Thanks, long day.

The most ecumenical vessel isn’t a cube, it’s probably something like a baptismal font or a communion cup.

@MikeScott, I was also perplexed but then saw that the Merriam-Webster defines ecumenical as "worldwide or general in extent, influence, or application". merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ecumenical

If you can liquefy them and bring them back, can you dehydrate the liquid and rehydrate afterwards? That will save you about 70%. I call this "ye method of essential saltes" (palingenesis)

I suspect that is supposed to be "economical"? (Or, y'know, efficient. "Economical" isn't wrong, but "efficient" is probably less confusing. Assuming that the intent was "way that takes up the least space".) Note also that there are a number of space-filling solids possible; for example, hexagonal prisms. BTW, what is a "Clyde"??

If they have the technology, it might be far more efficient to dehydrate humans for storage. Most of our volume is water, and water is notoriously incompressible.

If they have the power to reconsitute humans from undifferentiated goo while somehow retaining the minds, why don't they just upload human minds and build new bodies on the other end from local raw materials, rather than spending the effort to ship the raw materials from Earth? Do they have some sort of literal magic that causes the human goo to retain the psychic essence of the person or something?

It's Grey Goo all over again!

@Matthew We just have to assume the process requires liquefaction in order for reconstitution to work.

.... so many questions.... Like, if the body has sufficiently liquified, you may only have constituent compounds, some of which are going to react with each other (hydrochloric acid being a big one). At that point, do you actually need the slurry from the entire body, or can you just weigh the person and just extract the brain? I mean, this process would otherwise kill a person, even assuming they were just compressed, and not put in a blender....

Just submerge yourself in the bathtub and measure how far the water goes up. Then multiply by the surface area of the water. Eureka!

@DavidHambling I strongly suspect the brain and other organs will not survive that.

Can they not just take the stem cells? Seems crazy to store pi to a trillion digits when you can calculate it with a few characters of math formula..

The most unrealistic thing here is why a Lovecraftian monstrosity would care at all about any humans on earth, or why they would start to care now, after having lived here long before any humans were even sighted.

Humans are liquified - it's the volume you see before you.

Humans can be transformed into small cuboctahedral blocks of a chalk-like substance, about six inches across. But they're quite friable.

@CaiusJard I remember a time when people criticised using images to convey ideas over the internet because they were such wastefully huge data packages... but the reality is that if you have the hardware to make the required data trivial, then it does not matter which is more efficient or by how many orders of magnitude, you will just do what is easiest or best for the user.

@Nosajimiki - Reinstate Monica: And nowadays they use images - or worse, video - to ineffectively try to convey ideas, when a few written sentences would work better :-(

So... liquified humans would be the alien equivilant to a meme... that is funny on soo many levels.

Since recreating living humans from the liquified ones basically involves being able to construct a living human from molecules, all they'd need to store is one strand of DNA per person (or, if they have a more efficient digital storage form, they could just store the info in the computer). They could, to make their lives easier, carry away a few buckets of "protein goo", but actually they should be able to find everything they need in the new world anyway (else there's no living for the new humans!).