Comment on Scallops

smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• BaroqueInMind@lemmy.one ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Or, since ancient Jews were desert dwelling people, saw a fucking peacock from the jungles of Asia that was brought in by merchants and so they got high in their temple from breathing incense herbs all day and wrote about it.

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  • jaybone@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    “Mustafa keeps this powerful messenger of heaven in a small wooden cage. Huh.” Shrugs.

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  • tryptaminev@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    The accounts are consistent over a timeframe of about three thousand years, counting from Abraham to Mohammed (s.a.s). Note that Mohammed was an arab who could neither read nor write, leave alone hebrew.

    If it was just some birds brought in by merchants that would be an extraordinarily long time to not realise that.

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    • DosDude@retrolemmy.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      As always, people who could read, read religious texts for people who cannot. There’s no coincidence, just telling and retelling of stories once made up way before.

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      • tryptaminev@feddit.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        And those stories didn’t change over 3.000 years?

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• stringere@leminal.space ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  we are seeing multidimensional cross sections of them, which give them such an otherworldly appearance

  Accurate or not I’ve always liked Vonnegut’s description of the viewpoint from the 4th dimension to the 3rd:

  “The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti. And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millepedes—“with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,” says Billy Pilgrim.

  • Slautherhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut

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  • vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That description presumes our temporal dimension is their fourth spatial dimension though. It also makes meaningful interaction basically impossible.

    If it works more like Flatland and we have a shared temporal dimension then they’re simply able to perceive us, inside and out, from what we would consider every direction simultaneously. In much the same way that we can see the inside and full circumference of a two dimensional circle.

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    • Catpurple@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      They sound like they would make for invaluable medical staff, at least where diagnosis was concerned. Who needs a CT scan, they can just see a tumor, a messed up spine vertebrae, or anything else, plain as day.

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    • xpinchx@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Woah

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• OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  OMG I LOVED Flatland! There is also Sphereland, but especially considering when it was written, Flatland was by far more innovative and creative. Sphereland was an homage btw, not written by the same author, and instead much later, slightly updating things to include Einsteinian physics.

  Okay in that case, you might be interested to know: C.S. Lews - the author of Chronicles of Narnia, and well-known apologist for both christianity and atheism (hehe, he switched, then switched again:-P he left his childhood religion behind, became atheist, then became a different type of Christian) -has this trilogy starting with “Out of the Silent Planet”. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants “imaginative scifi”, in the spirt of Flatland. It is less known than his fantasy works, I suspect b/c the details did not hold up well in historical hindsight, e.g. all of those creatures on Mars and Venus that we never did end up finding… but it was nevertheless quite bold in its risk-taking in that regard, having been written prior to that - even though he knew reality was not going to end up anything like that, yet he made this fantasy work anyway:-D. Also I love the neat way he has of making you be skeptical enough to question EVERYTHING that you believe:-).

  In that series he puts forth basically exactly what you are describing. These are beings within our universe, but are entities of energy whose only way to interact with our world is… well, imagine how you would interact with a bacterium: you’d have to make a puppet and say “this is me”, but lol it really isn’t. And yet, from a certain POV, it kinda is? Like the best way to talk to “you” is to walk over to the puppet and engage with it, which your set-up would likely be predicated upon, as in even if their entire universe is observable under a microscope slide, still that is where your camera is pointed and zoomed at.

  I also thought it was neat how planets are these dirty little mud-balls, in the eyes of those who literally fly through space - to us they are our entire worlds, but to them they are navigation hazards!!:-P We are the bugs that splatter on their windshields? Or perhaps the mud-balls are dangerous even, like reefs to a boat. Another interesting point was that space is not as “dark” as those pictures from the moon would suggest, b/c of the light streaming outwards from the sun (this one I can never do justice to the explanation, and anyway it may have been just more fantastical world-building material). The first and second are wonderful depictions of what it might be like to travel to Mars and Venus, while the third is more abstract, being on Earth but they do wake up King Arthur, in order to fight against aliens acting as demonic spirts that possess the spirit of a beheaded psychic kept alive with like lasers or something, so… there is that:-).

  So many scifi series - like Star Trek - do such a wonderful job of showing us these imaginative concepts. But still there is something to reading them rather in books (or listening via audiobooks I guess), and since these were never made into movies, that is pretty much the only way to experience them. Enjoy!:-)

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  • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Re: Flatlandb and sequels

    I’m on break from work so I can’t say much, but Flatland as societal commentary is really weird and dated, as geometry it still holds up though. I haven’t read Sphereland but I really liked a different sequel, Flatterland. Check out other stuff by that mathematician too, I really like his writing.

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    • OpenStars@startrek.website ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If it helps, just remember that its commentary on how “women are not real people” was SO egregious, even if more in line with some of the thinking of the day, that it SURELY must have been satire.

      Or at least that is the only way that I can stomach reading it - so while I also happen to believe it, I also just “flat” (hehe) choose to believe it as well:-). Someone who sees so clearly into the heart of logic… well, I want to believe the best there rather than the abysmal worst that it appears as.

      Thanks for the suggestions - I never looked around for another sequel, that is awesome!:-)

      I really do enjoy people who “think outside of the box”, as that is the main way to move forward - not to discount the enormous investments of efforts by tinkerers too, but we need a bit of both. Jules Verne, HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, this Flatland book, CS Lewis - these giants could see far b/c they saw clearly into the hearts of people.

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• 5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKfZ8RJ487M

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