Comment on Strawberries are nuts 🍓

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petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨6⁊ ⁨days⁊ ago

Ah, there he is!

Just kidding.

The extreme usefulness of the one periodic table as we know it is why this is so hard to talk about. Philosophically, it isn’t any different: it is arranged by human values for human consumption. I think there is likely a strong reason that alien values would converge here, but that doesn’t really affect its arbitreity. The elements don’t have value unto themselves, they just are.

And there are plenty of different ways to arrange it. For one, if all you care about are the metals for some reason, you can arrange the nonmetals out of it completely. You could keep a linear, alphabetical list because whatever work you’re doing is derived from chemistry but does not actually care about atomic values.

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