They’re moving fast… relatively speaking…

Astute long-term observers of this comic will have noted that while over a decade has passed for us here in the “real world,” the timeline presented in Zombie Ranch (special presentations aside) covers a span of at most only a few weeks. You could posit this is due to our relatively slow update schedule. But if we actually get into relativity, science provides an alternate explanation, which is that the Zombie Ranch world is in fact moving very, very fast compared to ours.

Hey, don’t talk to me, talk to Einstein. Which might be difficult on account of him being dead, but his special theory of relativity lives on and the time dilation component he predicted may in fact be true. There’s a lot of math involved here but the basic premise (in my layman’s understanding, anyhow) is that the passage of time can be subjective based on the velocity of a given object. Clocks literally tick slower, enough so that clocks speeding along on board satellites in Earth orbit have to be programmed to adjust ever so slightly for the difference.

A popular example is an astronaut traveling near the speed of light who returns from what to them was a ten year space voyage only to find that over thirty years have passed for their planetbound friends and family. Oh, gravity is also involved in this equation, not just speed. You get near a black hole and amongst other issues, time is going to get wonky.

Anyhow, scientifically speaking over a decade may have passed for us but the folks in our Weird New West are obviously moving, not much slower than we, but much faster.

And also, our story has a lot of gravity to it.

So there.