Oh what the aliens think of us now!

 October 5, 2006 personal

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I’ve spent a lot of time constructing languages (Kisonef and Naedari being my favorites); in a similar vein, I also tried to create a language that an alien civilization would be able to understand. I had hoped to put a message written in my universal language in a conspicuous place (say, on a college campus), just to test if what I made really was understandable, even to humans!

But I never got around to that, and plenty of other people have done exactly that. This is related to the following question: state and prove a theorem in such a way that an alien would be able to follow your proof.

But whoa! I found out that Freudenthal (the mathematician) did the same thing: he created LINCOS. Bizarre. I also enjoyed looking at this image that we sent into space and trying to imagine what the aliens must think of people who write with such strange characters.