For the Love of Numbers

Numbers! I loved anything to do with numbers.

Why? Because there are only 10 numbers and they are listed in incremental order. There are 26 letters in the alphabet, and they are listed in some meaningless order. Not only that, but the sounds of each letter changes depending upon what other letter(s) they are placed beside in a word. Numbers are simpler to understand. I liked numbers. Maths came easy to me, and by the way, the contraction of mathematics is maths – not math!

While I have not interviewed or studied every species with which we share this planet, I think it’s pretty clear we are the only group that assigns titles to quantities. That is – numbers!

Back in my college years, someone mentioned that if an infinite number of monkeys were each given a typewriter, one of them would eventually type out the full works of William Shakespeare. As a science and maths student, I was fascinated with this notion. That was until I saw a cartoon of a monkey sitting at a typewriter. The caption read “To be or not to be, that is the akfk djn hglg”

This got me thinking about this infinite number of monkeys. Despite all mathematical probabilities, it took only one person to actually write the full works of William Shakespeare, and William didn’t even use a typewriter.

Not to underplay the minds of such intellects, but while mathematics is a means to explain many things, it is not the answer to everything.

For example, in an attempt to make contact with intelligent life on other worlds, we broadcast prime numbers into space. Being of curious mind, I decided to put this to the test and so I read out prime numbers to my cat. Being an intelligent creature as she was, I wondered if my cat would join in and meow out the next prime number in the sequence. You don’t have to be an intellect, or a mathematician, to figure out how successful that was, but the geniuses that thought of broadcasting prime numbers into space should have practised with species from our own world first. An octopus with its nine brains might be a suitable candidate. That’s eight brains more than we have!

Don’t get me wrong, the use of mathematics is a brilliant concept but it needs to be kept in perspective. Astrophysicists have carefully calculated the number of planets orbiting stars within our galaxy that could support intelligent life (meaning, as dumb as we are, plus or minus an IQ or two), as being astronomical – no pun intended. Whoever made that assessment should sit a monkey in front of a typewriter and take notes.

Before we let the universe know of our presence, let us all try and play nice while we can. At some time in the future, an alien race might happen upon us and I seriously doubt whether they will be interested in learning about prime numbers. We will most likely end up as either food or fertiliser.

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