I remember an item I heard at Eastercon on archaeology and how hard it is to know that you are interpreting things even remotely correctly, and therefore why we'd be completely at sea if we ever found something alien. The example given was the differing interpretations of near identical Neolithic dwellings by Western and Japanese archaeologists. Somebody at the end asked whether the right approach wouldn't be to look through your alien civilisation's books and find something that looked like a periodic table and try to use that as your rosetta stone. The guy giving the talk said this wouldn't work because there are lots of ways you could organise the thing, but didn't have any examples.
Now if somebody can come up with a version where the Lanthanides and Actinides don't look like a strange outgrowth…
There's an SF short story that I can't remember much about where an expedition to Mars is wondering why they bought a linguist when all he can do is catalogue hundreds of inscriptions with absolutely no clue what they mean, until someone finds a periodic table that gives an entry point. I remember an Eastercon game where someone had invented some "alien" artifacts, and the panel had to guess what they were. I thought the repeated suggestion from one panel member of "it could have some sort of ritual or religious significance" was supposed to be parody ("we have no clue, but we have a useful catchall category for anything we don't understand"), but was apparently genuine (with the same meaning).
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Date: 2006-10-29 07:27 pm (UTC)Now if somebody can come up with a version where the Lanthanides and Actinides don't look like a strange outgrowth…
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Date: 2006-10-30 08:20 am (UTC)I remember an Eastercon game where someone had invented some "alien" artifacts, and the panel had to guess what they were. I thought the repeated suggestion from one panel member of "it could have some sort of ritual or religious significance" was supposed to be parody ("we have no clue, but we have a useful catchall category for anything we don't understand"), but was apparently genuine (with the same meaning).