Comment on Fictional
thewebroach@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Both meters and seconds are units of Earth specific measures of space and time. Pretty sure at a cosmic scale god would give fuckall about how we measure and name our shit
Actually most constants have been standardized to natural sources. A meter is now a fixed (small) fraction of the speed of light in vacuum. A second is pegged to the duration of a Cesium isotope spinning or something. Just that the multipliers are chosen to be convenient to us.
Should we need to talk measurements with aliens, we can, and can convert between their units and ours.
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.
What’s more profound is that math is universal - after some teething pains with regards to understanding conventions, any alien technology should be comprehensive by us, and vice versa.
“Wait you all started with base 60 and left it? It took us millenia to realize that it was the best choice, and once we did we never looked back”
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.
What about imperial system?
IIRC it’s currently defined based on SI units.
An inch is just a special term for 2.54cm used by Americans (but not our government)
Well, akshually they started out as being earth specific, as convenient ways to measure human-relevant amounts of space and time, and were standardized after that. So really God still wouldn’t care to use meters or seconds, but would probably have their own units which could also be standardized with natural phenomena.
Right but the actual quantities are arbitrary. A metre is a fixed fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, but it’s an arbitrary fraction chosen because it was convenient. We could just as well have chosen it to be half or twice as long. Same with the second. And the kilogram, etc.
It’s neat to think about what units an alien civilization would come up with independently. Like the Plank Distance is fundamental to physics, so they’d probably have something for that.
Degrees Celsius is based on freezing and boiling point of water, so if they came up with a base 10 numbering system and water is key to their biology, then they’d probably come up with that.
A calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1L of water by 1C. A liter is a volume of a cube 0.1m on each side. The meter was originally ten-millionth of the distance between the equator and north pole (and subsequent redefinitions are based on that original measurement). They wouldn’t come up with the meter, and they wouldn’t come up with liters or calories, either.
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.
Degrees Celsius is based on freezing and boiling point of water, so if they came up with a base 10 numbering system and water is key to their biology, then they’d probably come up with that.
Waters boiling point isn’t a constant though… it’s dependent on the atmosphere.
Hell there’s also no telling if our preference to base 10 is relative to our number of fingers so neither of those are givens.
Base 10 is also cultural. Babylon used 60, Egypt had 12, Rome had 5, and my wife just spent 10 minutes arguing for 8
Hopefully they’d come up with a better numbering system than base 10. Base 10 is the worst part of metric tbh.
Every base is base 10 dumdum
That’s true. It should really be referenced by the number before 10 (e.g. Base 9).
Also “in a vacuum” would be assumed, since almost the entire universe is a vacuum.
i’ve just figured out how the religious universe ends. some physicist explains to their god that a lot of their assumptions were based on something being in a vacuum, and then their god says “what vacuum? you mean all that sparse hydrogen?” so the physicist says “let’s find out what happens when you have a real vacuum” and then the universe ends at the speed of dumbassery.
Ah so THAT’S the resolution to the false vacuum hypothesis
I think that is the joke of the posted image.
Technically a second is an arbitrary measure of a proprty cesium133. Now, anyways
People always forget about the rest of the universe. Drives me nuts sometimes
4am@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
If a god existed and gave a so much of a shit about our masturbatory habits he’d be at least tangentially aware of what the fuck a meter was.
Image
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
For a second i thought you were calling the metric system masturbatory and then i remembered that christians really do think god watches them jork it. Kinky
toynbee@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
There’s a Family Guy episode referencing that.