• FaceDeer@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Humans have no sense of scale. We evolved in the context of hunter/gatherers on the African savanna, we intuitively grasp the sorts of numbers and scales that we would encounter there. A few hundred people. A few dozen miles. A human lifetime. Tiny, trivial values on the scale that we’re having to deal with even in just our own current everyday civilization. The universe as a whole makes such things unimaginably insignificant - “unimaginable” in the literal sense, we’re just not wired for it. We have to invent systems of mathematics to handle that kind of thinking for us.

    Yeah. If there are indeed alien intelligences visiting us, they’re likely incomprehensible and we have zero chance of doing anything they don’t anticipate perfectly and can’t handle without difficulty.