Re: (ReacTor) Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans

Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:

Christian Weisgerber <naddy@mips.inka.de> writes:

On 2025-07-09, James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
>

Five Books About Aliens Who Are Fed Up With Humans
>
Yelling "Get off my lawn!" on an interplanetary scale...
https://reactormag.com/five-books-about-aliens-who-are-fed-up-with-humans/

>
In Greg Egan's _Quarantine_, the aliens have wrapped the solar
system in an artificial event horizon, cutting it off from the rest
of the universe. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going
out.

>
Wasn't that the final line in Clark's story "The nine billion
names of god"?  (why nine?  would have made more sense as
the four billion names, with a unsigned 32-bit overflow :-)

It is, and it is explained in the story.  The monks are using a character
set with an unstated number of symbols, no more than three consecutive
identical symbols, and from one to nine characters.  I think with some
combinatorics you could work out the number of symbols used (which
required custom printer modifications).

Devanagari has 48 characters, both vowels and consonants, and whatever set
the monks are using it has a whole lot fewer than that. 
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."