Gulliver’s Bottom

So a discussion over the eggbot man (see below) provoked a number of thoughts, principally concerning what way up is an egg? (Shades of the ongoing wars of Lilliput in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.) One approach immediately posits that the fatter end must be the bottom, but then if you went around the world applying this rule, you’d have to turn a lot of things upside down (e.g. all the trees). I started to wonder which way up hens lay their eggs, but immediately you have to ask, does the hen lay it upside down or right way up? Human babies, except for the breechers among us, are born upside down. So does the bottom come out first or the top? And what, in a larger sense, is bottom or top? Most world maps all put England on top, but it could equally of course be on the bottom. What way up is the sun, or the solar system? Why – more importantly – is the solar system always imagined spinning like a plate and not like a ferris wheel?

My point is this: is the eggbot man not too suffering from an excessively rigid interpretation of top and bottom? In another, freer world, instead of all this complex anthroporobotics, wouldn’t he simply have learned to walk on his hands?

Link to more on the eggbot man

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