That's a flaccid penis.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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The universal language we will use to communicate with aliens.
So we will have no way of communicating with them if they're hot?
Exactly.
Maybe interpretative striptease.
Looks like a testicular torsion incantation
I too saw a dong.
Toilets and dicks, why send this to the aliens?
Turns out the aliens all speak Esperanto
So no one on Earth can communicate with them? Damn.
Surprising amount of Esperanto speakers, and a few people who speak it as a native tongue.
William Shatner probably could.
OP just wanted to make everyone look at the math penis.
What are we seeing here?
I believe they are higher dimensional string diagrams. Maybe called n-diagrams? They are used in higher homotopy and higher category theory, I believe. But not entirely sure.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.06938
EDIT: Found it! they are called surface diagram, which are generalization of string diagram to 3-categories https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2010/03/modeling_surface_diagrams.html https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/surface+diagram
Still not sure what the proof is talking about though :(
But from the conclusion it looks like some sort of natruality condition, where the morphisms are slided around except beta.
EDIT AGAIN: got in touch with my string diagram contact. Here is the paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/0807.0658
Note the conclusion at the bottom, the proof on the right and the axiom on the left doesn't seem to be related.
The proof on the right is Theorem 6; the equality at bottom is in section 3.4, where the proof is omitted because "follows from definition"; the axiom on the left is HM1 and HM2 on page 19.
When I got to asking "WTF does naturality even means?", I decided to reread your comment from the beginning...
The amount of words in it that almost nobody will know the meaning is amazing!
Isaac Arthur made a compelling video about why this may be just the case with extraterrestrial beings.
I think one of those is Norway.
Yoooo! 3D string diagrams
Is this some sort of loss i'm too dumb to get?
Way-oh, way-oh, ooh-way-oh-way-oh
Talk like an alien
translation; i need to pee
Just like most of the material in the videos I saw that was sent to outer space as a message to whatever - I don't even try to understand what the message tries to say since I don't think I would experience any "Heureka!"'s in there 😂
Should I just hope "Good luck!" for them if even I can't understand this stuff?
Who else saw it?
I thought those were urinary tract diagrams.
I think it’s funny to think of mathematics as a universal language because all of formal logic is built on the assumption that binary truth values are grounded in reality, but I believe that has yet to be proven. All of human communication functions based on an assumed shared context.
If I say I have an apple, and you say you have an apple, humans would say that together we have two apples but in reality we each have an estimated collection of matter that shares nothing physically in common with the other. Maybe other intelligent life forms don’t make the same assumptions that we do that lead to the statement that there are two “apples,” and maybe mathematics isn’t universal.
I guess I mean to say that formal logic and mathematics are not grounded in reality, but are grounded in the way that a human brain perceives reality.
First of all, there has been a lot of research into what the minimal set of assumptions you need is to reproduce what we consider “basic math” and also what happens if you tweak those assumptions.
Second of all, the main goal for science and the type of math we use for science is to effectively model the world we live in.
Any aliens that live in the same universe are subject to the same physics, and any civilization advanced enough to detect our messages will know some basic universal facts about the world, and those facts are what we hope to use as the basis for starting communication.
there'd a big difference between experiencing a force and describing it though. Imagine attempting to describe proprioception to a race of spherical beings with no sense of touch.
Sure, but to get the communication started you would start with facts you’d agree on, like the positions of stars or basic chemistry.
Yeah you’re right, the main goal of science and the math we use for science is to model the universe. That model is completely subjective. The more we learn about the universe, the more the model changes. The way we learn is limited by our 5 senses and our mental models for the immediate universe around us.
That model is something of a language itself, and if a language is subjectively limited then I don’t think it can be universal
The model we currently have for the universe goes well beyond anything we could learn with our natural senses and the way we intuitively think about the world because of those senses.
It’s true that we keep refining our models and it’s very possible that an alien would have slightly different models, but at the end of the day, we are trying to describe the same universe and those models are going to overlap a lot because of that.
Look into "intuitionistic logic" and "constructive logic"
Maybe other intelligent life forms don’t make the same assumptions that we do that lead to the statement that there are two “apples,” and maybe mathematics isn’t universal.
That just shows that "Apple" isn't necessarily universal, and doesn't actually disprove the universality of the concept of "two."
There are a ton of different physical ways to represent the Fibonacci sequence, for example, and I would imagine the first contact looks for ways to find the mutually understood medium by both sides: raised symbols, pulses of radiation, pulses of vibrations, physical pebbles arranged in a line, physical pebbles manipulated over a timeline, etc.
Once we establish a common medium, we'd explore mutual understanding of prime numbers, approximations of pi/e/phi, and things like that.