A Few Notes on UNSoNG

UNSoNG, a novel by Scott Alexander is currently being serialized. It starts with the Apollo 8 astronauts reading from Genesis (which, if I recall correctly, was criticized at the time for introducing “Babylonian cosmology” into what should have been a scientific endeavor), followed by them running into the crystal sphere surrounding the world.

One way to look at it is that it takes the straw-man argument of the preceding paragraph and made it real: that the world really does have a Babylonian cosmology.

Another way to look at it is that it's what happens when there's a buffer-overflow bug (assuming the Simulation Hypothesis). The data (in the form of a space capsule) overwrote part of the symbol table.