leios
COMIC Book - How would aliens convert their coordinates to ours?
About the author
Georgi Popov - a man, who is curious and loving. Love making complex topics sound intuitive.
Quick Summary
Aliens are about to visit Earth!
They tell humans the coordinates at which they are going to land. The whole humanity is waiting for them. However, they land on a place where nobody is waiting for them.
Why that happened? They were simply referring to a different coordinate system. How will aliens get to the place, where humans are waiting for them? How are they going to solve this problem?
The whole story is meant to be told in a very interesting and humorous way, embracing the beauty of mathematics. The point of this story is that space cannot be defined in a single way. Despite that fact, you could always convert from one interpretation to another.
Target medium
This is a perfect scenario for a comic book.
More details
Aliens are about to visit Earth! They told humans the exact coordinates they are going to land a week before their arrival. They also told the time of landing. Humans are excited. They build a special platform where the alien's ship is going to land. The time comes. The whole planet is watching. And..... no alien ship. But where are the aliens?
At the same time aliens land on a not populated area on Earth (something like a village). They are quite disappointed that nobody is waiting for them, although the fact that they told humans exactly when and where they are going to land.
But why humans do not meet the aliens. Simply they are using different basis vectors for their coordinate systems. (If you are not aware with what that means no problem, I ensure you that working on the comic book will get you to know it perfectly :)))
The chief mathematician of the alien crew ( who wears a Pi badge by the way :D ) starts wondering what may have happened. Then he meets a person and asks him to show the basis vectors that are used on Earth. That's it! They are using different basis vectors. Then the chief mathematician spends some time to convert the initial coordinates (the ones they told the humans) in the context of humans. As soon as they get the real coordinates, they start the engine and go to the original place of meeting.
When aliens land, the first question asked by a journalist is the following: "What do you consider to be the most beautiful thing in our Universe?" "Mathematics" - they all say with one voice.
Contact details
Email: [email protected]
To clarify, by comic book (till August), what do you have in mind? Panels along a web page, or a slideshow in a video? Are we sure aliens had Descartes who came up with coordinate and they use number systems, and if so ones like ours?
Hi, Nikolaj! Thanks for asking that questions.
To clarify, by comic book (till August), what do you have in mind? Panels along a web page, or a slideshow in a video?
It is something that me and the artist are going to decide once the scenes are ready. Since the aim of the project is to make the concept accessible for as many people as possible, the final layout should be comfortable for the reader. I am open for ideas here.
Are we sure aliens had Descartes who came up with coordinate and they use number systems, and if so ones like ours?
That's a philosophical question! For the sake of simplicity, we would assume that the aliens in our comic book are going to use the exactly same number system and are going to plot the coordinates the way we do, although in real life it would be very unprobable.
