Suppose you, and you alone, were to make first contact with an alien species.
This is kind of an unfair question if you’re cut off from the internet. We’re a technological civilization, we’ve realized our wet brains are inadequate for storing all our knowledge so we put most of it on silicon where we can access it if we need it. It isn’t really fair to expect us to demonstrate our rationality without giving us access to the primary repository of our knowledge.
BUT:
It should be pretty easy to explain our formalization for the real number system and propositional logic.
|+||=|||
1+2=3
||+||=||||
2+2=4
| : 1
1+1=2
+1=3
+1=4
+1=5… and so on
1+1=3 :: F
1+1=2 :: T
Then give truth tables for elementary logical connectors. This probably only works if they have some kind of analogous formalization for math, but if they’re building and flying spaceships instinctively- instead of doing the math … well, first damn. Second, there isn’t any kind of symbolic proof of rationality you could give, but if they want to know if you are they’ll probably want to see how you play games and will test you themselves.
You could then give a written description of updating by the conditionality principle. But I’m not sure you could express the significance of that exactly.
Then you could draw a periodic table- though I probably couldn’t do it from memory. You could relate the elements to elements in the solar system by labeling the bodies with the proportions of the major elements found in the sun and on each planet.
Could you make a rough sketch of the first few atoms on the periodic table or other such universal phenomena so that it would be generally recognizable?
Do physical observations determine our visual models for atoms with a sufficient degree of specificity for this to work?
Depending on how much of the periodic table you have memorized you could go a little further with decimal notation to give atomic number, atomic weights, and specialized symbols.
H, 1, 1.01
He, 2, 4.00
Li, 3, 6.94
Be, 4, 9.01
B, 5, 10.8
C, 6, 12.01
Past that point you can probably just get away with reference by atomic number and you only have to have the periodic table’s order memorized (...boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, etc). Then you can diagram basic molecules like water as “(1)-(8)-(1)”. Nail down the meaning by spitting for a demonstration of “liquid”, and maybe come up with a convention for angles and show the angle between the two hydrogen dangling off the oxygen being ~104.5 degrees. Ask for 80% gaseous “(7)-(7)” and 20% gaseous “(8)-(8)” plus water to explain your biological requirements for a few days. Diagram glucose, fatty acids, salt, and essential amino acids so they can fabricate enough food to last until scurvy or some other nutrient deficiency kicks in.
That should give enough time for them to decompile our genome and learn English if the aliens are any good at being our technological superiors :-)
While waiting for that, constellations might also be a good place to go, if you have access to the night sky or a portal in their ship or something? The apparent movement of stellar objects can serve as a chronometer (if you can still see the sun or the moon or something). Once you’ve got a stable unit of time and a stable unit of distance you can start talking about stars by pointing and describing light years. If I remember correctly, Vega is around 28 light years away, Betelgeuse is about 600. (Google says… 25 and 646.) Then you can ask “How far have you traveled to get here?”
You should be able to get time just by labeling the orbits in your diagram of the solar system. Of course, you’ll have to remember that the sidereal year is one day longer. Just label the Earth’s orbit “year” and the Earth’s spin “sidereal” and then write 1(year)=366.25 days. Hopefully the aliens are tolerant of approximations. They may first think these are distances, but their next guess when they see the math doesn’t work would probably be time.
Then draw a line on your diagram between the Earth and the sun. Thats 1AU. The speed of light is about 173 AU/day (it’s a little less with sidereal days, a little more with solar days).
The problem then is that all the constants you’re used to are based the solar day. Eventually the aliens will get confused. One solar day = 1.00273791 sidereal days. But no one will remember that. It might be easier to remember 1 sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Or I guess if you have a constellation chart your could draw in the ecliptic plane and label that. But dang are our units screwed up.
1AU =149 598 000 kilometers but if you’re a provincial American like me you know miles. 1AU=92 955 887.6 miles…
I don’t think a lot of scientists have this stuff memorized (1 obviously looked up just about all these numbers, except for hrs/sidereal day).
I would be really nice if we had all our units based off the speed of light or something. That would make this so much easier.
This is kind of an unfair question if you’re cut off from the internet. We’re a technological civilization, we’ve realized our wet brains are inadequate for storing all our knowledge so we put most of it on silicon where we can access it if we need it. It isn’t really fair to expect us to demonstrate our rationality without giving us access to the primary repository of our knowledge.
BUT:
It should be pretty easy to explain our formalization for the real number system and propositional logic.
|+||=|||
1+2=3
||+||=||||
2+2=4
| : 1
1+1=2
+1=3
+1=4
+1=5… and so on
1+1=3 :: F
1+1=2 :: T
Then give truth tables for elementary logical connectors. This probably only works if they have some kind of analogous formalization for math, but if they’re building and flying spaceships instinctively- instead of doing the math … well, first damn. Second, there isn’t any kind of symbolic proof of rationality you could give, but if they want to know if you are they’ll probably want to see how you play games and will test you themselves.
You could then give a written description of updating by the conditionality principle. But I’m not sure you could express the significance of that exactly.
Then you could draw a periodic table- though I probably couldn’t do it from memory. You could relate the elements to elements in the solar system by labeling the bodies with the proportions of the major elements found in the sun and on each planet.
Do physical observations determine our visual models for atoms with a sufficient degree of specificity for this to work?
Depending on how much of the periodic table you have memorized you could go a little further with decimal notation to give atomic number, atomic weights, and specialized symbols.
H, 1, 1.01
He, 2, 4.00
Li, 3, 6.94
Be, 4, 9.01
B, 5, 10.8
C, 6, 12.01
Past that point you can probably just get away with reference by atomic number and you only have to have the periodic table’s order memorized (...boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, etc). Then you can diagram basic molecules like water as “(1)-(8)-(1)”. Nail down the meaning by spitting for a demonstration of “liquid”, and maybe come up with a convention for angles and show the angle between the two hydrogen dangling off the oxygen being ~104.5 degrees. Ask for 80% gaseous “(7)-(7)” and 20% gaseous “(8)-(8)” plus water to explain your biological requirements for a few days. Diagram glucose, fatty acids, salt, and essential amino acids so they can fabricate enough food to last until scurvy or some other nutrient deficiency kicks in.
That should give enough time for them to decompile our genome and learn English if the aliens are any good at being our technological superiors :-)
While waiting for that, constellations might also be a good place to go, if you have access to the night sky or a portal in their ship or something? The apparent movement of stellar objects can serve as a chronometer (if you can still see the sun or the moon or something). Once you’ve got a stable unit of time and a stable unit of distance you can start talking about stars by pointing and describing light years. If I remember correctly, Vega is around 28 light years away, Betelgeuse is about 600. (Google says… 25 and 646.) Then you can ask “How far have you traveled to get here?”
You should be able to get time just by labeling the orbits in your diagram of the solar system. Of course, you’ll have to remember that the sidereal year is one day longer. Just label the Earth’s orbit “year” and the Earth’s spin “sidereal” and then write 1(year)=366.25 days. Hopefully the aliens are tolerant of approximations. They may first think these are distances, but their next guess when they see the math doesn’t work would probably be time.
Then draw a line on your diagram between the Earth and the sun. Thats 1AU. The speed of light is about 173 AU/day (it’s a little less with sidereal days, a little more with solar days).
The problem then is that all the constants you’re used to are based the solar day. Eventually the aliens will get confused. One solar day = 1.00273791 sidereal days. But no one will remember that. It might be easier to remember 1 sidereal day is 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds.
Or I guess if you have a constellation chart your could draw in the ecliptic plane and label that. But dang are our units screwed up.
1AU =149 598 000 kilometers but if you’re a provincial American like me you know miles. 1AU=92 955 887.6 miles…
I don’t think a lot of scientists have this stuff memorized (1 obviously looked up just about all these numbers, except for hrs/sidereal day).
I would be really nice if we had all our units based off the speed of light or something. That would make this so much easier.