It would simply be impossible to communicate with them. Have you ever tried to communicate with a fly or an insect? It's god damn impossible because either you scare them or either they don't even hear you. Assumin the aliens have ears and they use audio to communicate, they have to understand our range of voice in Hz, let's take the human ears for example, we can hear from ~100Hz to ~18000Hz. Even on our planet, some species have different earing capacities, maybe these aliens will use a 100000Hz or a 0.0001Hz frequency language.

Also, mathematics are in my opinion part of the human's mind. We created mathematics, we simply put words (numbers) on observable things. Our imagination did the whole thing and guess what, it seems god damn logical to us and it fits.

...and proof that other life exists in the universe. What if this species is looking for other life? You know, kind of like what we do. Just think about this: what if NASA tomorrow says that we've discovered life on another planet? According to you we would only be interested in them as maybe a food source ("the newly discovered species will have practically nothing to offer any humans other than possibly a food source"). That's absurd. We would be amazed by merely the discovery.



Mathematics *as we communicate them* are unique to humans, sure. But this doesn't mean that an alien species wouldn't know of quite a few things we know. For instance, I'd almost guarantee that any species able to find us would be very, very familiar with pi, e, and c.

While numbers may be invented by humans, mathematics are universal truths.

They may not have the "Pythagorean theorem", but a^2+b^2 still = c^2.

They will have binary, but it won't be 0's and 1's.

et cetera.

/e: corrected Pythagorean theorem. oops!

This post was edited by OniNeko on Jun 3 2010 10:58am

supposedly we have already heard from ET. ever heard of the WOW signal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow_signal

The question isn't about a 'person of another language'... signs and gestures are cultural and genetic, and would be meaningless to an extra-terrestrial.



Pretty much every physicist...

BTW, check out the Aricebo Message that was beamed into space in 1974... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message

This is the Aricebo Message:


The link explains the symbols.

This post was edited by Aliengames on Jun 7 2010 06:49am

Why would you transmit in binary?