Show HN: Alienslike.us – Vote on what an alien society might be like | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Alienslike.us – Vote on what an alien society might be like

alienslike.us

52 pointsxxxxxxxx59 comments

It asked me if intelligent alien life would know about pi. I answered "yes", and the survey told me that 84% had also answered "yes". Am I understanding that right -- that 16% of respondents think that pi could be avoided?

OK, I get that this is a wildly crazily speculative discussion but how does anyone imagine intelligent life that doesn't have a concept of pi in some form? Pi is everywhere in math and science.

I put no. I'm not aware that humans knew pi sixty thousand years ago. But surely those early humans were still an intelligent life.

Maybe you imagine an alien life far more advanced than I do.

When did we even know Pi was a surd?

Before then we didn't know Pi.

Do do we currently know Pi? Even that might be arguable?

Well clearly they would use tau.

Maybe by considering pi a fractal instead of a fraction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80...

What if they do advanced math intuitively but don't consciously understand it?

Can someone explain how pi holds up when base 8 math is applied?

Pi is a quantity, a value that is independent of the way you represent it in symbols. Base 8 is simply a different way of representing a given value, in the same way that 4/6 and 6/9 are two different ways of representing the same value.

In the case of 4/6 and 6/9 there is an agreed canonical way of designating that value, namely 2/3. In the case of pi there is similarly an agreed canonical way of designating the value, namely the symbol π.

pi becomes 3.110375524210264302151423063050560067016321122011160210514763072002... in base 8 or, really, still pi

Pi is just our name for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter regardless of the base.

This is why it doesn't make sense for an intelligent species not to know what 'pi' is. It's an important concept that pops up immediately in basic geometry and just keeps popping up over and over all the way to general relativity and beyond.

Yes, an intelligent species may not know pi but they would not have progressed even to the point of basic geometry in the maths and sciences.

Their approach to geometry could be quite different though. Eg. they could use non-Euclidean geometry by default, 2D only being a special/edge case, and Pi, while encountered in calculations once in a while, wouldn't have a status of a well-known constant: which I understand would be the minimum to meet the requirement behind the question. If not, the question would be akin to whether they "know" 1, hard to say what it means

Pi shows up either in Einstein's field equations, or in Newton's gravitational equations. It's probably possible to formulate them both without reference to pi, but off the top of my head I don't see how. (As mathematicians go, I'm not at all applied, though.)

Pi only shows up in the field equations multiplied with an arbitrary constant. Therefore they are trivial to formulate without.

The arbitrary constant is related to G, which is Newton's gravitational constant, and to the speed of light. If I've understood correctly, if you don't want pi to appear in the field equations, then it will appear in Newton's equations as part of G.

Well, G is an arbitrary constant but Pi is not. So while you can _formulate_ using a new arbitrary constant, it is HIGHLY improbable you reached tbe point of making that formulation without discovering Pi along the way.

It's really hard to do engineering without Euclidean geometry.

pi pops up in equations without using any numeric symbols. It might not necessarily be 3.14159... but the concept is still there

For example, pi is the smallest strictly-positive real such that sin(pi) = 0, where sin is defined by its power series. That is a base-independent definition.

Intelligent does not necessarily imply developed. Also it's not like our math is the only math. It's completely possible that they have a functionally identical but radically different system from math, without concepts like numbers or ratios or what have you.

Assuming their concept of math & science similar to us. Heck they may even have totally different concept of number. Imagined the thing we mysteriously called dark matter is just elementary subject to them.

That doesn't matter they will still have Pi it's doesn't have to be 3.14... in base 10 it just means that they are aware of its existence through one of many of its special relationships.

Number theory and set theory is pretty agnostic to any preconceptions of what we would call numbers in the day to day life.

There's no guarantee that intelligent life would use a mathematic system that enforced the idea of constants. While Pi must likely exist to intelligent societies, it may not exist in the same form.

Actually it's unlikely that it wouldn't it's like saying that they will not understand the what a prime number is.

People mistake the value of a certain constant in decimal which is what we use to the meaning behind the constant itself.

The good news is that the Pi question is up near the top of the list at 87%.

After an hour on HN there are 44k responses in so far. Here is a summary sorted the percentage that agree/answered "yes".

23% Is gold valuable to them?

25% Do they eat aliens (i.e cannibalism)?

25% Can they time travel?

29% Do they have political parties?

31% Do they use base 10 maths?

31% Do they have compulsory taxation?

32% Do they have a United Nations?

34% Are there countries?

35% Do they have elections?

37% Do they have mobile phones?

38% Do they have insurance?

40% Do they have slavery?

40% Is there unemployment?

41% Do they have brands?

41% Is there advertising?

42% Do they have poverty?

43% Do they use money?

44% Do they have religion?

45% Is there a world leader?

45% Do they have double helix DNA?

48% Do they have private property?

52% Do they have corruption?

53% Do they wear clothes?

54% Is there theft?

54% Is there a market for second hand goods?

55% Do they have pills/oral medicine?

56% Do they have male & female?

58% Are there jails/prisons?

58% Do they eat animals?

60% Do they have pets?

60% Do they have shops?

61% Do they have governments with authority over individuals?

62% Do they have wars?

62% Do they have judges or courts to adjudicate disputes?

64% Do they use recreational drugs?

65% Do they have police?

65% Are there roads?

67% Do they practice euthanasia?

68% Do they have electronic computers?

69% Have they developed Artificial Intelligence?

69% Do they have fiction (books and movies)?

71% Do they live in multistory buildings?

71% Do they know about and agree with our periodic table of the elements?

72% Do they have a sewage system?

73% Do they know about and agree with the theory of relativity?

73% Do they sleep?

73% Do they have doctors and hospitals?

74% Do they have something like cement/concrete?

75% Do they have space travel?

78% Do they eat plants?

82% Do they grow old and die?

84% Do they have standardised weights and measures?

84% Do they have eyes?

85% Do they have something like the internet?

87% Do aliens know about Pi?

88% Are there cities?

89% Do they eat?

89% Do they have reading and writing?

92% Are there animals and plants (other than the aliens)?

My answers are strongly dependent on rather loose interpretations of words like "sleep", "money", "private" "property", "taxation" and so on. I think it's probably better to start with more general questions: for example, the answer "no" to "do they defect with each other on Prisoners' Dilemmas" basically rules out the need for taxation.

"Is there United Nations" - this question is extremely vague. It should be clarified. Overall most questions are based on our civilization and our path, rather than more important aspects.

-"Are they aggressive"

-"Do they have empathy"

-"Do they have family model"

Same with "Are there Jails" should be substituted by "Are there crimes" and "Is there a justice system"

This is an interesting comment!

I tried to have a balance of questions over these 6 areas:

* Biology

* Economy

* Environment

* Politics

* Science & Technology

* Society

I also tried to have a balance between questions that you would think for certain would be a 'yes' like the Pi one and a 'No' like the cannibalism one.

Layered on top of this was my own personal views on what's 'unusual' about our own society and a desire to get people actually thinking about us, not the aliens. Do we really need Jails and religion and countries? Is there another way? Maybe we could have a justice system without Jails, for example. That's what's behind the UN question - probably not a good question - but something I think about often.

I regret not thinking about the family question. That would have been a good one.

It probably needs a question about whether the aliens are aquatic or land-based. Some of the follow up questions wouldn't be relevant, like bridges and roads, if the world were aquatic.

Don't forget air-based.

It was fun, thanks!

Just this morning I finished reading Solaris (by Stanisław Lem, it's an amazing book about reflecting on "how an alien could look like", 10/10), so I stopped thinking after every question to consider different scenarios possible with either answers.

To me it feels like a great tool to start laying down the plot for your next scifi book ;)

This is a funny quiz to do. Even if IMO yes or no are too restrictive. Also, the backgrounds are very heavy, I used to select answer, start loading page and press esc to stop loading of the background :D

Some feedback on the performance would be helpful. The server is in Singapore, so perhaps if put it behind cloudflare to speed up the images download for Europe and US?

I wasn't really expecting this level of interest to be honest.

I wasn't able to select an answer until the image finished loading (well, it would submit the answer I selected at that point). I would suggest making it so it doesn't have to load the image before you can respond, and maybe compress them a bit more :)

Fun exercise, but some of the questions could use more context.

For example: "Do they value gold?" - I guess that depends on the amount of gold that you can find on their planet.

I guess it would lose some of its charm if the questions were larger, though.

I made this in Go & postgreSQL as a learning exercise. There are 60 questions and I haven't developed the 'end' yet, it just goes back to the start. So if you see the questions repeating, it's time to stop. If you hover over the percentage graph it will give you the stats so far for that question.

I kinda like the idea, though maybe 60 questions are a lot to go through. However, a very big improvement would be to show yes/no in the graph/circle in green and red (same color as the buttons). I was confused how many voted for yes/no based on the circle at the first questions

Good suggestions. My CSS skills are a bit impoverished so I tried to keep it simple to start. It's amazing how many people stick it out and answer all 60 questions. I hope my server can keep up....

Love projects like this. Love seeing how different people give themselves projects to learn new skills. Enjoyed the thought exercise, and keep up the good work. Have a great day!

It's a never ending quiz that asks you the same questions more than once. There needs to be an end!

I think the only thing that I said "no" to was ten fingers, since there's something around a 25% chance they have five fingers on each hand -- versus three, four, five, or six or so -- and assumes they only have two arms which serve as their primary environment manipulators. Even with eyes, it's a safe assumption their form of life evolved near a radiation source of some kind, and they almost certainly have "eyes" with which to sense that source. Even more so, that these things all exist in our history, by extension they must be possible in alien history. They may be immortal atheist pure communists that do not need to eat at the moment, but you'll need to consider how they got there, and so "yes" they probably did at one point have thieves and taxes and poverty and a king, even if they don't now. And "having" something (in my answers) includes having had something.

"On this planet there is intellegent life."

C'mon, of any words to misspell...

oops!

I started with Do they have jails and after a long while it asked me again the same question. Next was Do the have shops, which I already answered. Maybe it should understand it asked all the questions, thank and quit.

Are you going to post a one page total of all questions?

Btw, did you spend more time coding or looking for suitable pictures for the questions? :-)

It starts at a random question ( so all the answers are evenly distributed) and it just loops around to the start. I do plan to add an 'end' page with a summary at a later stage.

I hadn't used Pixabay before but it was perfect for this. It was a bit of mucking around to have 3 different image sizes for each question -so yes that took a while. About 6 hours including the domain and server setup I would say. The code was the easy (and fun) part.

Needs a 'maybe' button.

Yeah, there are a lot of maybes in here. But on the other hand, that would most probably cause me and a whole lot of people to answer maybe on pretty much all questions. This is more interesting, and makes you think about the question more.

I've heard that bridges on an alien planet would look eerily like ours since there would probably be a need for them and all designs would converge on the most optimal.

Somebody wrote that toast would also fall butter-side-down on any alien planet with any gravity. Lots of arguments about tables, toast, gravity and mean rotation speed.

I answered no to essentially all questions. I consider dogs and rabbits, for example, to be intelligent life. From observing the earth and our surroundings, there is no reason to assume that higher intelligence would automatically arise.

How to define human-level intelligence is an interesting question. It would probably have to be done with questions similar to those on the site. E.g., do they know about pi.

P.S. 25% think they have access to time travel?!

"500 Internal Server Error"

Is the site being DoS'd by us?

Yes looks like it. Just rebooted it - should be okay now.

I am amazed by how many people are willing to believe this but don't find out for themselves what the name of Jesus is doing

Just cycling for me - get to the last question and it continues to the first question :( I was looking forward to the results.

What a waste of time, its just a bunch of questions useful to advertisers.

what's the purpose of this exactly? I kept clicking a the gauge chart changed all the time but showed no insight on what was going on

The gauge chart shows you the percentage of people who agreed with the previous question (including your response)

It need some kind of label on which color is which, currently it is quite confusing.

Doesn't work without JavaScript

epic!

Thanks:-)

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