If I had an alien race, how would they interpret our numerical characters as being numbers?
So say we discovered aliens through a wormhole near Saturn (Interstellar anyone?). Congratz to us! But we have a bigger issue in trying to communicate with them.
They developed in a completely different way than us, but their general physiology is the same (Bi-pedal humanoids that utilize vocal chords to speak). Assuming it takes hundreds of years for them to get information, how do we communicate?
After thinking about what everyone said about "Well we could communicate with math?" and "Math is universal." it raised the question of how would they recognize all of our current mathematical symbols even if they were to be included? (For example, what if they used a base 4 for their math rather than 10 or their characters are completely different?)
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This question has already been debated by exo-astronomers. The best answer they could come up with (using 1974 technology) was the Arecibo Message.
The details might change, but the essential idea is that in the first part of your message, you teach the aliens, "this is how we count."
0 1 . 2 .. 3 ... 4 .... 5 ..... 6 ...... 7 ....... 8 ........ 9 ......... 10 .......... 11 .......... . 12 .......... .. 20 .......... .......... 21 .......... . .......... 100 (*snip* a 10x10 grid of dots)
Then build communication from there. In the case of Arecibo, they used a binary system instead of decimal. If the aliens wrote back in their base four, we might expect:
X A . B .. C ... AX .... AA .... .
etc.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/34711. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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