Question:If we overheard extraterrestrials cracking a joke, would we laugh? Can humor cross species and worlds?
Answer: To "get" the joke we would obviously need to share a language with the ETs, which is tricky enough, says artificial intelligence researcher Kim Binsted, Ph.D., with I-Chara Inc., creator of humorous AI characters.
"We'd also need to share some background knowledge — if the joke is about Betelgeusian Cloud Dancers, and I've never been to Betelgeuse, I probably won't get the reference."
Even if our language and background knowledge match, we still might not laugh. Humor is based on incongruity and surprise, so we'd need to share with this alien some expectations about the way the universe works. A man slipping on a banana peel probably wouldn't be funny to someone who had never experienced gravity.
Timing is vital to the success of a performed joke.
But what if the alien is more plant than animal, cogitating slowly over thousands of years? By the time it gets to the punchline, we will have forgotten the set-up.
Finally, says Binsted, the joke won't work if the social context is wrong. For example, we don't laugh if we feel threatened. So, if the jokester is a 5-meter-long sluglike thing with pointy fangs and acidic saliva, the joke will probably fall flat.
"All this said, cognition and humor are closely linked.
If we do meet any intelligent aliens, odds are they'll have a sense of humor — even if we don't get the joke."
Question: Flying at 30,000 feet, you look out and spot geese right below the plane. They've got specially adapted lungs, blood, capillaries and muscles to survive the cold, thin air. Could a human adapt at this altitude?
Answer: Most of us (outside a plane's controlled cabin) start feeling lightheaded and lethargic at 10,000 feet, report Neil Campbell et al. in Biology. At 17,000 feet, we start passing out from lack of oxygen. But like the geese, humans can adapt: There are permanent villages at 19,000 feet in the Himalayas and nearly that high in the Andes. The people who live at these altitudes are of smaller stature and have larger lungs and heart.
Even visitors to high locations will begin to adapt.
Drive from sea level into the mountains and your heart pumps faster, your capillaries may enlarge. Stay a while and your heart will slow, plus other changes to cope with the thin air. A few well-conditioned climbers have survived brief periods at over 29,000 feet, at the peak of Mount Everest.
Question: We all know what can happen if an asteroid a mile or two wide hits the Earth (R.I.P. the dinosaurs). What if it hits the moon?
Answer: You'd see a bright flash from a night moon, maybe even from a daytime moon, lasting a few minutes before cooling to invisibility, says Yale physicist Bradley E. Schaefer. The crater would be moderate-size, maybe 100 miles across. Such hits are rarer than on Earth (bigger, stronger gravity), occurring every half billion years or so.
The crater would spew out "rays," or streaky splash marks toward the bull's eye — seen in an amateur telescope.
But on Earth, the biggest event would come from the rocks splattered off the moon by the impact, that then enter our atmosphere as meteors. Some small fraction would make it down to Earth as moon rocks. About a dozen of these from past hits have been found, sent here exactly this way.
Following impact, it would take about a week for the debris to arrive, then MEGASPECTACULAR is the word for the ensuing meteor show.
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com.