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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Being a prime number is just answering the question “given that many objects, can you make a rectangle out of them”.
For exemple, if you have 12 apples, you can make a 3×4 rectangle. If you have 9 apples, you can make a 3×3 rectangle (which is a square).
But if you have 11 apples, you can’t make a rectangle out of them. Well, you can put them in a long line, but we don’t allow that here.
And numbers that are not “rectangle numbers” are called “prime numbers”.
But as you saw, it is something who has to deal with real life objects. While things like “base 10” is a question of “how things are named”.
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