Feel free to comment on the root of the thread or reply to any of the posts.

Rather than me clogging this community with my nonsense, I’m making a single unified thread for the Lonely Galaxy. Most of this will be reposted from the corresponding megathread on the CBB forum[1].

Biology

Humanity

Tech

Xenoergonomics

Politics and Economics

It’s possible I’ll have to quit Lemmy the same way I had to quit Reddit two years ago. Silly monkey brain like big number, and the voting system is addictive for me. Gotta have those imaginary internet points lol. If I do end up quitting, I have a Neocities page[2], and if you’re interested in the Commonthroat language, there’s a comprehensive grammar on Frathwiki[3].

  1. Megathread on the CBB ↩︎

  2. The Lonely Galaxy on Neocities ↩︎

  3. The Commonthroat language on FRathwiki ↩︎

  • early_riserOPEnglish
    1·
    9 days ago

    The Mass Router

    Kid: “Mom, can we get a star gate?”

    Mom: “We have a star gate at home.”

    The star gate at home:

    Mass Router

    Long ago, when we humans were still squatting in a ditch poking berries up our noses, the yinrih discovered subspace, which they called the underlay. They quickly learned how to send information through the underlay faster than light, instantly in fact, but transporting matter proved illusive.

    It wasn’t so much putting matter in or taking it out. The problem was momentum. An object egressing the underlay retains all the momentum from its point of ingress. If you ingress the underlay in a space station in low orbit over a planet and egress at the surface, you’ll be traveling at mach 20 relative to your point of egress.

    The first thing they figured out was how to flush Newton’s laws of motion down the toilet. This resulted in many technological wonders such as force projectors, which generate a reactionless force normal to their surface when a voltage is applied, and retribution fields, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of incoming projectiles and release that energy in a concentrated blast of concussive force back at the attacker[1]. But while they had mastered force manipulation of objects in realspace, the same was not so for objects in the underlay.

    Approximately one year after First Contact, a group of Claravian research monks perfected the impulse buffer, which absorbs the momentum of objects egressing the underlay. Because there were yinrih on Earth with access to a fabricator, they were able to establish a mass router trunk between Sol and Focus right away, allowing the missionaries to return home, and most importantly, bring their human friends with them.

    But there’s one catch: The mass router is a claustrophobic nightmare. There are both mass and volume limits to what can be sent through the underlay, meaning that only one person can be transported at a time. There’s enough room for a person and maybe a few bags depending on how high up the chonk chart the person is. Mass routers look like the unholy offspring of an MRI machine and an iron lung. You have to be sealed in a very small cylindrical space. If in a gravity well, you get a bed to lie on. If in microgravity, you strap into a harness. The sensation of ingressing and egressing the underlay feels like your whole body falling asleep for a split second.

    Savvy readers will note the use of the term router and correctly guess its mechanism of operation. It shunts a bubble of realspace containing the person into the underlay, fragmenting that bubble into billions of discreet packets. From the perspective of a hypothetical observer embedded in the underlay, these packets appear discontiguous, and can take separate paths to reach their destination. However, and this is important, from the perspective of a person within one of these packets, the space is still contiguous. If a box containing an ant were to be sent via mass router, the ant could travel from one end of the box to the other without noticing a difference. Or it could if the traversal weren’t instantaneous. There is no ontological question that what exits is the same entity that entered.

    “But what happens if a packet is dropped?” I hear you cry. Well, the entire bubble containing your mass, called a flow is harmlessly shunted back into realspace at the router that dropped the packet, provided the router absorbs your momentum correctly.

    Where there are routers, there are routing protocols. Mass Routing Protocol (MRP) is used to dynamically build paths from point to point in a mass router network, as well as coordinate mass flows within that network. Firewalls can prevent unwanted intruders from egressing at a particular router, and route poisoning can be used to hijack a person’s mass flow and make it egress somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.

    Some people, on four legs or two, harbor misconceptions about how mass routers work. Some people think your body is digitized and sent over the internet. Others, drawing on ancient superstitions regarding demons lurking in the underlay, believe that mass routers may allow demons to invade realspace[2].

    1. To get an idea of what this looks like, humans refer to retribution field generators as shoop da whoop cubes. ↩︎

    2. The Claravian magisterium’s official position on demons is “it’s best not to think about it”. If they do exist, you’ll only invite trouble by worrying about them, and if they don’t exist, you’re wasting your time fretting over nothing. ↩︎