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cousin_it comments on Convincing ET of our rationality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (28)
Show the ET my cellphone?
More seriously: draw a rough map of the Earth showing my location, and then a diagram of the Solar System with approximately correct distance ratios. An irrational species isn't likely to have such information. See Terry Tao's presentation The Cosmic Distance Ladder for some epic applications of rationality to measuring large distances.
Amazing, thanks for the link. This is what most interests me -- not what we know in science, but how we know it, when classes tend to focus on the former. (Asimov's book Atom is an excellent answer to the question of how we got to our current atomic models.)
Great link. It reminds me of my freshman astronomy lab which actually had us students calculate for instance the diameter and mass of the Earth and sun, and through the semester moved up to the level of using parallax and blackbody spectra to calculate distance to various stars.