[quote="Fonori"]Very interesting. I think it would be likely that the Djed-khala would contact the Kigdatsi first on your world.[/quote]Or possibly vice-versa, though the Djed-khala seem to have a head-start.[quote]As for physics, we'll need to work a bit there. The Djed-khao crystals can be fit reasonably into your RTF theories, as most of them are designed to amplify a given beings innate psychic ability.  This also means that crystal-based devices modified for Kigdatsi, if we were to consolidate our theories about psychic ability to your RTF, could possibly be much more effective than those used by the Djed-khala, who are only slightly more psychically receptive than humans (they can perform short-range telepathy unaided and have some precognition, though no useful amount of telekenisis without aid of crystals).[/quote]Ouch.  Unifying the ideas will require some work, because your concepts as presented break some principles that I dogmatically try to keep in my conworld.

In my conworld there is not (ATM) any spiritual phenomena.  The Kigdatsi's telekinesis is [i]not[/i] [u]psycho[/u]kinesis; it is the same phenomenon that they use for most flying machines, space-vehicle launchers, etc, and is no more non-physical than muscle contraction.  It obeys Newton's laws just as much as anything else, etc.  I do not know of an existing name for the thing I am trying to avoid, so I call it "psychocentrism", by analogy with geocentrism.  What follows is an attempt to tell you what it is, rather than why I am trying to avoid it in the Kigdatsi's world.  After all, it can make good sci-fi, and abstractions are beneficial [i]as long as you know what the abstraction does to the underlying reality[/i] (when it is necessary to know).

[b]Definition attempt[/b]
Psychocentrism is the idea that the thick (though quite solid) layer of abstractions through which humans view the world is somehow special, and the "artifacts"[1] of this abstraction correspond just as much to the way the world works as the non-artifacts; it fails to distinguish the aspects of our thoughts that [u]correspond via an abstraction[/u] to aspects of the outside world (e.g. how bright a single-frequency light is) from aspects of out thoughts that are [u]side-effects of the abstraction[/u] (e.g. whether that single frequency is considered a primary or secondary colour).

[b]Random related thing[/b]
The escapologist can escape his chains when hidden (from human vision) in a cloth sack but not when in plain sight (to human vision), [i]despite the fact that someone perceiving only via sonar (like a bat) or X-rays (which are not animal vision at all) would perceive either one the same way[/i].

[b]Another related thing[/b]
Fictional time machines which cannot leap through space as easily as through time[2] come out at the "same place" when they travel through time.  The idea of "same place" is defined (usually) as what humans consider to be the same place (i.e. geographical location on the planet).  The human idea of "same place" is thereby promoted to a fundamental property of the universe, despite (say) Newtonian and Einsteinian physics disagreeing (or rather an inifinitude of different ideas).

[b]A third related thing[/b]
When a team from Torchwood walk thorugh a temporal anomoly, they are not mangled by huge forces or twisted space, but in fact initially fail to notice.  How convinient that the anomoly is not only safe for human travel but also stays at the same height at the same geographical spot without anything holding it up.

[b]Computer example[/b]
Say a Windows folder is shown as a list of rows of data, which correspond to directory entries on disk.  Say they each have a name and a size shown, and are arranged in a certain order.  The strings of letters that label the files have a very close correlation to strings of bytes in the directory entries.  The shown sizes have a more abstract but still quite direct correlation to some other bytes in the directory entries, though there is a (non arbitrary) binary-to-decimal conversion with rounding.  The order of the rows has [i]nothing[/i] to do with the directory on disk, and is stored separately by Windows; it was deliberately added in because the files have to be presented on the screen in some order or other, because you can't show them all in the same place.  The shown filenames are an abstraction, the shown sizes are a slightly thicker (but still consistent) abstraction, but the ordering of the files is an [u]artifact[/u] of the interface.  The strongly psychocentric view would consider that the ordering of the files on screen is just as much a fundamental property of the directory as the ordering of the letters in the name of the files is.

[b]Attempt at specific objection [u]if[/u] I am to avoid psychocentrism[/b]
The mapping of things in the outside world to the thoughts in our brain is quite abstract, but determined by our senses and actuators.  The same holds for the Kigdatsi; their abilities seem "magical" to the uninformed, but they are just taking in sense data and processing it, or sending nerve impulses to actuator organs.  Anti-psychocentrism dictates that thoughts shouldn't correspond directly to the ouside world with no intervening "lower brain" and sense/actuator that defines what the mapping is.

That does not express well what I am trying to say, but it is the best I can do.
[quote]The view of alternate realities would only have to be slightly tweaked. It is believed that the star-system containting Djed was "thrown out" of its native system millions of years ago due to some dimensional or quantum anomoly as yet undiscovered. This is believed to be related to the Djed-khao crystals (Djed-yeltakh: sgee) on the planet. It might be possible that it had to do with one of your splits, where this particular region (or regions, as it seems some parts of the system actually came from different star systems in different locations/universes) did not split but instead was left behind in its own microuniverse (or psuedouniverse or whatever term we wish to apply) because of some irregularity that is as-yet unknown.[/quote]The splits were never intended as traumatic events within the universes, but as things the inhabitants wouldn't even notice.  Also, I have slightly revised the splitting idea.  Secondly, I am considering changing it so that all the universes always existed, but since they are almost deterministic they stay in exact lock-step initially (inter-universe travel being rare and (maybe) symmetrical).  For some reason, occasionally, half of the universes that are in lock-step at a certain time will take one option on an decision, and half will take the other.  For some reason, the universes that take each option are in continuous clusters (as viewed by their position in 2D "interspace") rather than randomly mixed, so that similar universes are close, and dissimilar ones often more distant.  This gets rid of the nasty simultaneuity that is created by splitting (thereby avoiding the question "simultaneous in which frame of reference?") and also avoids the problems caused by time-travel backwards across the split point.

I did not think about how the Djed-khala would have been removed from their original universe.  Maybe they were hit directly by the phenomenon that causes universes to diverge.  This could have created a new universe that is the same size as the existing ones but empty and dumped them into it along with some other matter.  Their journey through interspace would be very short (not decided, but at most a few nanometres).  Of course, there is then the question of why they ended up near Earth, and with a very similar motion to Earth, as positions in different subuniverses have a simple 1-to-1 correspondence, and jumping from a place in one universe always goes to the corresponding place in the other unless you do something drastic.  The simplest explanation is that their planet [b]is[/b] Earth.

If their planet is very similar to ours, the even might have occured hundreds of millions of years ago, which would be time enough for land life to look completely different.

If their planet has very different biochemistry to ours, then maybe "event" was billions of years in the past.  If it was slightly messy there would be a huge release of energy as small bits of the planet/protoplanet/protoplanetary disk went missing, or other matter turned up, such as those crystals, extincting life.  But it can't be too far in the past, and the event cannot have been too powerful, or the ground positions would be out-of-sync, so in-atmosphere travel between the worlds would be impossible.
[quote]Also, do the Kigdatsi have a language? It is possible that Djed-yeltakh would borrow a great deal of scientific terminology as they analysed Kigdatsi science and applied it to their own technology. Likewise, some of the technology traded to the Kigdatsi would carry with it Djed-yeltakh names.[/quote]
They have a language, though I have not created it yet, except for a few bits and pieces.  Their language is not verbal but pronounced via radio waves.  Fortunately transcription systems to produce human equivalents exist.  I will concentrate on the abstract syntax tree of their language, and how it is written, and not worry as much about how it is actually transmitted.  I have not drawn on my experiences of non-English spoken languages much, but instead from my knowlage of mathematics and programming languages.  

Technologically, the Kigdatsi have the co-operative ability to do some large-scale engineering, but their real talents lie in computing, programming, semi-applied mathematics, and general [url=http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hack.html]hacking[/url] ([i]do[/i] follow the link please, and see especially meanings 1, 2, 4, 6)[3].  To be blunt, in some areas, the Kigdatsi will not only have maths and programming languages beyond the Djed-khala's, but beyond their ability to understand without years of work; the Kigdatsi are not afraid to upgrade their own brainpower, and have a lot of it.  Technobabble example: the ability to perform automatic correctness proofs for computer programs from metaproof annotations expressed as dyadic functile hyper-arrows.

Good luck.  I will save this post elsewhere for the definitions of psychocentrism I wrote above.

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[size=9]Footnotes:
[1] By "artifact", I mean something similar to but not the same as "compression artifact", rather than the archeological meaning.

[2] This phrase excludes the Tardis.  Given the safety features the Tardis is known to have, and its stated ability to travel in space as easily as time, it is quite plausible that it automatically compensates for the motion of a the ground.

[3] If you have not encountered [i]The New Hackers' Dictionary[/i] before, you might benefit generally from reading the introduction and appendices at least, as you will recognise some of yourself in there.[/size]