Comments on: Missing Gnarl. Peng Parasims.

By: Steve H

Steve H — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 21:10:42 +0000

Rudy, this is furkin outrageous! Gnarl-stealing is such a cool idea that there has to be something impossible about it. Would Pi round down to 3? Would clouds tend to be square, or spherical? Would we put on Barry Manilow instead of Zappa, or would Zappa just sound like Manilow? More vitally, would all those little osmotic membranes and Krebs’ cycles and stuff in our bodies work anyway? Could an embryo develop normally sans-gnarl?
Have you read Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun? (Set aside several months if you haven’t.) Some of the mysterious characters are revealed to be ‘aquastors,’ material beings projected by the brains of the starships orbiting Urth; one turns to dust as the ship supporting him goes out of range. Apparently a dead person can go on for years with help from a shipbrain. Maybe the Peng are all being broadcast from a source? Maybe each Peng has a different source. If I were going to be a parasim, I’d have a para-parachute, namely if my source was cut off I’d want to be restored later in mid-sentence without losing data.
. . . and, wouldn’t islands be better for the Peng, as they could steal gnarl from the ocean around them instead of angering the humans? Maybe a few of them could be allowed to stay at the end of the book; put ‘em on Easter Island, or a ship.

By: Jon Groff

Jon Groff — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 16:24:05 +0000

Actually, as pointed out in your other works, it’s only a cool idea if we have it and they don’t. Advanced civilizations tend to subsume less advanced ones. The more advanced the technology the greater the consumption and efficiency of consumption of intermediate and end-result ‘gnarl’. From the chemical; wood and petrol burning, to the atomic; fission, fusion, spin isomer, to the subatomic; say, anitmatter; to the fundmental; quantum level or zero-point extraction.

Slowly, societies become the ultimate leeches of gnarl at lower and lower levels, until they are sucking down the very fabric of spacetime.

By: VirusHead

VirusHead — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 17:29:34 +0000

Gnarly parasims, man. Favorite line: “They’re like ice-sculptures in a blast furnace, being kept together by a zillion gnats with trowels and Slushy cones.”

By: Jon Groff

Jon Groff — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 23:55:29 +0000

I think the idea of a race that ‘farms’ complex quantum interactions is a very cool idea. I guess thats the next step after nanotech.
I really resonate with the concept of quantum interactions as computational in nature. I think its just another way to look at things rather than a radical change in ideas, perhaps a better way. Picturing the fabric of spacetime as that which results from the energy, or results from the computation inherent in quantum interactions fits with existing theories. Things like scale dependance of quantum effects become a statistical averaging of computations. It would then make sense that you can only walk thru walls 1 in 10^64 times. I imagine that you could describe the microwave background radiation as the minimum matrix necessary to support computation and hence produce spacetime. There is no computation at absolute zero.
It would also lend itself to describing gravity, the most confounding of forces. Would it be that gravity has the least computation and is more scale dependant statistically variant? This might explain why stars and galaxies form, since these computations are the most basic.
It could then be stated that physical laws are the result of these computations rather than the cause or the framework.