Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Little Green Men
We send/sent space probes to float around in the Milky Way with pictorial messages attached to them. For example, the 1977 Voyager probes had golden records, with inscribed diagrams depicting the human form and our location. The records were made based on the fact that little green men can understand basic math and geometry. Why is it that math and science are used to communicate with aliens? Wouldn't they have other ways of knowing?
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3 comments:
I have to disagree with Deep because our concept of math is based solely on abstract concepts which we've applied to yet another abstract ideal. Pure math is nothing more than man making something up in order to describe physical occurances. Physics could be one of the only areas which may be universal, however communication with another group of beings may be entirely impossible because we base all of our knowledge on our experiences on earth, developing language and even the ways to communicate physics. So, i feel as though communication among other beings at a distance is a fruitless attempt due to our lack in ability to communicate in any truly universal language.
I also have to disagree with Deep, since we can easily see how our method of writing numbers has changed. I believe that the diagrames used have the best chance because to me pictures seem more universal as pictures are a direct description of the item instead of a representation of the concept.
Though I wanted to see how ppl would respond with the depiction of math and science as more universal, I think it could be made more relevant (communicating with aliens that may or may not exist is hardly connected with the study of people). Humanities were valued more in this post than I thought; the apparent limitation, i.e. humanities only applies to humans, isn't really a limitation since humans encompass all our experience, anyways. And...if the "universe" only consists of humans (as it does for most everyone), than universality doesn't really apply. And, if communicating with people rather than aliens is your goal, than humanities would be more valuable, since people are foremost emotional beings and secondarily rational (no matter how much more "practical" science is). Any attempt to move away from using local slang, to national language, to a science-based vocabulary, to mathematics, to computer binary notation, inevitably sacrifices the personal connection for universality.
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