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We have four cardinal compass points: North, East, South, West. Why four? What physical properties of the Earth or the sky or other phenomena require four cardinal points, instead of maybe three or five? Would you adopt four cardinal points if you lived on Mars? Probably... Would you need or want four cardinal points if you lived in deep space? North can be a preferred direction in space, yes, and useful, too. But East...? Would you need four cardinal points if you lived in the hellscape on the surface of the planet Venus? How could you define compass points in practical terms on Venus, where the Sun is never visible, and the planet barely rotates...?

And if you're thinking four is just random... an accident of history, which is certainly a point of view worth considering, I'll remind you that Polynesian navigators, from the earliest records we have, reported four primary compass points subdivided into 32 lesser points. This division of directions could still be an accident of history, but now you would need a major coincidence layered on top.

There's no absolute answer to this. Just something to contemplate and talk about. So let's hear your thoughts.

And feel free to ask your favorite LLM ("large language model" = AI chatbot) for ideas. But one "rule": please don't post the LLM's text verbatim. Use it. Borrow a few key phrases and clever descriptions. Avoid the ease of copy and paste. Let's hear from you, not the bot. :) This is a soft rule, of course, since you could specifically prompt a chatbot to reply in your style, and no one would know the difference. But let's hear from you. 

Frank Reed