"Perhaps." Master Gravie was noncommittal about Ian's idea: "Just Ian, you might have imagined civilization too uniformly."
Having said that, the elder raised his hand and pointed: "We humans use the decimal system because we have ten fingers. This assumption might not be correct, but let's leave it at that."
"Then, civilizations with different numbers of fingers would use other numeral systems... Moreover, beings without fingers, who only exist in the Domain of Void, might not even need mathematics to understand many truths of the world, build civilizations, and achieve consensus."
"Such a civilization would be fundamentally unable to communicate with us... Even mathematics and various constants would fail to bridge our communication, because their cosmological observation systems are entirely different from ours—humans, who use material bodies, optical sensory systems to observe the world, and flesh and blood with electrical signals to sense the world."
