Saturday, February 04, 2023

The Space Goopies

 Had a weird but almost coherent sci-fi dream last night. Here are some ideas that might be worth stealing for someone.

A long distance space war starts as the result of a first contact gone wrong. Little is known about the alien race Earth is fighting. Apparently one dying eyewitness described them as "goopy."

They may be smarter than us. In order to try to end the war, they built a computer than can translate what we say into meaning in their own language. We can't do the same, so they understand us better than we understand them. This computer acts as a go-between but also allows the Earthicans to learn about their enigmatic foes by asking it seemingly harmless questions.

The one thing the people talking to the diplomat-computer were able to figure out was how differently the goopy approach to mathematics is. Goopy number theory isn't based on quantities like 1, 2, 3... but rather on rotations. Although they have their own squiggly symbols for them, the goopies count pi, pi/2, pi/3,.... Their idea of infinity is closer to our idea of the infinitesimal, as they count towards zero. I don't know if any of that makes sense, but that was my dream.

2 comments:

  1. The first association I had with the goopers were the Hovering Squids from the Hulks & Horrors game. Or maybe one of the Precursor species that somehow survived the plague.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is a very cool dream.
    My brother has a discord, and the best channel, or one of the best ones, is the dream chat.

    People just type out their dreams in there, it's great.

    Cool ideas come from dreams.

    Their counting system would be interesting to convert stuff to - it is almost like currency conversion.

    I also really like when information is important in dreams, so the way humans were trying to suss things out us really interesting and it's nda funny, which I often find dream logic to be.
    It's weird how real the logic can feel in-dream - but in awakening, it's silly again.

    ReplyDelete