X-Message-Number: 8099
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 1997 11:39:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Olaf Henny <>
Subject: CRYONICS Cryonet Message #8092 (Thomas Donaldson)

Subjects: - Brown Eyes

          - Hundreds of Billions Of Neighboring Starsystems 
            And Nobody To Talk To

Message #8092
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)

   >Incidentally, the "brown eyes" issue is very poorly chosen. Most Caucasians

   >(note that I did NOT say most Europeans) are darker than we are. Brown eyes,
      >just like brown skin, protect against sunlight when it becomes too bright.

   >I even see quite strong proof of this in comparing my own responses to those
      >of my wife; I am brown-eyed and she has blue eyes. I have much less need
   >of sunglasses than she, though of course I use them sometimes.

The resistance to excessive sunlight or lack of it, has precious 
function little to do with the color of your eyes but lots is 
rather a of the dilation/contraction range of your pupils.

I have blue eyes, excellent night vision, yet I skied comfortably 
near the 36th Parallel in April at above 10,000' elevation on 
bright sunny days without sunglasses.

Message #8092 (Thomas Donaldson)
As for COMMUNICATING mathematical ideas, I'd say that a lot depends on 
   just who it is you're trying to communicate with. The way to do it is to
   work underneath language, not through language, and even 5 + 5 = 10 would
   bewilder someone who may (because they are vastly more intelligent, or
   not so intelligent) try to understand what you mean by + and = and 5 and 10.
   If I were talking to another human being, and both of us were patient (I
   doubt I could do it in an hour unless that other person already understood
   the idea but symbolized it differently) I believe I could explain a 
   definite integral, and how we symbolize it. If that other person is not
   close enough to me mentally it gets harder and harder. But I would not try

   to do it with just more symbols, no matter how close or far the person was.
   
   After all, we didn't learn the idea of 5 from symbols and talk alone.
   We were shown, as kids, lots of instances of 5 things (I remember seeing the
   old workbooks). Then, as human beings, we get the idea of "5". Addition 
   of course would come later, subtraction even later, and (Wow!) then we
   get into multiplication and division --- division isn't quite so easy. But
   the one thing which was NOT done was any attempt to present arithmetic
   symbolically, with axioms etc.

Natcherly a one liner reference such as '5 + 5 = 10 would
bewilder someone', because it gives not enough reference points to 
draw any conclusions.  A much more obvious demonstration of our 
number system would be:

	ooo + ooo = oooooo	 	followed by:
	 3  +  3  =   6
				and
	ooo x ooo = ooo ooo ooo 	followed by:
      3  x  3  =      9

Similar examples would explain our signs for minus and plus.

Next would come a rendering of our decimal system 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
9 10 11 12 etc. followed up with a similar samples as above, which 
would encroach into the two digit range, i.e. 6 + 6 = 12
and 6 x 6 = 36.   Once the four basic functions decimal numbering 
system are explained, and understood it would be easy to carry on 
to Y^x or square roots.

How far you go would depend if you communicate real time, over 
light year distances or on spec, as in sending out a probe.

You could precede it all by the succession of prime numbers such 
as:

o oo ooo ooooo ooooooo ooooooooooo 	
This would also help establish, in which direction we are reading.

However, before we get carried away with speculation on 
encountering other civilizations, we should examine how highly 
improbable that is:

Approx. 65 Mio years ago we had a meteor impact, which was of 
civilization ending/altering magnitude.  From this single event we 
have knowledge of we might conjecture, that such an event may have 
a recurrence of 30 to 100 Mio years here in the outer arm of the 
galaxy. Toward the much more turbulent core we might assume, that 
such event occur with such frequency, that it makes the 
development of any civilization highly improbable.

You might argue: 'but what about the hundreds of million star 
systems here in the calmer outer regions?'  Our closest neighbor, 
the Centauri System, about 4,5 light-years away, is binary, again 
extremely turbulent.  My knowledge in astronomy is very limited, 
but I would that many single suns would also be too turbulent to 
support the development of civilization.

Second we have to deal with temporal factors:

Let us assume, that we have a very close by neighboring star 
system (only about 50 to 100 light-years away), which is very 
similar to ours.  Same type of sun, and similar range of planet, 
one almost identical to earth, but it has developed geologically, 
in life support capability and in development of a sapient race 
similar to ours 1% faster than we.  That would, assuming the same 
starting point as our system, at 4.5 billion years ago, put them 
45 million years ahead of us in terms of development of their 
civilization, and would make them probably unrecognizable to us.  
Certainly we would not have a whole lot in common to 'talk about'. 
That would IMHO even be true, if we reduced the time differential 
by *three orders of magnitude* to 45,000 years (just project our 

own sci/tech progress of the last 2-300 years 45,000 years ahead 
and you will know what I am trying to convey ;-). 

Olaf Henny

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