Crispykett's Sideblog

another thing i have been thinking about phm-wise is how inferior the eridian’s understanding and technological development of space-related fields would be, not just compared to earth’s but also pretty much every other eridian science. humans have been observing the cosmos since the dawn of their existence because it’s right there. literally you cannot miss it just look up. and yet we didn’t start launching shit up there until like the mid 20th century. eridians probably didn’t know space even existed for the vast majority of their evolution. they can’t see, and even if they figured out how to build technology to detect light there isn’t any light to be detected. the technological advancements it would take to not only figure out that something exists beyond their atmosphere but to observe and study it is probably at or even beyond earth’s current technological abilities. but to build a whole spaceship and send it ten light years away, all on a shoddy foundation of knowledge about the cosmos, and for it to succeed, is genuinely insane. compared to the rest of erid’s current science and technology, their space fields may have been basically in the stone age prior to astrophage. the trip to tau ceti was likely erid’s first ever space mission. and it was ten fucking light years away and decades long. i would not be surprised if the rest of erid was years ahead of earth in terms of technology and intelligence, it’s just their space travel that suffers from oversights and inexperience because they had to build it up from literally nothing in a matter of years.

ALSO it makes a ton of sense that eridians never discovered radiation or relativity because a lot of that knowledge was built up through observations of light. electromagnetic radiation IS light which is the first kind of radiation humans recognized, while early eridians would have encountered none of it, and would have never thought to account for the possibility of particle radiation in space. and special relativity, which explains time dilation, is largely based on the fact that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum. which obviously the eridians wouldn’t have been able to even conceive of for generations, let alone measure and then apply to their physics. truly rocky bringing back his pet space blob to erid probably triggered a massive revolution in eridian physics, because humans just have so much better access to the kinds of observations needed to arrive at conclusions about the universe. and with eridians being so adept at math and it seems very talented engineers, i’m sure they’d soar ahead into a new frontier of physics for both planets, both having unlocked space travel and given the resources to explore the universe at a fundamental level.