Foreign Foreign Language

It’s so weird how people expect to
contact aliens.  We have acknowledged
that they might not speak the same
language.  We have acknowledged that they
may not have language.  But for some
reason, we seem to think that science
and maths is universal.  Is it?
 sight isn’t universal, and without
sight, the written formula is pretty
hard to comprehend.  Numbers are
another interesting factor about this.  We have sets of ten right?
Possibly because we have 10 fingers and for some reason, a long
time ago, it was convenient to count like this and this is what became.
We had numbers grouped in tens.  So if maths is universal, and we
can supposedly contact aliens using numbers if language fails, what
makes us so sure that they will have numbers?  And numbers that look
the same as ours?  Numbers that have the same value.  If aliens have 27 fingers for instance, they might have 27 different numbers of
counting.  Making all our formulas quite different.  As well as
numbers, the coherence of them would also differ.  Our symbols
may not match their symbols.  Why would they?  If our languages are different, isn’t maths just another language?  We say that it is
universal, but we have to know the rules of the ‘universe’ before
we can understand the language.  If a language does not involve
speech, we need to know this before we try and understand it right?

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