Is this some sort of loss i'm too dumb to get?
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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That's a flaccid penis.
The universal language we will use to communicate with aliens.
So we will have no way of communicating with them if they're hot?
Exactly.
Maybe interpretative striptease.
I too saw a dong.
Looks like a testicular torsion incantation
Turns out the aliens all speak Esperanto
So no one on Earth can communicate with them? Damn.
Surprising amount of Esperanto speakers, and a few people who speak it as a native tongue.
Who else saw it?
I thought those were urinary tract diagrams.
Just like most of the material in the videos I saw that was sent to outer space as a message to whatever - I don't even try to understand what the message tries to say since I don't think I would experience any "Heureka!"'s in there ๐
Should I just hope "Good luck!" for them if even I can't understand this stuff?
translation; i need to pee
OP just wanted to make everyone look at the math penis.
Yoooo! 3D string diagrams
People always say that, but like... what does that actually mean? Like we could work from first principles and just build a system of communication based on math?
Gotta say I have my doubts. I have no idea what alien cognition would be like.
Counting is kind of basic. From one-two-three you can get fairly quicky to yes-no, and then comparisons, and with yes/no/more/less/same you have enough to fuzzle out whatever squak gigors.
Aliens we could talk to at all wouldn't be cthulu or q. They would live in the same basic reality we do, with entropy and gravity and the same elemetnts and stars. (They WOULD likely see different colors than we do, unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth)
unless their sun was the same temperature as Sol and their planet the same size as earth
Most other animals see different colors than we do, and they live under a start of the same temperature as ours, and in a planet with the exact same atmospheric composition.
The sun is the big one. What we call "visible light" is just the band of the em spectrum right around Sol's peak. A larger\hotter star would have that band shifted dramatically bluer, while a smaller/colder star would be redder.
what if they don't have the concept of atomic concepts: there's no such thing as "one" because everything can be divided, until you reach wave/particle duality in which case there's no singular state anyway? There's no such thing as "two" because there can be no dividing line between phenomena that have no external nor internal boundaries? What if they cannot see or hear but use other senses we have no names for? What if they are a hive mind and don't predate and thus have no concept of consent or denial/acceptance, and thus no concept of yes/no?
I feel like any civilization advanced enough is going to have no problem with that.
A body of water is connected but you can count the waves. They'd surely count repetition, too, such as their planet rotating and and orbiting it's starting. Or sound - "click" one "click click" two.
And if they're as intelligent as humans, both species are able to learn new abstract concepts
I mean this is all a hypothetical, so let me throw some blockers at you:
They don't distinguish between wave and not-wave, assuming they dont have a Lacanian concept of language and their pre-language concept of what we would call a wave is actually the average distance from the bottom of the ocean in an arbitrary field of qualia whereby they average out "extended" phenomena from an "unextended" experience of the average of the different forms of background radiation.
In which case they couldn't count a planet rotation and have no concept of counting or rotation but would express it instead as an average speed and direction in relation to the absorbed radiation of different astral and planetary (by which I mean "terrestrial" for lack of a better word when not talking about our planet) bodies? So what is a year to us is a limitless expression of the average rate of change of the comparative rate of radiation from the nearest star and the largest vent in the bottom of their ocean? They express this by making parts of their carapace emit different strengths of radiation in different directions. Would we even know to call those emissions a language?
edit: to make it even harder, maybe there's a way to experience a qualia of alpha radiation to them that for them is as different as the words "because" and "apple", but to us is two identical blasts of alpha radiation because we don't even know how to sense the differences that are there because to us they don't even exist?
I don't know enough about the stuff to form a strong argument but I feel if they live on our plane of existence, they experience time. And if they're intelligent enough to communicate with us, they could perceive the passing of it. Counting events of some kind would just come naturally
I guess I'm just saying we don't know that for sure. We don't even really know if lobsters or mushrooms or trees "experience" time. We know shrimps probably experience colors we can't conceive of, it's not that far removes from reality.
If a spacefaring race is so utterly alien they don't even have a concept of counting how did they manage space travel?
And, like I said, math only works for the (presumably large) subset of aliens we could eventually talk to.
we did it without what loosely translates as blarglsnargling and they are equally confused as to how we did it. The downside to our approach being pollution of our air, the downside to their approach being pollution of their planet's crust. Both of which would be catastrophic if occurred in each other's ecosystem but is a mild irritant heading towards and eventual catastrophe for each respective society.
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Like we could work from first principles and just build a system of communication based on math?
Not necessarily based on math, but math gives us a common ground to start from.
Like if you meet someone almost anywhere on earth, you can show them an apple and say "apple" and then they can say whatever they call an apple. This gives you a starting point to start communicating.
Aliens may not know what an apple is, but we're pretty sure they know what 1+1=2 is... given context so they can understand the symbols. You can also communicate math over long distances... as long as they can decide the transmission.
Gotta say I have my doubts. I have no idea what alien cognition would be like.
Yes, this is pretty much the basis of using math vs trying to talk directly with language. If we can't communicate basic mathematical concepts to eachother we're kind of hooped.
as long as they can decide the transmission.
That is the Problem. Even something as basic as a simple transmission can become quite hard to decode when you can't make any assumptions about how their technology works. This may start with things as simple as that they might not use binary logic, but tertiary logic instead. They might not use 8 bits as a smallest package of date. And then we have the big problems of how do we actually decode it. We as humans have tables for which bit sequence means which character, they probably dont have the same. They might use different logical levels/protocols for communicating single bits and so on. Sending a simple message to be decoded by aliens is everything but simple.
That really only matters at higher levels of communication, not the barebone basics that we're talking about here. When we are referring to 1, 2, 3, etc., we're not referring to our ASCII representations of the numbers. We're referring to literal pulses or some kind of other countable thing. While sending what a layman would call a simple message would be difficult, the kind of simple message we are talking about is very doable.
It is of course possible, but we still have the decoding. In the end its all just electro magnetic waves we interpret in a certain way. Of course its possible, but maybe not as easy as someone might think.
I confess, I was kind of baiting with the "decode the transmission" part. As someone else mentioned, the way we send the info doesn't have to be as complicated as what you're thinking. Many books and movies have been made about the subject... Contact and Project Hail Mary come to mind immediately. SETI is dedicated to being on the receiving end and makes assumptions about what ET would be sending based on assumptions about what we would send (filtering for repeating patterns and mathematical structures on narrow frequency bands).
In any case, how we transmit and what we transmit are two different things. What we transmit will likely be math and/or cosmos related, things we have in common with our galactic cousins (we assume). How we transmit... There are a million ways, so we narrow it down to what we think is the most likely to reach the target and be something they're listening for. And cross our fingers.
that they might not use binary logic, but tertiary logic instead. They might not use 8 bits as a smallest package of data.
People did both of those things in computers. They have also decoded encrypted messages where they didn't know the algorithm or the key. And, as others have said, in this case you start with simple messages, establishing the basic boundaries of transmission, before trying to communicate most primitive ideas.
The image is literally about the kind of thing the aliens would have in common.
You can decide on a language from that, but you will have to write down the definition of every word too.
It's a post-biological pidgin. You can't communicate cultural ideas to beings that probably have entirely different ideas of culture, but you can establish the intent to communicate as two rational species. Since mathematics is presumably consistent across the universe, you can beam a non-natural signal into space as a technosignature. If something responds to it, you're both sentient and have some kind of respect for academia. You can then use it to establish logic, make grids, and represent simple images without relying on their "eyes" perceiving the same wavelengths we do. Something like 1s and 0s is probably going to be easier for them to interface through than speech.
in sg1, they did with established periodic table elements, which is the natural "langauge of the" universe where any species advanced enough can understand, albiet the atoms were somewhat misrepresented.(-minus dozens of unknown elements that is not privy to earth even to sgu era"
What are we seeing here?
I believe they are higher dimensional string diagrams. Maybe called n-diagrams? They are used in higher homotopy and higher category theory, I believe. But not entirely sure.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06938
EDIT: Found it! they are called surface diagram, which are generalization of string diagram to 3-categories https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/03/modeling_surface_diagrams.html https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/surface+diagram
Still not sure what the proof is talking about though :(
When I got to asking "WTF does naturality even means?", I decided to reread your comment from the beginning...
The amount of words in it that almost nobody will know the meaning is amazing!
I think one of those is Norway.
Isaac Arthur made a compelling video about why this may be just the case with extraterrestrial beings.
Way-oh, way-oh, ooh-way-oh-way-oh
Talk like an alien
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