Re: Interesting concultural ideas

Dan Seriff wrote:
> Has anyone contemplated (or implemented) having a conculture
> based on a celestial body other than a globe?
Not a celestial body as such, but I often ponder life in worlds like
those portrayed in Greg Egan's novel <Diaspora> (1997), about which
there is some information at
http://www.netspace.net.au/~gregegan/DIASPORA/DIASPORA.html

The main characters are human or human-like minds in a large specialized
computer.  Each has a simulated body and a home universe, both of which
ve designs to vis taste; and each can visit others' universes on
invitation.  (Oh, I might mention that some citizens are gendered and
some not, and the pronoun for the latter is -- left as an exercise for
the alert reader.)

Among people who need not eat, sleep or bathe, what rituals
substitute for eating, sleeping or bathing together?

What customs govern the size and appearance of one's virtual body?

If, instead of simply jumping between virtual universes, it were
customary to have all houses (or at least portals to them) in a single
common space, what might that space be like?  Probably most of it would
be landscaped to resemble an ideal Earth; yet it need not be a sphere.
(I rather like the idea of a hyperbolic plane.)  If it's not a sphere,
how does the sky work?

I imagine occasional fads for hobbies in the physical world (using robot
bodies): building monuments, making and playing musical instruments
(rather than synthesizing the sensory experience), breeding animals.


...
Later the same novel visits a five-dimensional universe.  That part of
the story is set on the four-dimensional surface of a star, which has
patches of cool solid crust.  The three-dimensional coastlines are
packed with `trees' that make their living on the energy gradient.  Q.:
what do plants and spiderwebs look like in higher dimensions?

A pleasant feature of higher dimensions is that a road is not a barrier.


--
Anton Sherwood  --  http://www.ogre.nu/