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Comment by mordechai9000 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's a staple of hard science fiction. It's generally assumed that interstellar cultures are isolated, extremely long lived, and/or have solved the problems of practical interstellar travel (maintaining high thrust, dealing with radiation, not going splat on a dust particle at .99999c).

It's interesting to note that a traveler on a spaceship that can maintain 1g of acceleration would experience 14 years subjective time while traversing 1480 light years. (According to http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.htm...)

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And for those not familiar with relativity, in any case of course after traversing 1480 light years the civilization you intend to meet will be at least 1480 years in the future.

If two civilization were to meet the most efficient way of communication might be mediated through an AI. Exchange computer with some clear protocol for communication (probably based on elementary mathematical/physical principles) with an AI capable of conveying the intentions and the cumulative knowledge that you want to share.

  Exchange computer with some clear protocol for
  communication (probably based on elementary
  mathematical/physical principles)

I always see people talk about stuff like this, but it's never really clear to me how elementary math or physics will help us communicate with other species---species that will likely have sufficiently different biochemistry from us to make communication at least as difficult as talking to a dolphin or an elephant.

I believe it's assumed that if a species is capable of producing a mechanism to communicate with other interstellar species, then they necessarily have an understanding of math and physics.

I shared the same confusion before, but I do have some ideas:

I think you could establish a communication protocol with an alien species with something like this:

First, establish the meaning of a set of mathematical symbols by choosing recognisable / universal mathematical entities and demonstrating the symbolic relationship between them

That means things like eg. a picture of euler's identity and then symbolic representations beside it, then varying the individual elements and showing the results.

This isn't easy (if you've ever played that boardgame about inferring another player's rules with pyramids, you'll know what I mean...) but it is probably doable.

And you might be able to symbolically demonstrate Peano Arithmetic or something.

Once you've established a vocabulary of mathematical symbols, you can maybe use that to pin down a basic physical vocabulary. You could maybe identify different elements based on eg. their atomic number. You can establish a time vocabulary by giving a formula for the orbit of their nearest star and asking them to solve for x. You can describe spatial relationships between things.

It seems very difficult to go from there to a yet higher level vocabulary - but who knows, it may be possible.

It's actually not a problem at all. It'll be extremely unlikely that two civilizatizations in this case are about same level in terms of science and technology (+/-1000 years). So when the two communicate, the advanced one can easily understand the other.

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