Six, six, six

[unixronin]

As most of you probably already know, many of the credulous and superstitious have their panties all in a wad today because it's June 6, 2006, which can be written as 6/6/6.  OH NOES!!!1!  The Number of the Beast!!!  Maybe something really bad is going to happen.  Or maybe it's a sign of the End Times.

Unless, of course, you follow the Julian calendar, in which case it's May 24.  Or the Celtic, or Jewish, or Islamic, or Mayan, or Chinese, or ....  Well, enough of that silliness.

Now, wait a minute.  Back up a step.  What was that about the Number of the Beast?  Robert Anson Heinlein's protagonist in The Number of the Beast, both an engineer and an n-dimensional geometer, proposed that the transcribers of the Bible had misunderstood, and the number being cited was not six hundred, threescore and six, but rather an attempt to represent six to the power six to the power six (a rather larger number, some 36,306 digits in length).  This, he suggested, was the number of possible continua accessible if one postulated that space-time actually possessed six dimensions, which we can refer to as x, y, z, t, tau, teh, and that one could select any four of these six to use as three spatial dimensions and one temporal, and then step along the remaining two axes incrementally, one new continuum per integer quantum step.

Based on this theory he built what he referred to as a continua craft, the unforgettable Gay Deceiver, whereupon the whole group went haring off exploring the continua and stumbling into various other universes, including that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom and Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith's Lensman universe.

OK, now we're starting to get somewhere.  So, here we go:

Picture this.  By chance, mysterious provenance, the honest sweat of your genius brow, or the benificence of some n-dimensional geometer from who knows where, you have possession for a while of a continua craft much like Gay Deceiver.  You can make three, but ONLY three, trips to other continua -- any continua you like.  If you've ever read about it in fiction or in scientific speculation, assume that somewhere, at some point along some chosen combination of axes, it exists.

So....

• Where would you go?  Would you stay there?

• Who, or what, would you take there?

• If you didn't stay, then who or what would you bring back?

Comments

[k-crow.livejournal.com]

First place I would consider going to is Spider and Jeanne Robinson's StarDancers universe. Hell yes, I would stay there. As for who I would take with me... anyone that I care about that I could convince to go with me. If I didn't stay... I'd need to find *some* way to bring symbiote, or whatever would grow into symbiote if seeded into the right place, back with me.

I wouldn't mind visiting the X-men universe, though which one and at what point would take some thought. Not so sure I would stay there. Again, I'd take anyone with me who wanted to go. *grin* I'd consider kidnapping Nightcrawler to bring him home with me.

I have no idea what I'd choose for my third visit. Babylon 5's universe sounds appealing for some things, and so does Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange land. Then there's David Weber's Honorverse, and Laurell K. Hamilton's worlds, and Anne Bishop's Black Jewels trilogy. I'd want to stay long enough in Stranger to learn Martian. A bit more difficult to pin down what I'd want or how long I'd stay in the others.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't mind visiting the Babylon 5 universe myself. I don't really see myself fitting into the Stardancer universe, though, or any other kind of communal-mind scenario. I found the idea of the Overmind in Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End one of the most repugnant ideas I've ever read ... far from seeing it as some kind of godlike over-intelligence, I see it as a sort of a cancer on a galactic - or universal - scale.