"These imponderables are here to encourage my students to think creatively and identify deep questions"
Imagine you are an alien from a totally different world - so different that even the building blocks of life are completely different on your planet. Now say that you land on planet Earth. You find three huge sheets of paper (i) one containing English text (ii) one listing a DNA sequence and (iii) one listing a computer program. You have no idea which is which, but you recognize you are looking at ordered bits of information - three very strange and different languages. The question is, using statistical principles and principles from information theory can you (the alien) detect any fundamental differences between the three sheets of paper so that you can distinguish between a human language, a machine language and a biological coding language? Or is it in fact impossible to distinguish them in principle?
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