#umun

Hi there, and thanks for the kind words!

Umun (Mummu in Akkadian) is a primordial deity, one of a trio of primordial dieties alongside Abzu (the primordial freshwater sea) and Tiamat (the primordial saltwater sea). The three appear in the Enuma Elish, the Akkadian creation myth, where Umun is a craftsman and personal assistant to the other two.

The word umun in Sumerian has a variety of related meanings, including “raw material”, “idea, concept”, “knowledge, scholarship”, and “school, workshop” — the basic idea is of crafting, creation, and skill, similar to the Greek concepts λόγος and τέχνη. It seems to be related to other words beginning with um-, like ummia “teacher, scholar, artisan, craftsman, specialist” and umma “wise woman, witch”.

• Without the Copper and the teslatrons, our bodies literally couldn't exist, would fly right apart, smear right out. I've seen it.  This planetoid didn't make it; it was never finished. Consequently, it is no place for humans, really, in the long run. Take the ylobe, for instance. Viewed alone, the ylobe animal-entire is our unconquerable master, here. We're at its mercy, nowadays even inside our antenna blanket. There’s also the space-storms. Our original Earth's universe was nothing like this. I guess it's not there anymore or something.

• I wonder what happened to that other truck we came with? All kinds of gear left on that thing, wherever it is. My parent designed the technology that model was based on.

• the problem I see is that for the zanz we need to operate our lygo-technology, there's not enough yojh in the vlnic cosmos. If you ask me the only important science to be doing right now is coming to some kind of understanding of how and why that is, but there's been wars, and we've lost a lot of our most important minds. We have designers, we have macronauts, but they’re idiots, and we don't have cutting edge maths, we haven’t made any equipment to find out what our neighbors have been up to. We stopped drinking from the communal human pool, as it were.

- Not all hope is lost, but, because of exponentially hyperbolic curve in the yojh/zanz axis, before too long, much more than hope… will be.

• Jim didn't get along with the aliens - those Clarantans that came visiting. I can't blame him. They were rude as hell. But I think they're further along than we are.

• Humanity isn't a morphology anymore. It's a way of translating perception into reality. That method is as much a part of our biological evolution as the appendix or the lymph nodes were to humans of the ancient kind - as useless and expendable and as seemingly innate. We have already changed it, millions of times, probably, but how can we know? Would it even help - to be aware?

• It's one of ape-kind's greatest shames: it built minds, and gave them tasks.