From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Aug 29 2001 - 22:17:38 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote
> > > That example doesn't seem to work! I can just imagine you going
> > > off to planet Y in a very distant galaxy, crashlanding, swimming
> > > across a large river, drinking the water, using it to water your
> > > plants, and then having the first officer come yelling to you,
> > > "Chief! This stuff isn't H20!". You'd then probably conclude
> > > that not all water in the universe has the same chemical
> > > composition.
> >
> > I dont follow this, what do you mean the officer runs over and says its not
> > H2O? If its a compound similar to water and acts in the same way, it still
> > is what it is. What else could it be? If its compound X, then its molecular
> > structure might be different. My use of it doesnt change its identity or the
> > water's.
>
> What I don't understand is why there persists this notion that physical
> laws and even the elements will be discretely different on other
> planets. This isn't a new notion to my knowledge, its been around at
> least since H Beam Piper wrote his story "Syllabary" (where humans
> exploring a martian civilization figure out how to translate martian
> from the remains of a martian table of the elements, and the reporter
> with them asks them why martians don't have different elements...) but I
> would have thought that people would have gotten over such
> ludicrousness.
That's why I said "very different galaxy" to try to maximize the
alienness that *might* be encountered. We don't know that all
elements were cooked in equal proportions through out the
universe, and, though I agree that the chance is pretty slim,
it's not impossible that we would find *somewhere* in the universe
a substance that also had the usual characteristics of H2O we
find in daily life.
Lee
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