Timeline for How can we transmit a date to another species?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 19, 2017 at 22:36 | comment | added | Criticizing Israel not allowed | Just use powers of two instead... Or if you have the room, don't, just write the 100-200 extra 0's (in base 2). | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 17:40 | comment | added | Russell Borogove | It's pretty trivial if they have enough math to build radio receivers. If you look at the message described in my answer, you'll see that the first page shows a mapping of unary, binary, and decimal representations of numbers; the decimals are used thereafter, telling the aliens that that's our preferred base. Page three introduces the vocabulary for exponentiation and scientific notation. Dutil & Dumas used base 10 throughout their message for two reasons: it's more compact than binary and it's easier to proofread by the message composers. | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 15:40 | comment | added | called2voyage♦ | @Uwe Assuming the aliens have a similar grasp of mathematics, you could send an increasing sequence of numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12... to demonstrate what base is used. If the aliens don't have a similar grasp of mathematics, the chances for any meaningful communication pretty much vanish. Of course, I don't see why we would use base-10 when we could just use binary. You can see the pattern in binary a lot quicker: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100... | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 15:28 | comment | added | Uwe | Explaining something to another species with no common language at all is a lot more difficult than trivial. | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 14:52 | comment | added | Nyny | Yeah, but explaining them to another species seems trivial... But just maybe because I didn't try. | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 13:33 | comment | added | user | Powers of ten are only particularly meaningful because we use a decimal (base-10) system of counting. It's easy to imagine that an alien species with, say, six digits per appendage might find base-12 more natural, assuming two "hands" (which isn't a given at all!) | |
| Apr 19, 2017 at 9:34 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 19, 2017 at 10:28 | |||||
| Apr 19, 2017 at 9:32 | history | answered | Nyny | CC BY-SA 3.0 |