this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2025
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Actually most constants have been standardized to natural sources. A meter is now a fixed (small) fraction of the speed of light in vacuum. A second is pegged to the duration of a Cesium isotope spinning or something. Just that the multipliers are chosen to be convenient to us.
Should we need to talk measurements with aliens, we can, and can convert between their units and ours.
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn't considered.
What's more profound is that math is universal - after some teething pains with regards to understanding conventions, any alien technology should be comprehensive by us, and vice versa.
"Wait you all started with base 60 and left it? It took us millenia to realize that it was the best choice, and once we did we never looked back"
I think 840 is a better base number. It has 32 factors which is itself a power of 2. That is a highly versatile counting system if you ask me. But you didn't so I apologize for asserting so.
Well... up to the base calculation methods. Logic is universal. Math is a set of rules. Aliens might rule different.
I would say (not an expert) math is a representation of (numerical) logic, and as it gets more complex, the conventions if representing logical ideas need to be laid out. But that said, once done (teething pains), a learned and read peer "in the art" should be able to both comprehend and communicate at least mathematical ideas, and as a (gradual) extension to this, applied technology.
Put another way, 'greek' ideas should be easier to communicate with than 'latin' ideas.
However all bets out the window if aliens have a straight up 'God' that just gives them stuff and they are themselves dumb as doornails. In which case we have a few common denominators already living it up.
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
What about imperial system?
/hj
IIRC it's currently defined based on SI units.
An inch is just a special term for 2.54cm used by Americans (but not our government)
1 Meter = x umthilions plancs. There, retrospectively defined. In that sense.
Well, akshually they started out as being earth specific, as convenient ways to measure human-relevant amounts of space and time, and were standardized after that. So really God still wouldn't care to use meters or seconds, but would probably have their own units which could also be standardized with natural phenomena.
Right but the actual quantities are arbitrary. A metre is a fixed fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, but it's an arbitrary fraction chosen because it was convenient. We could just as well have chosen it to be half or twice as long. Same with the second. And the kilogram, etc.