this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
1186 points (97.6% liked)

Science Memes

11189 readers
3156 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 3 points 6 months ago

Assuming they use the same numbers then yes, 10 is 10 to us but it represents the separator of orders of magnitude. 10 in base 4 would from our perspective be 4, but ignoring the specific numbers and adapting them for the sake of the joke, the alien would write it as 10 and "base 10" would just be base 4. It's like how hexadecimal uses 0-9 and a-f to represent 16 numbers even though we don't have that many in decimal systems. The joke is a translation issue. I feel like I'm over explaining now though...