The Great Silence, the lack of any evidence of alien races in other star systems, has spawned many hypotheses as to why this might be so, with some of them being on the paranoid side. I’m not going to enumerate them here. You can check out Isaac Arthur’s SFIA channel on YouTube for well done presentations on them. Block out some time. There are a lot of them.
The one I’m proposing is, as far as I know, not on the standard list. A Lesser Filter doesn’t destroy a race, it just keeps it bound to its home world, with a side order of never developing technology. If we go back to the Neolithic era here on Earth, the human population would be very hard to distinguish from all the rest of the denizens of Earth’s biosphere. They certainly would not have any techno-signatures.
Until humans began organizing themselves into societies, building cities, practising agriculture and undertaking large projects, our impact on the planetary environment was negligibly small. In order to build such societies, organise such projects, and develop the tools to do so, there is one indispensable tool – mathematics.
The Babylonians, Sumerians and Ancient Egyptians all had sophisticated mathematics, up to the level of quadratic equations. Clay tablets as old as 3000 BCE have demonstrated that they understood multiplication, division, square and cube roots, and geometry. The consensus of experts in the field is that they arose from necessity. One could not measure land, levy taxes, design large structures or, generally, have an organised society without it.
Mathematics is an invention, a language by which one can describe the physical world, understand its laws and how to make them work for you. Humanity has produced a lot of mathematicians over the millennia. We know the names of some, but untold numbers of others are lost in the mists of history and prehistory. The ability to do math, and indeed the desire to do so, is deeply rooted in the human mind.
It is fair to say that, without math, we would still be living in small bands of hunter-gatherers, who would have, at most, very limited technology. Stone tools do not need math, and neither does pottery. There are other arts and crafts which can be done without math, but they are very much rule of thumb and empirical. It requires a lot of trial and error to develop a method that works in the absence of the ability to measure precisely and understand the underlying processes, and without math it can’t be scaled up. Five times as many pots require five times as much clay. Simple and intuitive to us. That does not mean it is to all races.
Suppose, then, a race arose on another world which was as intelligent as us, but not mathematical? What then?
They would face a very high barrier to developing knowledge of the laws of the universe, organising themselves into large societies, or undertaking any large engineering works such as digging canals or building cities.
They might well flourish in other areas, create beauty and learn to live in harmony with each other, but without math they could not become significant on a planetary scale. Their population would be significantly limited because they could not organise themselves to produce their necessities of life, whatever those might be, at scale. Lack of astronomy would leave them with no way to know the cycles of the seasons, and so leave them at the mercy of what they could not predict.
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” said Lord Kelvin. A race without math and numbers would forever be limited to knowledge of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
Math has had a huge impact on our world. A breakthrough in math requires only a single genius to build on the work of his predecessors and bring to the rest of us a leap in understanding. The work of Newton and Einstein, to name only two, changed the lives of, ultimately, every human being on Earth in almost every aspect of life.
We do not know how the predilection for math arose in our species, but it must have very deep roots. As far back as organised societies have left written records for us to decipher, we find math. A tally stick made from a bone, found in Africa, dates back to 20,000 years ago.
Many people in history have pursued mathematics for the pleasure of it, and discovered very useful tools in their quest.
In this blog, I often question assumptions. There will no doubt be people who will say that math is simply a part of intelligence. That’s an assumption. Of all the species which roam our world, Homo Sapiens is the only one that does math. It is intuitive and obvious to us because our brains are wired that way.
Math. Don’t leave home without it.
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