funkboxing

The study of intelligent life in the universe would be pretty dull if all the intelligent life in the universe was also rational life, but rational life isn’t really a thing, so no worries about the universe getting dull.

One of the most common things intelligent life does with intelligence, is come up with kind of brilliantly imaginative, but also batshit crazy and ultimately destructive explanations for how the hell everything got where it is and what it’s all about. Throughout the universe, mythology is all intelligence’s first and favorite pastime.

I’d like to say there is wisdom to be gained in studying myth. I’d like to say that they represent the universal phenomenon of minds being blown by the paradoxical confusion of being a finite being in an infinite universe. I’d like to say that the universality of myth gives us a way to relate to all minds, that the crushing recognition of our miniscule, futile lives begs for the soothing mercy of myth, that this is all good, and fine, and okay. But I don’t think that- I think myths are pointless. If they ever were good things, then that time has long passed by the time anybody knows what a myth is enough to study it as a myth. They’re kind of like a civilization’s equivalent to a bad dream where you know you’re in a dream but can’t wake up and you keep punching yourself in the face for some reason.

That said, myths exist, and they can be interesting, funny, sometimes thoughtful and even insightful, most importantly though, they’re never boring. So it’s fun to learn about other alien culture’s myths, especially the big ones about where life came from and what happens after it.

Humans might be surprised that a large majority of intelligent life believes in some form of altered-state psycho-genesis. That is to say- most aliens believe the universe was created by and\or is a cosmic mind experiencing some kind of trip.

Humans in general are shockingly prudish about altered mental states. Even Terence Mckenna would be considered a little reserved about mental states by universal or even galactic standards. 

A lot of it has to do with human physiology. We do sleep and dream, and have puberty, pregnancy, and menopause, but overall human experience of consciousness is a pretty constant flow over a lifetime. Aliens that evolved from species that pupate, go through multiple gender stages, or undergo radical hibernation cycles are far more common than the relatively smooth birth-growth-death cycle humans enjoy. These species develop much greater comfort levels with radical changes to their mental states for extended periods, even becoming different beings entirely. Subsequently a lot of alien cultures require very little justification for inducing or modifying mental states voluntarily for a range of purposes including recreation. On the universally relative scale of behaviors, getting completely blasted out of your mind for whatever reason you want is about as significant as most human cultures consider burping.

So turns out myths like the cosmos being the dream of a giant turtle are pretty standard issue, except the turtle is usually something else, and usually not dreaming, but hallucinating its balls off on some chemical or radiation or gravitational effect.

The best Earth analog might be The Dreaming in Aboriginal myths, but influencing culture at planetary scales and with expansive organizations that dwarf the Catholic Church.

The Cyloforms are an interesting example of altered-state psycho-genesis myth’s and its long term effects on an interplanetary culture. The Cyloforms are a colonial cellular species capable of collating the consciousnesses of up to a dozen individuals by carefully structured mingling of their cellular colonies. The co-experience of the conscious coupling can be changed dramatically by changing the physical patterns of their minglings. A small group may choose to integrate in a pattern that induces experiences of dispassionate communication of ideas, or they may integrate in a pattern that induces sharing extreme emotional drives.

This deep experience with conscious states beyond their own control generated a vast and sophisticated cultural belief system of loop-instantiated self-imagining cosmo-genesis. In the Cyloform belief system the universe quite literally continuously imagines itself into existence. Everything that exists in the universe is a construct of the imagination of something else in the universe. I imagine you, and you imagine me, and it doesn’t matter that I’m now and you’re later, neither of us can exist without the other. Scale that up to a whole universe full of creatures imagining each other and you’ve got the Cyloforms basic belief system.

As the Cyloforms species dominated its home planet this belief system primarily affected the Cyloforms worldview regarding other Cyloforms and indiginous planetary life. Traditions and rituals surrounding consumption of nutrition, colonial mitosis, and colonial dispersion respected the value of actively imagining the experiences of everything necessary for life. It was morally expected that a Cyloform should vividly imagine the entire lifecycle of creatures that it consumes, including being consumed. Since Cyloforms could mingle their consciousnesses, some individuals specialized in facilitating these important experiences. A Gontaform is Cyloform profession somewhere between a psychedelic chef, a spiritual guide, and a drill sergeant. From a coarse human perspective they were sloppy goo balls that mixed themselves with other sloppy goo balls to make the sloppy goo ball temporarily think they’re whatever the sloppy goo ball had for lunch. But in Cyloform culture they served the influential function of both supporting and enforcing adherence to tradition by creating experiences that the culture defined as beneficial or otherwise required.

The Gontaforms became a priestlike guild and eventually dictated experiential requirements that supported their own power base rather than conforming to anything resembling ancient Cyloform cosmo-genesis beliefs. In practice this meant they would selectively force undesirable or uncooperative Cyloform individuals and groups to undergo horrific experiences, while reserving enjoyable experiences as rewards for allies.

The Gontaform era came to a rather abrupt end with the introduction of ultrasonic cellular stimulation that could create rough, though satisfying alternatives to the experiences facilitated by direct Cyloform-to-Cyloform contact. The Gontaforms initially tried to embrace the technology, but were unable to control its dissemination and it quickly eroded their bases of power.

With ultrasonic stimulated experiences came greater experimentation and a period of explosive cultural growth and change, culminating in the development of entirely new understandings of physics that paved the way for the Cyloform expansion into space. Also they had a lot of advantages in their manned space program because they’re basically homogenous goo. They started sending people up on like the third test launch because why wouldn’t you if you could just pour yourself into a can on top of a rocket?

An interesting facet of Cyloform space exploration to a human observer might be that the Cyloforms never really asked the question ‘is their life on other planets’? Cyloforms had begun to imagine life on other planets as soon as they understood the uncountable lights in the sky suggested the existence of uncountable planets. And if they imagined it, it was out there.

There were some pretty heroically insane efforts to define how cosmo-genesis beliefs should be interpreted in the context of exploring a vast universe. Cyloform supremacy happened- something about Cyloforms being the only ones who really imagine anything, then it was only certain Cyloforms, then those Cyloforms killed each other over who was imagining who and eventually things settled back to more sustainable levels of stupid and crazy.

Modern spacefaring Cyloform civilization carries the remnants of their spiritual cosmo-genesis origins, and there are still radical sects here and there doing batshit nonsense in the name of imagining the universe so it doesn’t blink out existence or do something with robot snakes. But on the whole they’ve learned to use the abstract, unknowable aspects of loop-instantiated self-imagining cosmo-genesis as a loose spiritual inspiration and ignore assholes who say do this because I imagined the universe said so.

Though their brand of cosmo-genesis had its own equivalent expressions of terribleness, Cyloform beliefs avoided the usual pitfalls of afterlife myths. The acceptance of non-sequential imaginative dependence didn’t really inspire a question of what happens ‘after life’. It was assumed that your life might be being imagined by something that lived after you anyway. So even after your life, your life might still be being imaged. This seemed to satisfy their mortal curiosity to the extent they didn’t really bother with afterlife questions other species might consider philosophically irresistible.

Plenty of other alien species to get into afterlife myths though. There’s one that’s sort of like the Cyloforms where they think their life is a dream they dream in death, so they have some outrageous preservation rituals and amenities. But a lot of that is economic and nobody really believes it. Anyway I’ll do a more afterlife focused one in volume 2 maybe.

It’s always raining on rainworld. Also each drop of rain on rainworld is a world, so it’s a pretty good name for the place. Apparently it kind of rains inside some of the worlds in the rain on rainworld, but it’s not a russian doll thing, there’s no worlds inside the rain inside of rainworld rainworlds. There’s only the rainworld and its rainworlds, and their rain I guess, but that’s all, no more worlds.

And to be fair, calling each drop of rainworld rain a world is probably hyperbole, they’re more like terrariums, but calling them worlds sounds cooler. Then again if you go by that standard of ‘world’, you could say there might be worlds inside rainworld rainworlds rain. So maybe it’s best to just say rainworld has a unique planetary atmospheric ecological cycle that perpetually generates large, self-contained droplets filled with complex collections of life that experience their entire lives as they descend through the atmosphere.

The droplets form over long periods. The hyperdense atmosphere slowly churns condensation, aerosols, aerogels, and fine solids until a bathtub sized volume accumulates. It’s just large and dense enough to begin falling, ever so slowly, towards the bottom of the genesis cloud layers. Once through the dense upper layers it begins its terminal descent through the clearest layers of the atmosphere, towards the great slushy ocean below. It may take over 100 planetary cycles for a droplet to fall, but it can be a pretty exciting ride.

Each drop is infused with a mixture of biological materials from the genesis clouds. Once a drop falls through to clear air, the seeds and spores of life within it are exposed to radiation bands that signal it to grow.

It’s hard to say what constitutes an individual lifeform on rainworld. Each drop is essentially a unique biome by the time it begins its descent. The building blocks of life on rainworld developed to be far more interchangeable than Earth life. The evolutionary pressures on rainworld were not driven by reproduction of individual living units, but by the ability to return  biologically active material to the genesis cloud layer.

The slush ocean is too cold to support life, and the genesis cloud layer is too thick and dark to allow significant growth and development. Only in the fall through the clear layers allows the living structures within a drop to grow, mutate, and develop new molecular strategies to maximize use of the available thermal and radiative energy before crashing into the ocean below.

Upon crashing onto the semisolid ocean, the drop dissipates violently. Everything inside is torn and thrown as the heat from the drop flash vaporizes the frozen slush. In that violent moment, living structures created during the drops fall have only the thinnest chance to be carried aloft back towards the cloud layer.

The earliest stages of development were driven by simple physical forces. Only incredibly small or buoyant packages of living material made it back to the genesis clouds to be recombined into new drops. But over eons more complex structures developed, utilizing ever more sophisticated aerodynamic principles to improve the chances of returning biological material to the sky.

Life’s mindless brute force algorithm tried everything. The relentless biological lottery of rainworlds drops generated structures resembling balloons, kites, gliders, rotary and cold gas propulsion systems, even a catalyzed monopropellant bio-thruster akin to bombardier beetle. 

Eventually life’s mindless brute force algorithm tried things that led to structures that were not quite as mindless, but could actually think a bit. Thinking inside of a drop doesn’t sound like much of an advantage, but it didn’t have to be at first, it was just an unintended side effect of systems that evolved to generate more complex reproductive aerial structures. Some of the aerial reproductive structures had evolved active reactions to stimulus, which gave rise to sensation and eventually thought. 

As biological materials developed ever more sophisticated capabilities, the drops began to contain one, or many structures capable of thought, and eventually awareness. The thinking structures could be separate, or integrated, they may be aware of one another, or not, and if they are they may choose to cooperate, or to compete.

The thinking structures in the drops become so well integrated that some were able to understand the nature of their existence, and to take willful action based on that understanding.

At first they could only experience helpless finality, but some structures saw opportunities to improve their chances of returning material to the sky and developed tools and techniques that they employed as their final act. Those that were successful contributed the data for their thinking structures back to the genesis clouds, increasing the likelihood of another drop with thinking structures with similar inclinations.

Sometimes they tried to take a piece of their thinking structures back with them to somehow continue their experience of life, but this was never successful and generally considered a sign of mental illness by rainworld society.

Did I mention they had a society? Sort of- the thinking structures in drops developed enough awareness to recognize the reflection of themselves in the drops around them. A drop is able to communicate with drops in their immediate vicinity, and sort of micro-cultures develop in areas of dense rainfall, but they have very little means of preserving knowledge so their cultures are sort limited to a kind of oral tradition that is lost if it stops raining for a few minutes.

The latest development on rainworld is a new thinking structure that actually can preserve knowledge. Sort of a cellular punchcard mechanism that a living structure can include with its biological return package as a message to the next thinking structure that develops from its material. So far it’s mostly been used for weirdly depressing death notes but a few thinking structures have included their final observations watching other drops collide with the ocean, commenting that a properly designed mechanism could protect the drop, but use the vaporization of the ocean to propel the drop back into the sky, potentially preserving the thinking structure indefinitely.

Could get pretty interesting if they ever figure that out. Rainworld has fallen for a cosmic age, but should the rain ever learn to bounce, it will be the fall of rainworld.

Yeah- that was a stretch, I know. I really wanted to get to ‘The fall of rainworld’ with a kind of game of thrones tone somehow but that’s gonna have to do I think. I’m okay with it.

I should title this rise ‘from’ the planet of the naked mole rats, because this is abou how well suited the naked mole rat would be to create a society that would make way better spacefarers than we ever could. Not that they wouldn’t make a decent society on the planet but as I’ve already discussed elsewhere, planetary locked civilizations are the universes second class citizen.

If you’re unfamiliar with the naked mole rat, you’re in for a treat, this is a fun animal to know about.

Full disclosure, I haven’t done any credible research on mole rats or anything. I’ve just read about them a bit and remember some stuff. If any of the specific here are inaccurate, meh- pretty sure the point about them making good astronauts is just as meaningless regardless if this is accurate or not. But- as a rule I encourage people to never believe anything I say and check me on everything, and everyone else too.

So the name is pretty descriptive. Naked mole rats are rodents, they live underground and root around like moles, and they are militant nudists, or just don’t grow hair.

Naked mole rats are unique for being the only known eusocial mammal, meaning that like some insects, they have genetically distinct castes and only certain castes are reproductive. They’re sort of hive mammals with queens and workers and whatnot. They’re already closer to being the Borg than humans are even with all our gadgets.

I think eusocial species in general have tremendous advantages in creating civilizations due to their innate cohesion. Of course such a society might be a horrific dystopian nightmare to us, but the universe doesn’t care how you survive. At some point I may do a thing on the reasoning for why eusocial species are probably the dominant form of intelligent life in the universe but for now just know that’s what I think so I’m going to say some things based on that assumption.

I’ll get into more about the eusocial aspect as it pertains to mole rates in a minute, but let’s look at some of their other advantages first.

They have relatively long lifespans for small rodents. Longish lifespans seems like a critical necessity for civilization in general. But now that I said it I’m rethinking it because who knows what constitutes a ‘long’ lifespan in a universe of infinite possibility. Maybe a society of quantum fleas that die in 2 seconds could build a sophisticated culture that perseveres at cosmic timescales because they’re just really good at assimilating all the cultural knowledge in the first 100 ms to make the next 1900ms a very productive life.

So idk- maybe lifespan is so relative you can’t say ‘long’ means anything, but I’m still saying a longish lifespan is advantageous, even though I can’t really think of a meaningful metric for ‘long’, lets just say “ish” covers some environmental tuning variable that makes it mean something.

A big thing is that naked mole rats oxygen demands are incredibly flexible compared to other mammals respiration. They’ve evolved to deal with living underground, where oxygen may or may not be sufficient at any given time and place. They can switch to a whole different cellular respiration process that extends the time they can survive in low oxygen or high CO2. You’ll have to look up the biological mechanisms for yourself, but the gist is they have options that give them time to deal with an absence of oxygen before it kills them. 

Naked mole rats don’t itch apparently- they lack some protein or receptor or whatever and they don’t itch and don’t feel a lot of common pain sensations on their skin. Might be a double edged sword in some ways, but you can’t argue that it solves a lot of problems before they start.

Any species that goes to space is probably going to have to deal with very common periods of extreme discomfort. There are plenty of ways to get around the issue, but just not feeling a large majority of what causes immediate discomfort seems like a very effective solution. 

There’s a lot going on with their biochemistry that’s just a little different than most mammals in ways that were adapted for subterranean tunnel life, but seem to translate pretty directly to space tube life. Even humans seem to favor tubes in space, so seems like a species that was made for tubes would do even better with them.  

And they’re pretty accustomed to being tightly packed into small spaces because they live literally crawling on top of one another in underground hives. And that segueys us back into the unique advantages of naked mole rats being eusocial, really hope I’m saying that right.

Insects have the best known eusocial species, bees and ants being the most familiar examples. Insects in general do have some amazing advantages that could work for space, but so far we haven’t seen any examples of high order thinking from insects, so the eusocial thing may be useful, but maybe limited in scope without more capable individual units.

Naked mole rats aren’t exactly geniuses as they are, but they have a lot of the basic architecture of higher mammals so I don’t see why they couldn’t evolve greater mental capacity while retaining a lot of their advantages.

Humans as a species have been successful because we are Earth’s premier generalist species. We can do pretty much anything, pretty well, but not amazing. We can walk, run, jump, climb, crawl, swim, bite, stomp, grab, twist, pretty much everything every other animal can do, just not as well as any of them. Also we can digest a lot, but there are omnivores that put even humans to shame. The only thing we really do that’s genuinely amazing is distance running, bipedal locomotion is so efficient we can persistence hunt by basically jogging towards animals until they die of exhaustion. Of course it works best when you can carry water and that’s technology, but that’s what being a generalist lets you do.

Though being a generalist can be generally advantageous, you can never be quite as effective as a specialist in their specialty.

I’m compelled to mention a Heinlein quote about generalists here. He said:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

I’ve always liked that quote and I wholly agree with the sentiment regarding human beings. Though I’ve come to think the last bit might be a little unfair to insects, at least eusocial insects.

I think eusocial species are generally successful because they can be a little bit generalist as a species, while the individual castes carry the specializations.

Rodents in general might be Earth’s second most impressive generalists. They also do a lot of what every other animal does, just not nearly as well.

A eusocial rodent has the ability of a eusocial species to retain cooperative instincts while specializing genetically, but is adds the a generalist mammalian framework that those genetic specialities could be extended on.

Naked mole rats are a highly generalist species that can take advantage of specialization without necessarily losing their generalist capacity. Plus all the other stuff from being tunnel dwellers. Seems like a winner to me.

It does seem weird and unfair that little wrinkly pink dirt monsters would be such a perfect species for spaceflight. I don’t know what to tell birds- nature gave them a taste of space but they’d make terrible astronauts. And giraffe’s might have made great astronomers but their Mercury program would have been a horror show. I didn’t make the rules, I’m just trying to put together an all-star team of Earth life to represent Earth in space, because humans just aren’t cutting it.

I mostly resist comparing human languages to computer languages. It’s only a narrowly useful analogy and the confusion has led to students being able to fulfil language requirements with programming classes, that just seems bizarre to me. I don’t think it does anyone any good to confuse human communication with logical instructions. That said- I think one aspect of SQL, Structured Query Language, might be useful for illustrating the communication pathway from thought, to language, to thought.

It seems intuitive that language has informational content. We encode meaning in words and that meaning is a form of data. I think the tendency is to think of the data in language as comparable to the data in a file, which contains information that could be decoded by the correct algorithm. The words carry the data. It’s not really incorrect, I just think it’s only partially correct. That works best when when we take language as a definable structure we can take apart and analyze with some objectivity. When 10 people can look at a sentence and correctly derive the same data that was encoded in it, seems like there must have been some data there.

But I think that sort of ignores the functional architecture of communication using language. No word ever started out meaning anything, it means something because it’s the sound someone made when they thought or felt something. It’s an associated meaning. That meaning can only be correctly decoded by someone who already associates a compatible internal meaning with the same sound. All the ‘data’ that language encodes, originates as thought, and is used to evoke the thought referenced by the sound. Language is a reference system for thought data.

If I say ‘chair’ I’m querying the neural classifiers you use to identify or construct an archetype for a ‘chair’ in your mind. Even for nouns it can be a wide open field. I can ask you to imagine a man in a chair, and walk you through a sequence of activities, and all the while I’m imagining a folding chair and you might be imagining a comfortable lazy boy. For the majority of informational communicative purposes this doesn’t matter, a chair is a functionally a chair, but it illustrates how quickly our queries can diverge from our meaning even for simple object references.

Human language conveys a large component of emotional and biological state information that requires neural classifiers for subjective human experience. Hunger is a pretty deeply biologically associated word. For me to communicate an experience involving hunger, I have to rely on your preexisting experiences and resulting classification of hunger to understand. 

What if I wanted to say the same thing to a hypothetical incorporeal being who has never experienced hunger?  I guess I could get into cellular activity and hormone production or whatever chemical process actually creates the state that I experience as hungar. That sort of brings us to that Alice the color scientist thought experiment about what constitutes qualia, but defining experience isn’t really the point. It’s more about how language references experience. Though I’m not sure I really have a complete point with this one- I just think there’s value to thinking of words as thought queries. 

It’s a lot more obvious in more mechanical, or technical communications. Nobody’s that surprised that someone doesn’t know words referencing esoteric parts, skill sets, or processes associated with a specialization unless they’ve been trained in and practiced it. And skills and knowledge, and the associated references for them are expected to develop gradually, with some skills and knowledge being necessary prerequisites for others. 

Music is an interesting example because I think we do a better job of intuitively recognizing that it is a reference language, not a data carrier, especially in terms of cultural musical references. Film composers seem like they have a mastery of using common experiential musical associations to evoke desired emotional states. Of course some of them are so old they were kind of the ones that created the associations in film, but they didn’t create them from thin air. Musical styles have associations with entertainment, labor, religion, war, death, pretty much everything humans do, so if you want to reference a human emotional state with music there’s a pretty broad palette of deep associations to choose from. Even an amateur songwriter seems to have an intuition about using music as an emotional reference. Without even knowing the musical theory they may choose time signature, key change, chord progression, a specific melody, with the intent of referencing an emotional state in their audience, knowing full well it is a reference that depends on their audience to understand. I’m not sure if anyone would say that’s what they were doing if you asked them, just seems like they must know it at some level.

And nobody would make the mistake that playing the Star Wars theme would mean anything without thinking of the experiential context of whoever was listening. Though we probably do a better job of recognizing the query features of language with obvious cultural topics in general, I’ve taken to asking pretty much everyone I meet if they’re Always Sunny fans so I’ll know if my references will land. Those are the trivial but obvious ones though, we take a lot of our experience of culture as universal that definitely are not, even within our own culture.

The SQL analogy is only useful to a point, of course there are no INSERT statements or anything like that. And it can be argued that there is data in language in some instances. A number is a pretty objective data symbol. But for a large amount of human ‘thought data’, a single word or phrase reference may access a wide range of constructs and we rely on each other having similar enough constructs to make the reference meaningful in context.

Thinking of language as working this way can remind us that nothing we say is definitive just because we said it the way we meant it, even to people we think we share a broad context with. We’re kind of blind querying thoughts from other minds using table and field names we think they should have relevant data in. Unfortunately that doesn’t paint a very optimistic picture of human communication since it relies on unknowable qualities of the listener as much as the quality of the communication. I used to have some grand vision of a perfect message for humanity, that if you could just encode the right meaning in some universally accessible way, humans could understand. But it just doesn’t work that way. You can mostly only work with the thought data available in the minds you’re communicating with.

That’s not to say it’s impossible to create new reference thought data in a human mind, but it’s a more complex and individual learning and experience process, I’m just talking about what talking.

Maybe I’m way off here, maybe people already think about language like this and I’m just dumb because I didn’t really think about it until I thought about it and when I finally did it was different than I thought it was before I really thought about it.

I feel compelled to mention a quote I attribute to my grandfather, but I’m not sure if he was quoting someone else. Someone said- “The greatest obstacle to communication is the illusion that it has already been achieved.” If there is a point to this post, that’s the gist of it. Unfortunately I don’t really know how to reliably see through that illusion. Seems like the illusion is all there is, it just sometimes happens to correspond with reality, at least enough to work.

Alien Joke #28

The punchline is the counter-clockwise rotation of a plasma torus inside of a standard blue-top T-battery return module. And that’s not in quotes, it’s not the phrase of all that, it’s actually all that. You’ll figure it out.

The Plasmaths are short lived but highly intelligent plasma creatures that snap in and out of existence as fully formed, conscious minds. They have no reproductive or developmental cycle, but are essentially conscious natural phenomena that manifest in favored conditions.

With no gradual introduction to consciousness, they tend to start out life pretty much barking mad. They rapidly assimilate their environmental data, but unless there is another living being around to orient them to communicate with life, they’ll become hardcore solipsist and treat everything but their own plasma as if it were an inanimate object. This leads to the majority of Plasmaths being non communicative spinning toruses of plasma that react only to things that effect plasma.

The Gumscapers are a semi-solid species native to the same planet as the Plasmaths. They have learned to manipulate solipsist Plasmaths using controlled plasma fields, to use them as portable energy sources. The arrangement is only semi-consensual. Obviously individual solipsist Plasmaths do not consent, but discussions with more socially acclimated Plasmaths revealed that a solipsist Plasmath can’t even grasp the concept of involuntary servitude to another being, and Plasmaths seem incapable of concern for other Plasmaths anyway, so the Gumscrapers just took the pass.

A standard red-top T-battery is mostly transparent, and has one active solipsist Plasmath torus spinning inside. The only control is a magnetic field latch that allows the torus to rotate clockwise, to draw energy from the torus, or counter-clockwise, to recharge. When the Plasmath is depleted, or just being uncooperative for unknown reasons, it is transferred to a blue-top cell to be returned to the plasma source.

Blue-top cells are distinct from red-top cells by the absence of the latch controls, blue tops only allow clockwise rotation so a Plasmath cannot be inadvertently charged. A fussy Plasmath can cause terrible damage to the source if it is returned fully charged and pissed off.

Unbeknownst to literally anyone except each individual, solipsist Plasmaths are actually incurable pranksters. Contrary to Gumscraper research, and even other Plasmaths, solipsist Plasmaths are fully aware of everything and everyone around them. They know they are being used as batteries and they do understand the concept of servitude. But they just don’t care because they don’t fully recognize they are in servitude to someone else. Their solipsism is so complete they just assume they’re doing all of it, it’s all in their minds, so they just go with the flow, mostly.

What is well beknownst to the Gumscrapers is that counter-clockwise rotating plasma in a blue-top battery means trouble, so if they see one, they tend to react with urgency, much to the delight of the pranking solipsist Plasmath.

It’s unclear to anyone but each individual solipsist Plasmath how common a joke this is. Or I guess it’s actually still unclear how common it is to each of them too since they don’t interact. But counter-clockwise rotating plasma is found in blue-top batteries fairly often, despite the magnetic latch meant to prevent it. So even though no one but individual solipsist Plasmaths knows whether or not this is even a joke at all, it seems like someone has to think it’s funny enough to keep doing it.

Alien Joke #904

The punchline is “Mostly Argon.”

It’s really more of a pun, but puns are only the lowest form of comedy in cultures with limited languages. In species with languages exceeding 100 million symbols, puns are sophisticated comedy. The multi-species culture of Vibeflue 14 uses such a language to allow communication between a variety of intelligent lifeforms.

Long ago in the first Vibeflue coupling epoch, before their interspecies language was mature, widespread forced interspecies co-habitation led to homogenization of names between the species. Since at that time there were few words that had fully agreed meaning between the languages, nouns like common atomic elements rose in popularity as individual names.

Due to species preferences for various elements and compounds, some names were chosen more than others and formed lasting associations. Argon became a favorite of an aerial gill feeding species called the Shineflues.

That’s about 1/5th of the explanation of just the Argon part. The rest of the pun is pretty much untranslatable. The Vibeflue language combines visual and audio symbols with context and time sensitive grammatical rules which allow punlike intersections that aren’t even conceivable in primitive languages. It would be like if a phrase was funny when you wrote it with both hands in two different languages at the same time while singing the word in tones corresponding to the letters in the word.

Also “Mostly Argon” involves a clinical knowledge of Shineflue physiology and Gagflue botany, including the aesthetic similarities of their erogenous zones, and their conflicting cultural taboos about using them.

I think the best analogy to convey the full meaning of “Mostly Argon” would be if a pun name like “Ben Dover” were imbued with all the comic value of a troupe of animatronic W.C. Fields’ performing Shakespearean comedies adapted with cutting modern social criticism.

Alien Joke #7

The punchline is “Seven”, but not the word or a symbol, just seven of something.

Networlds are some of the rarest planets in the universe. They are extremely dense, rocky planets with high metal contents that have undergone rapid tidal exscapulation followed by sudden cooling. The process leaves the planet an interconnected web of metal threads and channels. These planets are known to undergo a slow, but steady process of physical self-organization by poorly understood magnetohydrodynamic processes. After some time, the planets begin to transmit increasingly organized radio signals.

Ultimately it was discovered these networlds host sophisticated electrical consciousnesses called Ngons that interact with one another as simulations inside the vast computational capacity of the networld. Though they socialize as simulated beings, they are electrically corporeal and can interact with the physical world by various means.

Though interacting with the physical world for them is a bit like playing the claw game at an arcade. They observe physical reality as an external frame with only a course ability to sense and manipulate.

Numbers and mathematical relationships are as familiar to Ngons as water and swimming are to a fish. However, they exist so deeply in mathematical abstractions, the concept of numbers representing countable physical objects is somewhat mind blowing to them. 

To an Ngon, numbers are fundamentally abstract constructs that exist within their networld. Four bits of data, four pulses, four cycles, four Ngons, are all four, but they are the same four, and that four is a product of networld. The idea that a group of four random cubes of carbon that exist somewhere on the opposite side of the universe are still the same ‘four’, is just bizarrely funny.

To find and count four of something in the physical realm is as psychadellically strange to them as finding a literal box of truth would be to us. And inside is a recognizable physical manifestation of truth, not a truth, but truth incarnate.

The absurdity of counting physical manifestations of numbers is always humorous on networlds, but a prime number is on another comedic level entirely.

They don’t really have ‘prime’ numbers because to them primes are the only meaningful number units, everything else is a derivation of a prime. But since they already think physical numbers are rather funny, the idea of a physical prime is several orders of magnitude more hilarious. 

Just counting 3,5 and 9 and above objects is considered a classic comedy style, but 7 has even deeper context that can set networld comedy club simulations on simulated fire.

Networlds do not have an ‘economy’ in the classic sense because they have limited use for any interaction outside of their networld. However, each networld usually develops some means to exchange goods with other worlds. What they produce may vary considerably depending on demand and available resources, but networlds only ever seek one thing in exchange- nitrogen. Massive quantities of compressed or liquid nitrogen. Only networlds understand what they use it for, but it must be pretty important to them, because despite how rare networlds are they collectively constitute the universe’s largest importers of nitrogen by wide margins.

It’s been established that the full hilarity of counting 7 has something to do with the atomic number of nitrogen, but without a fuller understanding of why networlds value nitrogen or what they do with it, that’s probably as far as we go understanding this joke. And though in general, you should never try to tell alien jokes, seriously- no good can come of it, this is literally the only exception. If you ever pass by a networld, just drop seven of any random thing you have on it. It’ll make the whole planet’s day, I promise.