Constants and Variables 162, alien desire edition
An interesting question from MindMatters, based on an old and pointless discussion about aliens.

Pointless: There's no point in asking whether aliens exist, or why we haven't heard from them. If they exist and they WANT us to hear from them, we will. If they exist and they DON'T want us to hear from them, we won't. If they don't exist, we won't hear from them.

Focusing on technology and lightyears and event boundaries misses the main point of PURPOSE. Just as with human Deepstates, the absence of apparent communication tells you nothing about the technology or existence of the communicator. NSA, along with its branches Apple and Google, has been way ahead of "earthling" tech since the '60s, for the specific PURPOSE of exerting INVISIBLE AND UNDETECTABLE DEMONIC ABSOLUTE POWER. All of Deepstate's satanic monstrosities are attributed to Nazi terrorists or Red terrorists or Islamic terrorists or Hippie terrorists or QanonTrumpTard terrorists or (best of all) "viruses". Deepstate's bloody fingerprints are always displaced to the currently fashionable terrorist.

Denyse asks an interesting question anyway: Do progress in science and technology inevitably lead to the collapse of a civilization?

Not quite so simple.

We need to separate science from technology.

Science = theory.

Technology = Material solutions for real problems.

I've handled this question before in the context of radio, which is presumably necessary for alien contact.

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An article in the latest New Superstitionist puts forth an old idea, common in science fact and science fiction for decades.

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. As we are many light years away, our signals would take many years to reach them, so there would be no scope for snappy repartee. There could be an IQ gap and the aliens might be built from quite different chemistry.

Yet there would be much common ground too. They would be made of similar atoms to us. They could trace their origins back to the big bang 13.7 billion years ago, and they would share with us the universe's future. However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

The article goes on to discuss which formulas and theories would be good candidates for interplanetary chit-chat.



Polistra begs to differ. The supposed "universality" of math is a myth.

Our new Facebook Friends on Alpha Centauri could have the technology to text us, while knowing very little math. Let's look at the start of electrical communication on Earth. Sam Morse was an artist, not a mathematician, and his telegraph was built by trial and error. Alex Bell was a speech teacher with a deep visual comprehension of wave action. Early radio sets (spark-gap transmitters, cat-whisker detectors) were also built without fancy math, though a certain amount of measurement was important for meaningful testing.

You need a way of remembering size and comparing this size with that size. When testing antennas, you'd need to see that a longer antenna worked better than a shorter antenna, and you'd need to know when the lengthening stopped improving the performance and started making it worse. In other words, you need GRAPHS, or the mental equivalent of GRAPHS.

Even without trying to imagine an alien mind, it's easy to see how we Earthlings could have developed a communication system able to reach distant planets, all without any math beyond measurement.



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If we look at human history, societies that developed PROBLEM-SOLVING technologies like dams and aqueducts and plows didn't die suddenly. They weren't killed BY the dams and aqueducts and plows. Sometimes they were conquered by enemies (eg Mayans), sometimes they lost their technological edge but continued functioning (eg Persia).

Societies that focused on THEORY were killed directly by the THEORY.

We can see the distinction RIGHT FUCKING NOW in the realm of medicine.

Vaccination was developed WITHOUT THEORY 500 years ago by the Circassians. It was brought to England and "reinvented" 200 years ago. Since then, vaccines for many different diseases have been developed by continual refinement of techniques and constant endless TRIAL AND ERROR. NEGATIVE FEEDBACK. The ERROR part is crucial. Before 2020, clinical trials were HALTED when too much ERROR appeared. None of this development used or needed any theories, except the OBSERVATION that the immune system can be trained to reject a disease by seeing a preview of the disease.

In 2020 we explicitly DELETED the entire concept of immunity. Public Death Officers still understand that it exists, but they use their understanding to ELIMINATE immunity, not to BOOST it. Now clinical trials are conducted to improve genocide, not to improve health.

Now we're operating on a magnificently maniacal THEORY that disease is caused by heretical beliefs. We still use the word "virus", but what we mean by "virus" is witch powder, not a microscopic package of RNA.

We are committing FAST suicide. Or more precisely, Deepstate and its branches are MURDERING us faster than ever before.

EXPERIENCE SURVIVES. THEORY KILLS.

Labels: Constants and Variables, Jackboot stomping forever, Real World Math

  ¶ 5:50 AM