To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers.
We must admit with humility that, while number is purely a product of our minds, space has a reality outside our minds, so that we cannot completely prescribe its properties a priori.
I love the idea of numerology, but I don't really believe in it. But I like thinking about what numbers convey.
But it is a delightful challenge to try to depict interesting aliens.
Ever since the Enlightenment, people thought that we were living in a rational universe. They thought that God was a mathematician and that the function of the scientist was to figure out the mathematical rules whereby the universe was created.
I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer, and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket, adding a lot of numbers.
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Before I was seventeen years old, I had lived in twenty-one different houses. In my mind, each of those houses had a number.
It's true that I have always been very comfortable with numbers.
I think anybody would have to be with out common sense to think there weren't aliens. There are billions of planets, and I am convinced Earth is not the only one that's inhabited. It would be quite an ego trip to think that. I think about it all the time.
I don't believe that there are aliens. I believe there are really different people.