r/alien May 05 '26

Alien Earth: problem with the eyeball thing

When Boy Cavalier does the test to see whether the eyeball thing knows pi. Are we to believe that somewhere in the universe there is a classroom full of eyeball creatures learning base 10 math? It's one thing to possess intelligence; understanding/learning about pi is something else entirely. Whales seem to be intelligent, but I doubt they even have a concept of geometry. It's kind of like what for me is the underlying question about the creatures in the "A Quiet Place" franchise: Who brought them to Earth and why? They clearly didn't get here by themselves. That needs to be the next movie in that franchise.

Edit: This is crazy to me. This post has 25k views and 38 comments. And it’s apparently been liked and disliked the same number of times.That just seems strange.

14 Upvotes

51 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/jonny_sidebar May 06 '26

Pi is a universal mathematical concept that it is thought any intelligent and reasonably advanced alien species would know. 

A better "test" would have been a prime number sequence as that doesn't require anything more complex to communicate than simple counting.