@BernardoMeurer The first steps are the hard ones. Assuming the ETs don't think just like us the only things that we can be sure will be the same are the physical sciences and some math.
You need people who can spot and interpret those texts even though they were written by alien minds. And then the pros bootstrap the full understanding from there.
@G.Bergeron And mathematicians human maths, and physicists the human perspective (i.e. our models) of physics. Also, I'm not talking about cultural linguists here, I mean the badass theoretical linguist, Chomsky style
The task should probably be understood as some kind of cryptanalysis, since you don't even know what has meaning in the communication and what is just noise
@BernardoMeurer I disagree with the math/human math part... But yeah if you go deep in theoretical linguistic then it's essentially math/information theory
@BernardoMeurer If the aliens used our math and physics than any educated person could spot the texts. But one of the things a fully trained physicist does it apply multiple models to the same ideas. They are a priori the one best equipped to see the known patterns in the alien models.
@G.Bergeron That's actually something I wonder about, if we got people and never taught them any maths (given that the experiment starts with them as babies) at all, say we do this enough times, would they eventually reach a mathematical framework that is meaningfully different from ours?
@AccidentalFourierTransform I actually think it is quite egotistic of us to think we really thought of that by itself and then be ''amazed'' that nature is described using that
@BernardoMeurer But relying on the same basic logical consistency constraints
I don't see how anything can even exist outside these constraints
I didn't really discover Piper until a few years ago. Which is weird because I buy lots of old science fiction books at second hand stores. The man was a giant in his time and much underappreciated these days.
A lot of his stuff has far more subtlety and social complexity than we usually give Golden Age SF credit for.
Even the writing is less dated that you would expect.
@heather I've read a lot of Asimov over the years and wouldn't bad mouth the man for anything. But he doesn't go on my list of mostest favoritest SF authors. On the other hand I adore the 2 minute mysteries books.
