Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in 'contact' with aliens. I am invited to ask them anything. And over the year's I've prepared a little list of questions. The aliens are very advanced remember. So I ask things like, 'Please provide a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem'. I write out the simple theorem equation with the exponents. It's a simulating exercise to think of questions to which no human today knows the answers, but where a correct answer would be recognised as such. It's even more challenging to formulate such questions in fields other than mathematics. Perhaps we should hold a contest and collect the best responses in '10 Questions to Ask an Alien'. |
/ Carl Sagan / |
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By type: | open clusters [67] | globular clusters [14] | diffuse nebulae [3] | dark nebulae [0] | planetary nebulae [27] | variable stars [18] | binary stars [23] | asterisms [2] | galaxies [119] | quasars [1] | planets [2] | minor planets [1] | comets [5] | Sun [0] | Moon [5] | other objects [8] |
By catalogue: | Messier 1-50 [20] | Messier 51-110 [18] | NGC 1-1000 [17] | NGC 1001-2000 [21] | NGC 2001-3000 [32] | NGC 3001-4000 [25] | NGC 4001-5000 [18] | NGC 5001-6000 [22] | NGC 6001-7000 [40] | NGC 7001-7840 [35] | IC 1-5386 [1] | other catalogues [71] | uncataloged [10] |
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