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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Think of playing cards, a five of diamonds has thr symbol “5” and shows five diamonds on it. If we used base 2 (binary), the “5” symbol would change to “101”, but there would still be the same number of diamonds displayed on the card.
Since prime numbers are just an amount, the symbol used isn’t the important bit. We probably wouldn’t be able to communicate with aliens using any symbol representing an amount since aliens wouldnt know our alphabet. The symbols would have to be a literal depiction of the amount eg you could use dots or a tally system, like the way we display the numbers on playing cards or dice.
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