From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Tue Jul 13 1999 - 01:48:27 MDT
Michael S. Lorrey writes:
> You don't know enough about math for your opinion to count. No insult
> intended. Math is math, and is the same math everywhere in the universe.
Whoa, Mike, hold your horses. Math per se does not exist but in the
minds/machines of its practicioners (though zealots may argue
otherwise). There might be other self-consistent formal systems
in use Out There, or maybe no formal systems at all -- just idiot
savant-like "knowing". Or something else entirely, something we have
yet no idea of.
> We have even created maths that describe sytesm that have no possible
> hope of existing in this universe (see elliptical equations(no, not
> ellipses, thats something else)). Additionally, humans have used a
> number of different number bases, including base 2 (binary), base 5
> (Roman/Latin), 10 (decimal), 12 (celtic/aryan, as I recall), 16
> (hexadecimal), 24 (Mayan, as I recall), and 60 (ancient Sumerian). We
All very interesting, but what if the aliens don't at all have the
concept of numbers? Or equations?
This is no more abstruse than your assertion that they indeed do have
all these properties.
> can use a base of e (the natural log), or we can use pi as a base
> (making all other numbers irrational). For geometry, we have not only
> the Platonic Euclidian geometry based on a commonly accepted set of
> axioms, but at least two types of non-euclidian geometries which deal
> with variations of the parallel theorem. The only possible math areas we
> may not know are those used in other space-time continua which use
> dimensional systems which have not been deeply explored by current day
> graduate students, but every day there is new progress.
>
> Any species more advanced than us is going to KNOW any math that we
> know. They will know other maths, but if they are interested in
> communicating with primitve species, they will use maths that are common
> among primitive societies.
All apparently plausible assumptions -- alas, extrapolated on the
basis of exactly one instance -- us. Sorry, not convinced.
> If the ancient maya or egyptians had had radio telescopes, they could be
> communicated with quite easily by an advanced intelligence via math.
We know Mayans and Egyptians, or, at least, we know our images of
them. They are all people, temporally not terribly distant from us.
Comparing them to postsingularitarian supercivilisations (because
that's the only kind of civilisations with high enough temporal
depth for us-current to bump into them with any probability) is
terribly oversimplistic.
> Communicating via math does not require that we learn their maths, but
> that they will communicate via simply understandable maths, much like EO
> Wilson playing with pheromones to talk to ants.
So far, nobody seems to have seen us/want to communicate. Our
problem is to find the aliens by their metabolism signatures they
cannot avoid, by grand-scale artefacts they cannot possibly conceal.
Whether they are there or not -- both possibilities are very
intriguing. Either the visible universe is ours to claim -- which
will require much better tech than we currently have, or, we will
soon face the task of communicating with extremely advanced
extraterrestrials -- which will very probably require us to be
postsingularitarian/one of them. No sense people talking to
nematodes.
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