I’ve started reading a lot of sci-fi and the humans always attempt to communicate with aliens using prime numbers, but if they use a counting system that _isn’t_ base10, would the prime numbers still make sense?
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Others have said the answer that primes are primes are primes, no matter what. But I think they have all failed to mention why the base notation of the number does not matter. Base notation is a way of using shorthand to write large numbers and that is literally it. It does no more than that. Without a base numbering system you have tallies where one tick represents one thing. If you want to represent 1M things you would have 1M ticks. You want to expand to 2M things, that is another 1M ticks. But with base 10, if you want to represent something up to 1B, it requires 9 digits. Want to expand to 10B, your notation requires just one more digit. So again, the properties of the number and how it divides is no different. Base 10 is useful because things in counts that we typically run across are readable when put in base 10 notation.
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