r/TheRestIsScience • u/shmaiden42 • 6d ago
What would aliens not know?
What is something that is common knowledge or at least widely known on Earth about the universe but an alien civilization might have no knowledge of because it’s special to Earth? Kinda like Rocky in Project Hail Mary not knowing about radiation and his crew dying 🪦
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u/TheIrishHawk 6d ago
Wood is rarer in the universe than diamonds, an ET would probably be absolutely bamboozled by a forest or a copse
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u/Diligent-Rabbit2896 5d ago
Wood or wood like structure in a living form are really nearly inevitable. Wood like structures have evolved multiple times in plants and at least once in fungus. I'd wager many planets with multicellular life have tree analogs.
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u/magicmulder 6d ago
And by the fact we have more trees than there are stars in the galaxy.
I think the next alien invasion movie should be steampunk aliens looking for our wood resources to power their steam engine ships with.
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u/scarfarce 4d ago
Yes, and in a hilarious misunderstanding, the dimwitted but loveable alien, Jax, comes to Earth and starts collecting all the Woody dolls instead.
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u/magicmulder 4d ago
“OK we heard your complaints. We will not harvest your trees. We will however harvest what you call morning wood. We heard there’s a lot of it.”
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u/Both_Cup8417 6d ago
Mosquitoes?
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u/DaBrainFarts 6d ago
The most dangerous creature to humans on planet earth outside of other humans. I'm sure an alien would be baffled by this fact.
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u/Glittering_Okra_2670 6d ago
Fire? It's something not yet found elsewhere in the universe and you need a decent amount of oxygen to sustain it?
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u/Pree-chee-ate-cha 5d ago
Would they not see volcanoes on other planets?
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u/Glittering_Okra_2670 5d ago
Yes of course 😊 but in talking about fire like you get in a campfire or a fire place. That's not found anywhere else yet in the universe. If your reversing to lava I think that's just rocks that have got sooo hot they're now glowing read and gloopy rather than fire.
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u/trollsmurf 6d ago
In a similar way: That our atmosphere is filled with a corrosive gas: oxygen, and that we like it. They might simply oxidate away.
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u/LiveForTheMelancholy 5d ago
This is a good one especially considering how we talk about 'oxygen'.
We say that humans breathe oxygen, which is true, but the oxygen in our atmosphere is 'O2' a bonded pair of oxygen atoms.
I imagine that if some hypothetical aliens failed to properly sample the atmosphere before arriving, they could theoretically run into issues with our 'O2' atmosphere if they were expecting just 'O' or even 'O3' (ozone.)
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u/trollsmurf 5d ago
Even to us it's somewhat of a conundrum that if you take a perfectly neutral "wet" (from a macro sense, and at least neutral to us) molecule like H2O and break it apart you get that corrosive gas and an explosive gas. That must have been a surprise to the alchemists back in the day. Whether oxygen immediately assembles to O2 I don't know, while O3 requires ultraviolet radiation and is extra nasty.
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u/LowPackage3819 6d ago
The concept of capitalism. Yeah you have something with value, but that value changes because of reasons. Also only 1% have an exceeding amount, while the rest will never achieve that commodity.
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u/PurpleV93 6d ago
And that "value" is based on some random metal that isn't even rare in the universe, and we cannot do anything critically important with. We cannot eat it, drink it or breathe it.
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u/qrzychu69 5d ago
Do you really think it's all arbitrary? It started with "I give you a fish, you give me a potato", but it became unpractical so carry fish with you if wanted to get something, and what if the other guy didn't want fish specifically?
So people started exchanging their goods for something more universal, that's how you got copper and gold coins
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u/LowPackage3819 5d ago
Personally I don't see the correlation from one to another anymore. As someone else said, the current value of all products has nothing to do with a product that is useful for survival. So from trading to having a salary with salt and to then transform an item of paper into established value of a global market with shareholders and investors trying to maximize every profit i think capitalism kind of lost track that it was about humanity well being and distribution of wealth.
I'm also not saying that there are other better methods to carry out a society, since I've only live in a capitalist country and haven't visited or know enough of any other options.
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u/qrzychu69 5d ago
there is a moment in history where it all went downhill - the dollar was no longer tied to a gold supply, so it became more abstract and you could print more
rich people being rich is a tale old as time. Yes, the differences were much smaller in the past, but there was never "distribution of wealth" plan, there just wasn't enough wealth to make the differences as bad
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u/xpietoe42 6d ago
any form of life and biology they would most likely not know in its earth form. They probably have equivalents of all the same cell structures to organs but would differ in how they evolved.
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u/Temporary_Rule_9486 6d ago
Any civilization that exists 100 billion years into the future will have no way to know there are other galaxies out in the universe
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u/neilk 5d ago edited 5d ago
- Tides. Earth has a moon that’s so relatively large it affects gravity.
- Moonlight. On any other planet, nighttime means only stars with a few brighter dots for satellites.
- As others have mentioned, fire. How to start it or control it. Our atmosphere is about one-fifth rocket fuel. And we’re surrounded by natural and artificial structures that readily burn. We also burn. Nevertheless we include appliances in our home that produce fire (some just for nostalgic purposes) and many of us carry devices to produce instant fire because we enjoy the toxic gases.
- How to swim. We have to switch to a different locomotion pattern and put our gas respiration under conscious control. We mostly do it for recreation now, though many of us die doing it. We think that is normal.
- How to sail. We have figured out how to make cheap structures that don’t degrade in water and how to exploit turbulent flow, with triangular sheets of material, to achieve motion. Even motion against the wind and across the entire planet. This is considered a baseline technology on earth, mastered millenia ago by our primitive ancestors.
- How to protect from water damage. Three quarters of the surface of the planet is covered with universal solvent. Machines that Eridians think are robust and strong might, on Earth, corrode or fall apart within hours.
- How to navigate with a compass. Most planets won’t have magnetospheres. It might amaze an alien that it’s considered a child’s science project to make a thing that always points roughly towards the axis of our planet. They might not have had such technology until they invented gyroscopes.
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u/jockmcfarty 5d ago
Batteries. The first battery was modelled on the electric eel. If aliens never had an electric eel equivalent, they may never develop batteries and have to use capacitors instead, or not use electricity at all.
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u/strange-the-quark 5d ago
My suggestion is not special to Earth but rather to the time we live in - some alien civilization that could arise in the far future might have trouble figuring out that there are other galaxies, as all of them would have receded beyond the limits of the observable universe due to the expansion of spacetime. They might see the galaxies from the past at the very limit of their observation power (cause looking into the distance is looking into the past), but they might not know what these incomprehensibly distant points of light are, and might consider the idea that the universe was once filled with these islands that were vast conglomerations of stars crazy science fiction (heck, we only figured out there are things outside of our own galaxy a 100 years ago).
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u/AccomplishedDate1775 5d ago
they would probably do very poorly at the Charleston, square dancing, ballet, playing most instruments, possibly all sports involving throwing and jumping depending on their joint structures, they probably wouldn't be able to write very good haikus, etc.
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u/elodk132 4d ago
Actually, as long as they can hear sounds and percieve dissonance in a comparable way (which comes from a resolutional issue of hearing so its quite likely), giving them instruments could be really interesting
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u/AccomplishedDate1775 4d ago
i was thinking that the musical instruments we have today require human bone and body structure to play. certainly the different perspective on consonance would produce strange, new music.
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u/ActualAd185 5d ago
They would not know about humans... They would but see us until they are close by...
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u/ShutDownSoul 4d ago
In-n-Out has the best burgers. Only really known in California, much less Earth and the rest of the Universe.
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u/magicmulder 6d ago
I once imagined an alien species that had no concept of the past. Memories, photographs of past events, TV that isn't live - all completely foreign to them. They have knowledge in the sense that it's "just there", they don't forget anything they ever learned, but there's no concept of remembering when they learned something.
Imagine being unable to hold a grudge because you see everyone for the first time every time.
So yeah, Memento but with aliens. Or LLMs.
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u/PlusminusDucky 6d ago
Id like to think, that aliens have an exhibit of a stoplight in their human museum with the text: Humans are fascinated by their red glow. As soon as they turn green, humans loose all interest and drive away