Star's Reach by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: alien contact, peak oil, climate change, john michael greer, future, deindustrial
Publisher: Founders House Publishing LLC
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Nineteen: A Different World

“There was a long argument about that in the old world,” said Eleen. We were supposed to be eating lunch, but nobody was paying much attention to the bread and soup, and Tashel Ban wasn’t even pretending. He was over by the printer, muttering bits of hot language under his breath when the thing tried to jam.

“About numbers?” Berry asked.

“About math.” Scholars usually say “mathematics,” but Eleen stopped saying that the second or third time one of us gave her a blank look. “One side used to say that math was universal, so every intelligent species in the universe would end up understanding it the same way. The other side said no, mathematics are just the way our brains work, and so every species would have its own math. In the old world, most scholars agreed with the first side, but the other side was right—at least about the Cetans.”

“But how did that stop them from figuring out what the Cetans were saying?” I asked.

“Because the first messages we sent them were all about numbers.” She rapped on the table: once, twice, three times, five times, seven times. “What do those have in common?”

“They’re prime numbers,” Berry said at once. Eleen gave him a startled look, and he went on, as though he was embarrassed: “My teacher at Nashul taught us about those.”

“Good,” Eleen said. “Yes, and that’s one of the things they sent the Cetans, because they figured that any intelligent species ought to recognize them—but they didn’t. Meanwhile they were sending us the equivalent in their math, expecting us to recognize them, and we didn’t. It took a hundred years before anybody on either side realized that the problem was that we think in numbers and they don’t.”

I tried to get my thoughts to fit around that one. “They don’t even count on their fingers?”

“Cetans don’t have fingers.”

“Well, but—”

“But that’s just it. We’re born with so many fingers—five, most of us—and we live in a world where things come in nice neat packages you can count: four oranges, ten trees, things like that. They don’t. If a Cetan wants to grab something—” Her hand mimed flowing outwards. “—it grows as many fingers as it needs, and when it doesn’t need them, they go away. Everything that matters to them is like that. That’s why their math starts from flows, not from numbers.

“We’ve got math that can handle flows. It’s called calculus, and there are maybe a few hundred people in Meriga who understand it, but we’ve got it. They’ve got math that can handle numbers. It’s very advanced math to them—as far as anyone here could figure out, they got there by imagining what happened when a flow got slower and slower, until it approached what we call zero—but they can do it. It took close to a hundred years for both sides to figure out that these complicated relationships they were finding in each other’s signals were what the others thought was very simple, basic, easy math.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.