Re: What if...?


"N" <n.m.keele@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1188342616.898429.138140@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
: On 28 Aug, 23:50, "Androcles" <Engin...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
: > "N" <n.m.ke...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
: >
: > news:1188337460.450726.28370@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
: > : What if human beings had both ways and means to travel interstellar-
: > : ly,
: > : and on finding a reasonably habitable planet out there, chose to
: > : settle
: > : on a planet like Earth with two moons and a year of...say, 18 months?
: > : do you think our Earthly moulded evolution would be affected by the
: > : leap
: > : to a new location?
: >
: > Sounds a tad like Mars. Ever had "jet lag"?
: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_lag
: >
: Yeh, I was thinking along those lines as well,
:
: I swotted up on the ultraviolet catastrophe, and thinking back to
: how human perception of colour and light was strikingly different
: from some animals (octopuses have an enormous range), for all
: I know what we see as a tinge of ultraviolet is caused by some
: optical illusion or other. Obviouslyphysics is different.
: Evolution seems to be tuned to ecology, so why not consider
: a possibility that some creature or other somewhere... has
: developed extra mental arithmetic to process those additional
: perceptions?

You are confusing Nature with mathematics. They are independent.
We have computers and calculators to do our mental arithmetic. <shrug>
Computers work on binary arithmetic, 0 and 1, on and off, true and false.
It would not matter if whales and dolphins, spider and flies or wolves
and sheep developed mathematics, you can't get any simpler than
1 and 0. Collectively, we humans have all the concepts you can imagine
and more besides. The principle of mathematics is to dig down
to the most primitive axioms and build up more complicated
theorems, proving every step along the way.
:
: > Would our maths have evolved differently if our
: > : location in space had been different?
: >
: > No. Math is pure.
:
:


.

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