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> Optimally humanity should have chosen base 12 instead of base 10, then the metric system would have used it. If humans had evolved to have twelve fingers and

> Optimally humanity should have chosen base 12 instead of base 10, then the metric system would have used it. If humans had evolved to have twelve fingers and twelve toes, then this could’ve perhaps happened. Even if humanity had chosen base 12 for whatever reason, I’d imagine we’d have different single digit symbols for numbers “A” and “B” that we use in hexadecimal now, with something like “10” representing what we call as 12 in decimal today.

Aardwolf 7y ago
Of course we'd have had 12 unique symbols if humanity had adopted base 12 instead of base 10, say if that would have happened historically with arabic numerals (but it's a bit more complicated historically of course because the roman numerals and other systems before it were already decimal, even the babylonean base 60 was actually decimal based anyway, their notation uses 6x 10 symbols, not 5x 12 symbols). Obviously it didn't and history won't change :) And yep, no matter in what numeric base you are, "10" will represent the amount of symbols of that base. "10" in binary is 2 in decimal, "10" in hex is 16 in decimal, etc...