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

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

...and you would get squished by the first mage of reasonable power to come along. "Look at me, I can kill you from 50 yards away!"

"But you don't want to do that. You like me. You want to give me your magical device." *Mage Casts suggestion*

*Fails will save* "Yeah, you're right. I do..."
"Thanks." *Mage casts PW:K. You die.*

Fae'run is a scary, scary place if you don't know how to use armour/magig.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

~chuckles~ good points, but i'd still like ta visit!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

If I wanted to visit any continuum where magic worked, I'd want to have a good, thorough course in theory and practice of the place's magic first and go there as a competent mage myself. (Not that I'd advertise the fact if I didn't have to.) I'd want to brush up my swordsmanship a lot, too.

The first place I'd personally want to go, though, is someplace that could fix everything that's wrong with my body. Ideally, I'd want to have the capability to update the engineering spec a little while I was at it -- increase bone strength and toughness, increase specific muscle strength to pan troglodytes spec (it's not just that chimpanzees are proportionately more muscular, their muscle fibers are seven to eight times as powerful as human muscles; we all have a defective muscle-fiber gene), increase speed of nerve impulse propagation, conscious control over time-rate perception, conscious control of peripheral vasoconstriction, additional color receptors in the eyes and improved resolution, some modifications to the structure of the spinal column ... and make them all genetically dominant traits. A quick trip to Jack Chalker's Well World universe for a chat with Obie would probably take care of that.

The Culture could probably do MOST of those same things ... but I'm not actually totally certain even the Culture could do all of them.

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

See...this is why I want to go to Pendor. That is, plus a few other upgrades, standard fare for a citizen. (Or there is the option to become a non-human, but I'm not really down with that. Except maybe as a pamthrett, and I'm not sure I could handle that drasitc a body-type change.)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What is a pamthrett?

(Actually, I've considered at different times making changes quite a bit deeper and more fundamental than I mentioned above, given complete carte blanche.)

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

A six legged sentient telepathic panther, loaded with major cybernetics.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uh ... yeah, that's a pretty extreme modification.

Though arguably not as extreme as the book I was reading once in which an entire planet of colonists voted to genetically reengineer themselves into what amounted to sentient fish by means of a virus. Not even aquatic mammals; fish. I recall hoping the people who voted against it were allowed to leave first.

I also recall a book in which a human space probe discovered a race that had re-engineered themselves into almost cryogenic, non-technological creatures with glacially slow metabolisms that "saw" via shortwave radio, apparently in an effort to have a sufficiently low-energy existence to avoid destruction by what amounted to a race of ragingly paranoid space-travelling crabs. The crabs had built robots as ragingly paranoid as they themselves were to construct and manage their technology, then handed over control to the robots, and now went around doing their best to sterilize their region of the galaxy of every other form of sentient life but themselves just in case one of the others might someday decide to attack them. (Thereby ensuring, of course, that any race that survived, or that discovered what they were up to, would do its very best to exterminate them.)