Comment on Fictional
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours agoIt’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.
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).
Woah, I had never considered that. To think, all these years I was on the side of “initial index is 1.” I’ve unknowingly been using “initial index is 0,” since I started using numbers.
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MasterOKhan@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Water’s boiling point and freezing point depends on the pressure of the local atmosphere unfortunately! But I like your logic.