While the sex question would be interesting, God questions too complicated and I don’t think I want Bjork back… I would like to know what they did with all my missing socks.
Never mind, Aro, I thought this was an interesting thread. :rolleyes:
“Is it true what they say about tinfoil hats?”
I also think this is a very interesting topic, but it’s extremely complicated for the reasons stated above. If I were visiting, say, a distant and isolated human tribe, I doubt I’d be able to address with any degree of authority half of their questions. (Especially the ones that arise from cultural conditioning. “My son was kidnapped by tree spirits and transformed into an ocelot. How can I get him back?” Uh…) Considering how simple cultural differences can make it difficult even for humans to communicate with one another, extending it to a completely extraterrestrial intelligence simply compounds the problem.
I could probably come up with One Big Question, but it would have to be prefaced by a whole lot of preparatory questions first. What’s your version of DNA? What’s your version of quantum theory? What’s your version of relativity? Is there only one intelligent species on your planet, or in your system, or in your stellar neighborhood? How recently did your species go starfaring? And so on, and so forth, just to get the proper context for the inquiry. I’d have to know, generally, where the extraterrestrial was coming from, before I would know what to ask.
What’s with all the Swamp Gas???
I’ll play along with that. Are we supposed to be able to distinguish the alien from a time-travelling human, who might have come from our future?
You probably knew this already, but Fermat’s last conjecture has already been proven. (Wiles, 1995)
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FermatsLastTheorem.html
"So.
How much did Gene Roddenberry get right, anyway?"
Can I fly your spaceship and muck around with your sonic cannon? Oh PLEASE.
Have you ever seen The Seeds of Death or The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and do you ever plan to do such things to our planet?
(If the answer to the previous question is yes)
Can I join your side?
Hi Aro. Sorry that the content of this thread is, perhaps, not quite of the quality you’d hoped for!
There are various problems and conjectures in maths and physics which it might be useful to ask the alien, assuming that (a) they know some stuff we don’t, (b) they can understand our question and © we can evaluate the answer. If you Google on ‘Great unsolved problems’ you get lists of topics such as: quantum gravity, understanding the nucleus, fusion energy, glassy materials, high-temperature superconductivity, solar magnetism, complexity, consciousness, the Riemann hypothesis and so forth.
So in theory one might be able to get a suitable expert to frame a question about any of these topics which, if answered correctly, might strongly suggest the answer came from a non-Earthling. However, the nutcase (if nutcase there be) could reply with pages and pages of pseudo-science jargon-babble and say “The alien expects we are too primitive in our understanding to follow his response”.
Another tack would be to describe a serious illness to which we, as Earthlings, are prone, and ask them for some evidence of their advanced medical knowledge or techniques. But again, the flaw is that (a) our question (based on our own physiology) might make no sense to them and (b) their answer might make no sense to us.
Another tack is based on the fact that presumably, any aliens who are at least as technologically advanced as ourselves can generate images and photographs, or at least things which we can perceive as photographs. So ask them for some pix of stuff we can’t take photos of, but the accuracy of which can be verified by astro-physicists e.g. a photo of Saturn taken from a point of view which we can’t obtain from Earth or from any of our telescopes, on Earth or in space.
Or ask Mr. Alien for one component from his mode of transportation. I think it would be fairly clear whether it was something a human had made or not.
Ha! Good one Arnold, but you’ve buggered eveything up here haven’t you? 
Assuming that one of our descendents could come back* how could we frame a question that couldn’t be answered by such a person? In fact, the fact that the “alien” could speak to us at all would cast some doubt on their alien nature.
Btw, there was a TV programme about Wiles over here in 1997, but I’d forgotten about it. So the Fermat thing’s off the list then.
You could send a probe to photograph Saturn from any angle - that’s what the Voyager probes have done. I suspect it wouldn’t be possible to suggest a verifiable, non-fakeble subject for a picture of space, or one that we couldn’t take ourselves if we went to enough trouble.
*If it was possible, wouldn’t it have happened by now?