3 ms·

This entire Twitter thread (and most of the comments here) operate from some really weird assumptions about these aliens. As in, that there’s some agreed upon f

This entire Twitter thread (and most of the comments here) operate from some really weird assumptions about these aliens. As in, that there’s some agreed upon final answer for how everything from time to historical events should be logged, categorized, and accounted for in your little planet’s revolution around its Star. And that this regime is perfectly predictable without knowing anything about the life forms on the planet you’re observing. Do people here really think this is reasonable, or realistic?

viraptor 4y ago
Not an agreed upon final answer, but a common not arbitrarily changing one - yes. You can easily see that in our history. Every time we have something slightly different in various cultures, we try to unify it and make it more consistent. Various units of measurement got pretty much unified when we needed to work together. Where we didn't, we got issues like losing the Mars orbiter because someone thought inches are still cute. We got time measurement unified and precisely defined, because we needed to synchronise time globally to enable precise GPS. Even on a cultural level, many countries went through some kind of unification/simplification of their language. (simplified Chinese, German orthography reform, Indonesian -> Malaysian, etc.) On a social level, we're so connected, that pointing at a random person today, I could guess they speak English, Spanish, or Chinese and not be wrong too often. So yeah, once a society gets to travel to other life forms in the universe, you could expect their measurement of time is simplified and plain. Not that they don't understand the historical context of not having it that way though... but that would be far in the past. And it's funny to think of them going "oh, one of those again...", or even "ok, I've seen some weird stuff, but the mixed units on Earth are just disgusting". Probably the same reaction you'd get if you saw a programmer today copying the whole source to another folder with suffix "..._working_8". "oh $deity, I see why you're doing this, but please stop, this hurts my brain, I'll show you version control".

viraptor 4y ago

Not an agreed upon final answer, but a common not arbitrarily changing one - yes. You can easily see that in our history. Every time we have something slightly different in various cultures, we try to unify it and make it more consistent. Various units of measurement got pretty much unified when we needed to work together. Where we didn't, we got issues like losing the Mars orbiter because someone thought inches are still cute. We got time measurement unified and precisely defined, because we needed to synchronise time globally to enable precise GPS. Even on a cultural level, many countries went through some kind of unification/simplification of their language. (simplified Chinese, German orthography reform, Indonesian -> Malaysian, etc.) On a social level, we're so connected, that pointing at a random person today, I could guess they speak English, Spanish, or Chinese and not be wrong too often. So yeah, once a society gets to travel to other life forms in the universe, you could expect their measurement of time is simplified and plain. Not that they don't understand the historical context of not having it that way though... but that would be far in the past. And it's funny to think of them going "oh, one of those again...", or even "ok, I've seen some weird stuff, but the mixed units on Earth are just disgusting". Probably the same reaction you'd get if you saw a programmer today copying the whole source to another folder with suffix "..._working_8". "oh $deity, I see why you're doing this, but please stop, this hurts my brain, I'll show you version control".