
Show HN: Alienslike.us – Vote on what an alien society might be like - xxxxxxxx
https://alienslike.us/
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computator
It asked me if intelligent alien life would know about pi. I answered "yes",
and the survey told me that 84% had also answered "yes". Am I understanding
that right -- that 16% of respondents think that pi could be avoided?

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.

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DailyHN
Can someone explain how pi holds up when base 8 math is applied?

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Ensorceled
pi becomes
3.110375524210264302151423063050560067016321122011160210514763072002... in
base 8 or, really, still pi

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.

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V-2
Their approach to geometry could be quite different though. Eg. they could use
non-Euclidean geometry by default, 2D only being a special/edge case, and Pi,
while encountered in calculations once in a while, wouldn't have a status of a
well-known constant: which I understand would be the minimum to meet the
requirement behind the question. If not, the question would be akin to whether
they "know" 1, hard to say what it means

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Smaug123
Pi shows up either in Einstein's field equations, or in Newton's gravitational
equations. It's probably possible to formulate them both without reference to
pi, but off the top of my head I don't see how. (As mathematicians go, I'm not
at all applied, though.)

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petters
Pi only shows up in the field equations multiplied with an arbitrary constant.
Therefore they are trivial to formulate without.

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Smaug123
The arbitrary constant is related to G, which is Newton's gravitational
constant, and to the speed of light. If I've understood correctly, if you
don't want pi to appear in the field equations, then it will appear in
Newton's equations as part of G.

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Smaug123
My answers are strongly dependent on rather loose interpretations of words
like "sleep", "money", "private" "property", "taxation" and so on. I think
it's probably better to start with more general questions: for example, the
answer "no" to "do they defect with each other on Prisoners' Dilemmas"
basically rules out the need for taxation.

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funkyy
"Is there United Nations" \- this question is extremely vague. It should be
clarified. Overall most questions are based on our civilization and our path,
rather than more important aspects.

-"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"

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xxxxxxxx
This is an interesting comment!

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.

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jrpt
It probably needs a question about whether the aliens are aquatic or land-
based. Some of the follow up questions wouldn't be relevant, like bridges and
roads, if the world were aquatic.

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user5994461
Don't forget air-based.

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ff_
It was fun, thanks!

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 ;)

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federicoponzi
This is a funny quiz to do. Even if IMO yes or no are too restrictive. Also,
the backgrounds are very heavy, I used to select answer, start loading page
and press esc to stop loading of the background :D

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xxxxxxxx
Some feedback on the performance would be helpful. The server is in Singapore,
so perhaps if put it behind cloudflare to speed up the images download for
Europe and US?

I wasn't really expecting this level of interest to be honest.

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andai
I wasn't able to select an answer until the image finished loading (well, it
would submit the answer I selected at that point). I would suggest making it
so it doesn't have to load the image before you can respond, and maybe
compress them a bit more :)

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JD557
Fun exercise, but some of the questions could use more context.

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.

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xxxxxxxx
I made this in Go & postgreSQL as a learning exercise. There are 60 questions
and I haven't developed the 'end' yet, it just goes back to the start. So if
you see the questions repeating, it's time to stop. If you hover over the
percentage graph it will give you the stats so far for that question.

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nicolasd
I kinda like the idea, though maybe 60 questions are a lot to go through.
However, a very big improvement would be to show yes/no in the graph/circle in
green and red (same color as the buttons). I was confused how many voted for
yes/no based on the circle at the first questions

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xxxxxxxx
Good suggestions. My CSS skills are a bit impoverished so I tried to keep it
simple to start. It's amazing how many people stick it out and answer all 60
questions. I hope my server can keep up....

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sbussard
It's a never ending quiz that asks you the same questions more than once.
There needs to be an end!

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fapjacks
I think the only thing that I said "no" to was ten fingers, since there's
something around a 25% chance they have five fingers on each hand -- versus
three, four, five, or six or so -- and assumes they only have two arms which
serve as their primary environment manipulators. Even with eyes, it's a safe
assumption their form of life evolved near a radiation source of some kind,
and they almost certainly have "eyes" with which to sense that source. Even
more so, that these things all exist in our history, by extension they must be
possible in alien history. They may be immortal atheist pure communists that
do not need to eat _at the moment_ , but you'll need to consider how they got
there, and so "yes" they probably did at one point have thieves and taxes and
poverty and a king, even if they don't now. And "having" something (in my
answers) includes having had something.

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ovaqre
"On this planet there is intellegent life."

C'mon, of any words to misspell...

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xxxxxxxx
oops!

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pmontra
I started with Do they have jails and after a long while it asked me again the
same question. Next was Do the have shops, which I already answered. Maybe it
should understand it asked all the questions, thank and quit.

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? :-)

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xxxxxxxx
It starts at a random question ( so all the answers are evenly distributed)
and it just loops around to the start. I do plan to add an 'end' page with a
summary at a later stage.

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.

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tomelders
Needs a 'maybe' button.

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suprfnk
Yeah, there are a lot of maybes in here. But on the other hand, that would
most probably cause me and a whole lot of people to answer maybe on pretty
much all questions. This is more interesting, and makes you think about the
question more.

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mrfusion
I've heard that bridges on an alien planet would look eerily like ours since
there would probably be a need for them and all designs would converge on the
most optimal.

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JoeAltmaier
Somebody wrote that toast would also fall butter-side-down on any alien planet
with any gravity. Lots of arguments about tables, toast, gravity and mean
rotation speed.

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petters
I answered no to essentially all questions. I consider dogs and rabbits, for
example, to be intelligent life. From observing the earth and our
surroundings, there is no reason to assume that higher intelligence would
automatically arise.

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?!

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user5994461
"500 Internal Server Error"

Is the site being DoS'd by us?

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xxxxxxxx
Yes looks like it. Just rebooted it - should be okay now.

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asderty123
I am amazed by how many people are willing to believe this but don't find out
for themselves what the name of Jesus is doing

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logingone
Just cycling for me - get to the last question and it continues to the first
question :( I was looking forward to the results.

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coldcode
What a waste of time, its just a bunch of questions useful to advertisers.

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tbarbugli
what's the purpose of this exactly? I kept clicking a the gauge chart changed
all the time but showed no insight on what was going on

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xxxxxxxx
The gauge chart shows you the percentage of people who agreed with the
previous question (including your response)

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kenrick95
It need some kind of label on which color is which, currently it is quite
confusing.

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thght
epic!

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xxxxxxxx
Thanks:-)

