Lincos language • Hacker News Board

Re: Lincos language

#31

Post by giantrobot » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

szemet wrote: post #27

giantrobot wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to worry about completely unintelligible (to us) Lovecraftian aliens. If they exist and are even interested in looking for alien life themselves they'll have equally unintelligible (to us) methods and motives. Life on Earth is varied but has a couple common characteristics. It's not coincidence Earth life is carbon based. Carbon is pretty common, a lot of organic chemistry involves similarly common elem…

> Water is ... a mild solvent I remember, when I was a child I asked my parents (both are chemists), about what the most powerful solvent is. To my suprise they answered: water. Wow, that can be true, it is everywhere, I tought... It is somewhat a point of view question, considering that there are different categories of solvents - it is like asking a biologist about the most dangerous animal: human - of course! But…

I called water a "mild" solvent because it's not so reactive as to instantly destroy everything in its path. But in terms of solubility water can act as a solvent for more molecules than anything else (if I remember high school chemistry correctly). This makes it a great medium for moving solutes around and facilitating interesting chemistry.

Re: Lincos language

#32

Post by szemet » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:19 AM UTC

giantrobot wrote: post #31

szemet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Water is ... a mild solvent I remember, when I was a child I asked my parents (both are chemists), about what the most powerful solvent is. To my suprise they answered: water. Wow, that can be true, it is everywhere, I tought... It is somewhat a point of view question, considering that there are different categories of solvents - it is like asking a biologist about the most dangerous animal: human - of course! But…

I called water a "mild" solvent because it's not so reactive as to instantly destroy everything in its path. But in terms of solubility water can act as a solvent for more molecules than anything else (if I remember high school chemistry correctly). This makes it a great medium for moving solutes around and facilitating interesting chemistry.

> I called water a "mild" solvent because it's not so reactive as to instantly destroy everything in its path.

Ok. But I guess the proper common terminology would be "corrosives" for those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrosive_substance

Re: Lincos language

#33

Post by bmn__ » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

> In 1999, the astrophysicists encoded a message in Lincos and used the Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope in Ukraine to beam it towards close stars. This is known as Cosmic Call.

https://blog.plover.com/aliens/dd/intro.html "it's fun to see if you're as smart as an alien"

Re: Lincos language

#34

Post by gus_massa » Tue, Jul 21, 2020, 11:12 AM UTC

paganel wrote: post #30

gus_massa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can probably count the stars and the can probably count the Hydrogen atoms. It is a very good guess that they understand the "natural" numbers.

> They can probably count the stars Those aliens could have then asked, similar to Parmenides: where does a star "end" for you to be able to "count" it as a separate entity? From the wiki page [1]: > and thus despite appearances everything exists as one, giant, unchanging thing The pre-socratics were a very interesting bunch, again, it's a social-constructed presumption to think that those possible aliens have all ch…

Relevant https://xkcd.com/1189/

It's not clear where the Solar system ends, and it's not clear where a star ends. There are several criteria and they give different numbers. But they have all the same order of magnitude that is much smaller than the distance between the stars. For most orbital calculations you can take the star as a single point, and assume that the space is empty. Aliens probably had done a similar approximation and can count star easily.