screaming its head off – much preferable to be spending those moments in a little peace and quiet with my wife (well, peace and quiet aside from that whole planet-exploding-around-us thing).
Given the high level of advancement that Krypton enjoys, I’m pretty firmly of the belief that they would know that little Kal-El would wind up well-nigh invulnerable once he got close to a yellow star, so for me, the risk is more in the journey than the destination. Once he gets there, he should be fine, even if he remains undicovered by the locals for a while. My main concern is that Kal-El has the best chance of getting there safely. After that, it’s up to fate.
I had always assumed that the craft had at least enough guidance systems to ensure that it landed on land somewhere in the temperate zone.
And even if Jor-El didn’t know details of our history or culture, he knew we existed. I don’t think it’s possible for a lifeform to reach anywhere close to any level that could be called “people” without having a very strong instinct to care for helpless babies.
Depending on the continuity, though, Kal could have been self-sufficient at an early age or as helpless as a baby from Earth. In the Silver Age, Kal-El exhibited extraordinary powers as an infant, and as a teenager began fighting crime publicly in the red-and-blue costume and became known to the world as Superboy. However, in the last 30-35 years, Kal-El’s powers were presented differently. He exhibited no powers until adolescence, when his powers began to manifest themselves gradually. There was no flying around as Superboy. And as a baby, Kal would have been highly unlikely to have survived if his rocket had landed in a remote section of the planet.
I think you’re right about that. In fact I’d not be surprised if it was guidance rather than propulsion that held up the completion of the prototype.
True enough. Certainly he had to work on that assumption; nothing else is emotionally possible.
I send the kid. But, in the 1979 movie at least, the journey took a few years… they put a baby in the thing, and out popped a walking 3 year-old.