cosmicos | Sending the lambda calculus into deep space

It’s a familiar problem. You’ve finally managed to contact that alien civilization. Things are going great. You feel like your world will never be the same, that whole new realms of possibilities are opening up before your eyes. Then, inevitably, a hint of strain starts to creep into your relationship. You find that you don’t really have all that much in common. Heck, sometimes it feels like you’re not even in the same galaxy. It’s as if there is this vast gulf between you, making communication almost impossible. You’re not even sure you’d understand each other no matter how physically close you became. What do you do?. You design a language for cosmic intercourse. Hans Freudenthal made a start at one in his book, Lincos, published in 1960. One of the most interesting ideas in Lincos is to bootstrap up from mathematics and logic to conversations about mathematics and logic between imaginary characters Ha and Hb, and from there to statements about behavior of those characters. That’s a pretty rich universe of shared ideas already. In CosmicOS, we develop this idea of communicating through theater by introducing a new topic of conversation: programs and simulations. For example, if discussing logic circuits, we transmit a program for simulating the circuits, so the listener isn’t restricted to the examples we show. If discussing movement through space, we transmit a simulation of a small adventure game, and show navigation from room to room. And so on.