• DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    If a spacefaring race is so utterly alien they don’t even have a concept of counting how did they manage space travel?

    And, like I said, math only works for the (presumably large) subset of aliens we could eventually talk to.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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      5 hours ago

      we did it without what loosely translates as blarglsnargling and they are equally confused as to how we did it. The downside to our approach being pollution of our air, the downside to their approach being pollution of their planet’s crust. Both of which would be catastrophic if occurred in each other’s ecosystem but is a mild irritant heading towards and eventual catastrophe for each respective society.

      • DomeGuy@lemmy.world
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        41 minutes ago

        Space launches via catapult are entirely possible on earth. We don’t do it mostly because the engineering scale is dramatically larger, not because of how we math.

        The laws of physics seem to be consistent throughout our universe, so any claim that an alien race could travel through space without math is what skeptics call “an extraordinary claim”.

        I dont really see how a contrarian “what if they’re just too weird” stance is even helpful in a discussion about why math is the closest thing we have to a universal language. If an alien civilization is too weird to grok math, I dont see how we’d ever be able to communicate with them at all.