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Actually most constants have been standardized to natural sources. A meter is now a fixed (small) fraction of the speed of light in vacuum. A second is pegged to the duration of a Cesium isotope spinning or something. Just that the multipliers are chosen to be convenient to us.

Should we need to talk measurements with aliens, we can, and can convert between their units and ours.

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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
1 Meter = x umthilions plancs. There, retrospectively defined. In that sense.

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JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
SI being capable of interspecies translation is an interesting thing I hadn’t considered.

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- icelimit@lemmy.ml ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  What’s more profound is that math is universal - after some teething pains with regards to understanding conventions, any alien technology should be comprehensive by us, and vice versa.
  
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  - MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    
    math is universal
    
    Well… up to the base calculation methods. Logic is universal. Math is a set of rules. Aliens might rule different.
    
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  - captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    “Wait you all started with base 60 and left it? It took us millenia to realize that it was the best choice, and once we did we never looked back”
    
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captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Yeah in 2019 we even managed to get the pesky kilogram defined by a natural constant.

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Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
What about imperial system?

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- Aqarius@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  IIRC it’s currently defined based on SI units.
  
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  - captainlezbian@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    An inch is just a special term for 2.54cm used by Americans (but not our government)
    
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sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Well, akshually they started out as being earth specific, as convenient ways to measure human-relevant amounts of space and time, and were standardized after that. So really God still wouldn’t care to use meters or seconds, but would probably have their own units which could also be standardized with natural phenomena.

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Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Right but the actual quantities are arbitrary. A metre is a fixed fraction of the speed of light in a vacuum, but it’s an arbitrary fraction chosen because it was convenient. We could just as well have chosen it to be half or twice as long. Same with the second. And the kilogram, etc.

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