OK, I get that this is a wildly crazily speculative discussion but how does anyone imagine intelligent life that doesn't have a concept of pi in some form? Pi is everywhere in math and science.
Maybe you imagine an alien life far more advanced than I do.
Before then we didn't know Pi.
Do do we currently know Pi? Even that might be arguable?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80...
In the case of 4/6 and 6/9 there is an agreed canonical way of designating that value, namely 2/3. In the case of pi there is similarly an agreed canonical way of designating the value, namely the symbol π.
Pi is just our name for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter regardless of the base.
This is why it doesn't make sense for an intelligent species not to know what 'pi' is. It's an important concept that pops up immediately in basic geometry and just keeps popping up over and over all the way to general relativity and beyond.
Yes, an intelligent species may not know pi but they would not have progressed even to the point of basic geometry in the maths and sciences.
Number theory and set theory is pretty agnostic to any preconceptions of what we would call numbers in the day to day life.
People mistake the value of a certain constant in decimal which is what we use to the meaning behind the constant itself.
After an hour on HN there are 44k responses in so far. Here is a summary sorted the percentage that agree/answered "yes".
23% Is gold valuable to them?
25% Do they eat aliens (i.e cannibalism)?
25% Can they time travel?
29% Do they have political parties?
31% Do they use base 10 maths?
31% Do they have compulsory taxation?
32% Do they have a United Nations?
34% Are there countries?
35% Do they have elections?
37% Do they have mobile phones?
38% Do they have insurance?
40% Do they have slavery?
40% Is there unemployment?
41% Do they have brands?
41% Is there advertising?
42% Do they have poverty?
43% Do they use money?
44% Do they have religion?
45% Is there a world leader?
45% Do they have double helix DNA?
48% Do they have private property?
52% Do they have corruption?
53% Do they wear clothes?
54% Is there theft?
54% Is there a market for second hand goods?
55% Do they have pills/oral medicine?
56% Do they have male & female?
58% Are there jails/prisons?
58% Do they eat animals?
60% Do they have pets?
60% Do they have shops?
61% Do they have governments with authority over individuals?
62% Do they have wars?
62% Do they have judges or courts to adjudicate disputes?
64% Do they use recreational drugs?
65% Do they have police?
65% Are there roads?
67% Do they practice euthanasia?
68% Do they have electronic computers?
69% Have they developed Artificial Intelligence?
69% Do they have fiction (books and movies)?
71% Do they live in multistory buildings?
71% Do they know about and agree with our periodic table of the elements?
72% Do they have a sewage system?
73% Do they know about and agree with the theory of relativity?
73% Do they sleep?
73% Do they have doctors and hospitals?
74% Do they have something like cement/concrete?
75% Do they have space travel?
78% Do they eat plants?
82% Do they grow old and die?
84% Do they have standardised weights and measures?
84% Do they have eyes?
85% Do they have something like the internet?
87% Do aliens know about Pi?
88% Are there cities?
89% Do they eat?
89% Do they have reading and writing?
92% Are there animals and plants (other than the aliens)?
-"Are they aggressive"
-"Do they have empathy"
-"Do they have family model"
Same with "Are there Jails" should be substituted by "Are there crimes" and "Is there a justice system"
I tried to have a balance of questions over these 6 areas:
* Biology
* Economy
* Environment
* Politics
* Science & Technology
* Society
I also tried to have a balance between questions that you would think for certain would be a 'yes' like the Pi one and a 'No' like the cannibalism one.
Layered on top of this was my own personal views on what's 'unusual' about our own society and a desire to get people actually thinking about us, not the aliens. Do we really need Jails and religion and countries? Is there another way? Maybe we could have a justice system without Jails, for example. That's what's behind the UN question - probably not a good question - but something I think about often.
I regret not thinking about the family question. That would have been a good one.
I wasn't really expecting this level of interest to be honest.
C'mon, of any words to misspell...
Are you going to post a one page total of all questions?
Btw, did you spend more time coding or looking for suitable pictures for the questions? :-)
I hadn't used Pixabay before but it was perfect for this. It was a bit of mucking around to have 3 different image sizes for each question -so yes that took a while. About 6 hours including the domain and server setup I would say. The code was the easy (and fun) part.
Is the site being DoS'd by us?
Just this morning I finished reading Solaris (by Stanisław Lem, it's an amazing book about reflecting on "how an alien could look like", 10/10), so I stopped thinking after every question to consider different scenarios possible with either answers.
To me it feels like a great tool to start laying down the plot for your next scifi book ;)
For example: "Do they value gold?" - I guess that depends on the amount of gold that you can find on their planet.
I guess it would lose some of its charm if the questions were larger, though.
How to define human-level intelligence is an interesting question. It would probably have to be done with questions similar to those on the site. E.g., do they know about pi.
P.S. 25% think they have access to time travel?!
