Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#1

Post by anthonyrubin » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:22 PM UTC

This submission is inspired by a quote from my previous submission.

Suppose a group of alien beings were to learn our language and randomly selected you as a source of further human knowledge. They send one of their kind to your home and the being informs you that it will be crashing at your place for a few weeks to learn whatever it can.

I realize this scenario is rather contrived, but what reading material would you provide to such a being? Remember that this being likely does not have the contextual knowledge that would be required to understand your favorite books.

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#2

Post by varun » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:38 PM UTC

A RSS feed reader, pre-filled with top 1000 feeds covering various topics, from news to technology to gossip! I'd get the alien to spend the first half of his time reading these feeds, and the latter half I'd show him Google.com and ask him to find out what he doesn't even know he could have found out about! A trip to the urban jungle (Manhattan) and a trip to a natural area, and the being would be all set! :)

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#3

Post by brk » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:46 PM UTC

The Bible (any version. Or Qu'ran, or similar epic religious tome).

The 3rd party viewpoint would be very interesting.

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#4

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:47 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#5

Post by anthonyrubin » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:51 PM UTC

I would start with world history -- first a book that covers the last few millennia, then specific books on significant events. Next would be a few of Karen Armstrong's books on religion; books such as the New Testament might prove difficult to understand without proper background.

The Princeton Companion to Mathematics would probably be a good starting point for math. I'm not aware of any great texts that provide the same level of broad introduction to science.

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#6

Post by anthonyrubin » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:52 PM UTC

brk wrote: post #3

The Bible (any version. Or Qu'ran, or similar epic religious tome). The 3rd party viewpoint would be very interesting.

Without proper historical context I believe the Bible would be somewhat confusing.

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#7

Post by icey » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 4:53 PM UTC

Wikipedia.

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#8

Post by pavelludiq » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 5:09 PM UTC

How about philosophy. It would be hard for them to get the other stuff(excluding math and science). I don't know if they could get our philosophy either, since the way we think and see the world is very tightly coupled with our psychology, but we can assume that if they got our language(lets call it blubish) they either understand humans to some degree, or are themselves similar to us(or similar enough to understand us).

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#9

Post by tjic » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 5:12 PM UTC

Is anyone else gritting their teeth and cringing, waiting for someone to say "Atlas Shrugged" ?

:-)

Re: Ask HN: What reading material would you provide to a visiting alien being?

#10

Post by tjic » Mon, Apr 13, 2009, 5:14 PM UTC

The Oxford English Dictionary.

It defines every English word they're going to ever come across outside of technical literature, it's got tons of historical examples, shows the connections between English and other languages, and more.

If we extrapolate the speed with which Google is learning to harvest latent information out of data dumps out just 20 or 30 years, I wouldn't be surprised if aliens smart enough to get here could pull a huge amount of culture and history out of the OED.