Imagine an alternate timeline for just a second,
like really picture it. Imagine human beings
evolved with four fingers on each hand instead
of five. Right, so eight fingers total. Exactly,
eight fingers total. If that had happened, I
mean our entire global concept of mathematics,
our currency, our science, our culture, all of
it would revolve around the number eight. Yeah,
top 10 list wouldn't even exist. No. You'd be
listening to a top eight list and it would feel
entirely complete and satisfying to you. The
very foundation of what we consider a round number
would completely shift. It really is the ultimate
example of human anatomy kind of masquerading
as an absolute law of nature. Yes. We assume
our math is objective, but it's actually heavily
biased by the literal shape of our own hands.
Which is wild. And welcome to this deep dive
crafted just for you. Whether you are catching
up on some fascinating historical trivia, maybe
prepping for a wildly specific conversation,
or you're just insanely curious about the invisible
structures of the world around you, you are in
the right place. Today, our mission is exploring
a massive stack of source material. all centered
around something so ubiquitous, so constantly
in front of our faces, that we have basically
completely stopped seeing it. We are diving into
the number 10. And looking at the research we've
gathered, I mean, this isn't just a basic mathematical
overview. Not at all. The documentation here
covers the birth of spoken language, the mechanics
of ancient warfare, structural chemistry, and
even ancient mysticism. Everything radiates out
from this single foundational integer. OK, let's
unpack this because I want to frame this right
off the bat. This is not going to be some boring
math lesson from middle school. Right. This is
a journey into how a really simple biological
baseline, basically shaped all of human civilization.
So where does this all begin? Like before we
even had written numbers, how did human beings
first conceptualize 10? Well, to find that, the
sources trace the actual spoken word 10 back
through this massive linguistic family tree.
It originates from the Proto -Indo -European
root, which is pronounced roughly as dekem. Now
Proto -Indo -European is the ancient totally
unwritten ancestor of most modern languages across
Europe and South Asia. And that root, Decum,
meant quite simply ten. Decum. It almost sounds
like a, I don't know, like a drum beat or heavy
footstep. It definitely has a weight to it, certainly.
And from that ancient origin, the linguistics
trace how it evolved into the Proto -Germanic
root Tehun. Tehun. OK. And from there, it branched
out, basically seeding the vocabulary of a whole
host of modern languages. You see the descendants
of Tehun in Dutch, in German, in Swedish. And
of course, it eventually morphs into the English
word 10. Wow. But the core revelation here, the
reason the decimal system, which is our base
10 numeral system, became the dominant way humans
denote numbers globally is purely physical. It's
the fingers. It's the fingers. It's simply because
early humans looked down at their hands and feet
and used their 10 fingers and 10 toes to keep
track of them. things. It is so stunningly literal
like we built an abstract universal system for
measuring the distance to the stars and its baseline
was established by you know cavemen counting
on their digits. It is a really remarkable translation
of the physical into the conceptual. You are
taking a tangible reality, your literal fingers,
and abstracting it. The physical reality of human
anatomy set a cognitive baseline, and that baseline
just seeped into every corner of human thought.
And you really see how deeply embedded it is
in our everyday language, too. I mean, we use
the word decade to describe a nice, neat, tidy
collection of 10 years. We use the ordinal adjunct
decimal, the distributive adjunct of dairy, and
we see it in Greek prefixes like deca or deca
and the Latin prefix. It all feels very orderly,
very structured and safe. It does feel safe linguistically
speaking, anyway. But history shows us that this
mathematical neatness can absolutely be weaponized.
Right. Because as much as 10, is usually a comforting
concept for organizing quantities today, the
research reveals a shockingly brutal historical
application attached to it. So we've seen how
biology built our math, but how did that math
get turned into an actual weapon of terror? Well,
to answer that, we have to look at the true historical
definition of the word decimate. OK. Today, people
use it casually, but the literal definition of
decimate is to reduce something by exactly one
-tenth. Literally one -tenth. Literally. And
in ancient Rome, this wasn't just a math problem.
It was a formal institutionalized punishment.
A punishment for what, specifically? Like, who
was getting decimated? Primarily, it was used
for cowardice or mutiny within the military ranks.
Wow. The Roman military was highly structured,
right? Organized into cohorts. If a cohort rebelled
or fled in battle, the commanders didn't kill.
everyone, and they didn't just single out the
leaders either, they used math. They used math.
Yeah. The punishment was the execution of exactly
one in ten soldiers chosen by lottery, and the
nine who survived were often forced to execute
their own comrades. Oh my god, that is horrifying.
It gets worse because it wasn't strictly limited
to the military. The texts detail how decimation
was also used as a calculated form of retribution
against rebellious agrarian villages. You civilians!
Yes. The Roman legions would enter a village
and kill exactly one -tenth of the able -bodied
men. They would just line up the farmers, count
to ten, and execute the tenth man. Precisely.
And I mean, think about the mechanics of that
in an agrarian society. Right, the farming. Exactly.
If you remove exactly 10 % of an able -bodied
workforce, you don't instantly wipe out the town,
but you create an immediate catastrophic labor
shortage that crops can't be harvested in time.
It introduces the very real threat of mass starvation
for the following winter. Wow. What's fascinating
here is how a purely abstract mathematical concept
division by 10 was utilized as a highly precise
cold instrument for social control. Yeah, it's
so calculated. It wasn't about blind rage or
totally wiping out a population. It was about
mathematically calibrating the exact amount of
trauma necessary to break a society's spirit
while leaving exactly enough of them alive to
suffer the long -term consequences. It is chilling.
Just bureaucratic mathematical terror, but you
know, I really want you the listener to think
about how we actually use the word Decimated
today, right? It's totally different completely
different if you hear someone say The opposing
team was decimated on the field or the coastal
town was decimated by the hurricane We usually
mean it was completely wiped out utterly destroyed
totally gone. Yeah But mathematically, historically,
if something was decimated, 90 % of it actually
survived. Here's where it gets really interesting
because our modern use of the word has completely
lost that cold calculated math of the Roman original.
We've basically replaced the precise fractional
terror with just a general sense of total annihilation.
It's a profound semantic shift. We took a word
that meant a highly structured 90 % survival
rate and culturally redefined it to mean total
destruction. It just shows how language can entirely
grift away from its numerical roots over centuries.
So the Romans turned this mathematical concept
into a literal weapon. But if you strip away
all that human baggage, like the language, the
history, the bloodshed, how does this number
actually behave in a vacuum? Like if we look
at the pure math, does the number 10 actually
hold up as a perfect structure? Well, in pure
abstract mathematics, 10 is simply the even natural
number that directly follows 9 and precedes 11.
Very basic. Very basic. In geometry, if you draw
a polygon with 10 sides, it forms a decagon.
But what the sources illustrate beautifully is
how the actual identity of 10 completely changes
depending on the mathematical language or the
base system you are using to look at it. Right.
It's like the number wears different disguises
depending on who is doing the counting. Yes,
exactly. So in our standard decimal system base
10, it's a 1 followed by a 0. But in the binary
system, which is base 2, and the foundational
language of all modern computers, the number
10 is written as 1010. OK, I have to stop you
there because we hear about binary code all the
time, right? Just ones and zeros. But how does
the physical quantity of 10 actually translate
into 1010? Like, how does that work? It's all
about place value. So in our normal base 10 system,
you have the ones place, the tens place, the
hundreds place. Each step up. multiplies by 10.
In binary, you only have zeros and ones, so each
place value multiplies by two instead of 10.
You have the ones place, the twos place, the
fours place, and the eights place. Oh, I see.
So instead of ones, tens, hundreds, it's ones,
twos, fours, eights. Exactly. So to build the
physical number 10 in binary, you need one, eight,
zero, fours, one, two, and zero, ones. OK, let
me follow that. An eight plus a two is 10. Right.
So reading those places from left to right. 1,
0, 1, 0, 10, 10. Oh wow. That makes perfect sense
when you break down the machinery of it. Yeah,
it's very elegant. But the sources also mention
hexadecimal and duodecimal systems. And there,
the number 10 isn't even a number at all, right?
It's just represented by the letter A. And the
mechanics behind that are actually equally logical.
Hexadecimal is a base 16 system. Base 16, OK.
Right. That means you need single distinct characters
to represent every value from 0 all the way up
to 15 before you carry over to the next place
value. But we only have digits up to 9. Exactly.
Since our normal numbers run out at 9, mathematicians
just started using the alphabet. So 10 becomes
A, 11 is B, 12 is C, and so on. That is so practical.
It really is. And in Roman numerals, 10 is the
familiar X. In Greek numerals, it is represented
by the symbol iota with a small stroke, so it
looks like an I with an accent mark. It is a
complete chameleon, depending on the system.
And when you look at the calculation tables and
the research, multiplication and exponentiation
by 10 are just deeply satisfying. I mean, to
multiply, you just add zeros, 10, 100, 1 ,000,
10 ,000. It scales perfectly. It does. It defines
what we call an order of magnitude. And I want
to give you, the listener, an analogy for how
powerful that is. Multiplying by 10 isn't just
taking a step forward. It's entirely changing
the dimension of what you're looking at. Yes.
It's the difference between looking at a single
house and then zooming out to see the entire
city and then zooming out to see the entire globe
from space. Each zero completely changes the
scale of reality. That is a perfect way. to visualize
an order of magnitude. It is an exponential leap,
not just a linear progression. But you know,
I'm going to push back on this idea that 10 is
the perfect mathematical VIP. Oh, really? Yeah,
because when you look at the division table in
the source material, the neatness completely
falls apart. It gets messy. Very messy. You divide
10 by 2, you get a clean 5. You divide 10 by
3, you get 3 .33 repeating into infinity. Divide
10 by 7, you get this chaotic string of decimals,
1 .428. 571? So from a purely practical standpoint,
10 is actually a terrible number for everyday
division. And that is a very mathematically sound
critique. In fact, many mathematicians and historians
argue that we locked ourselves into the wrong
base system purely because of our fingers. Really?
So what should we have used? A base 12 system,
which is also known as a dozenal system, is mathematically
vastly superior for human use. Because 12 divides
so much cleaner. Exactly. The number 12 can be
cleanly divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. The number
10 can only be cleanly divided by 2 and 5. That
makes so much sense. Yeah. If you are a carpenter
trying to divide a board into thirds, or just
a person trying to divide a pizza among three
friends, a base 10 system creates messy fractions.
The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians actually
used a base -60 system for this very reason,
which is highly divisible. Base -60. Yes. It's
why we still have 60 seconds in a minute, 60
minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle.
We force our biological base -10 quirk onto a
universe that probably prefers base -12 or base
-60. So we're just stubbornly dragging our ten
fingers into advanced mathematics. Pretty much.
And speaking of advanced math, this is where
the research throws some serious jargon at us.
translate it. The text classifies 10 as a, quote,
composite number, a happy number, and the smallest
non -catotient number. Yes. That is quite a list.
Now, an encyclopedia will just drop those terms
and expect you to know them. But we can't leave
you hanging like that. What on earth makes a
number happy? Like, does it have a good credit
score? What does that mean? A happy number is
essentially a mathematical puzzle. Here's how
it works. You take a number, like 10. and you
separate its digits, so a 1 and a 0. Then you
square both of those digits and add the results
together. Okay, let me do the math. 1 squared
is 1, 0 squared is 0, 1 plus 0 is 1. Right. In
number theory, any number that eventually boils
down to exactly one through that repeating process
is classified as a happy number. It's just a
fun, quirky behavioral trait of certain integers.
That's amazing. OK, so what about a composite
number? That one is much simpler. A composite
number is just any positive integer that can
be formed by multiplying two smaller positive
integers together. Oh. Because 10 is made by
multiplying 2 and 5, it's composite. It's basically
the opposite of a prime number, which can only
be made by multiplying itself. and one. All right,
now the final boss of the jargon, non -cototient.
Doesn't even sound like a real word. It is a
dense concept, admittedly, relying on something
called Euler's totient function. But to strip
away the complex formulas, just think of it this
way. In math, there's a specific equation used
to figure out how many numbers below a certain
threshold share no common factors with the starting
number. It's a way of mapping out relationships
between numbers. Most numbers can be generated
as an answer to this equation. But 10 is a non
-kotoshin, meaning 10 is the smallest number
that never appears as an answer in this specific
relationship mapping. Wow. Yeah, it is prominently
locked out of that particular mathematical club.
So it's not just a bland placeholder. In the
higher realms of number theory, 10 possesses
these only unique, distinct architectural properties.
Yeah. But here is the massive question that raises.
If 10 is so mathematically clunky for division
and has all these weird quirks, how did it become
the absolute dictator of modern science and physics?
Enter the metric system. Oh, of course. While
base 10 might struggle with division into thirds,
it is unparalleled for scaling up and down rapidly.
During the French Revolution, the world was a
chaotic mess of local weights and measures. A
foot in one city might be a completely different
length than a foot in a city 20 miles away. That
sounds like a nightmare for trade. It was. So
the metric system was designed to create a universal
standard for physical measurement, and it was
entirely fundamentally built on the number 10.
Which is why converting units in the metric system
feels almost like cheating compared to the imperial
system. Like in Imperial, you have to memorize
that there are 5 ,280 feet in a mile, 16 ounces
in a pound. It's chaos. It really is. But in
the metric system, converting units is done simply
by shifting that decimal point, utilizing those
orders of magnitude we discussed earlier. One
centimeter is 10 millimeters. One decimeter is
10 centimeters. One meter is 100 centimeters.
One kilometer is 1 ,000 meters. You literally
just slide the zero left and right. It's so easy.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, the
metric system's strict reliance on the number
10 is arguably one of the greatest collaborative
tools ever invented in human history. It brings
the tidiness of the multiplication table directly
into physical reality. That's a great way to
put it. It is the infrastructure that allows
a structural engineer in Tokyo to share physical
data with an aerospace engineer in Paris without
catastrophic measurement errors. That shared
base -10 reality creates a unified global language
of physics. And the number 10 pops up in the
physical world itself. Yeah. Naturally. not just
in how we choose to measure it. Oh, definitely.
The sources note some great elemental trivia.
Like if you look at the periodic table of elements,
the 10th element is neon. And if you're looking
at transition metals, the 10th one is zinc. But
before we wrap up this journey, I have to bring
up one final detail from the research that takes
us from hard objective science straight into
ancient cult -like metaphysics. Ah, the Pythagorean
mysticism. This is a really fascinating pivot.
Yes. When we think of Pythagoras today, We just
think of the Pythagorean theorem from high school
geometry, right? Triangles and hypotenuses. But
in ancient Greece, Pythagoreanism was practically
a religion. It was a full -blown worldview. Yeah.
And to them, the number 10 wasn't just useful.
It was revered as divine. It played a deeply
mystical role. It was symbolized by something
they called the tetractis. The tetractis is a
powerful ancient symbol. Visually is a triangular
figure consisting of 10 points arranged in four
rows. The top row has one point, the second has
two, the third has three, and the bottom row
has four. One, two, three, four. Right. If you
add those rows together, one plus two plus three
plus four, it perfectly equals 10. And the Pythagoreans
didn't just draw this in the sand. They swore
their sacred oaths upon it. They did. To them,
the four rows represented the classical elements,
fire, air, water, and earth. of ten represented
the entire organization of space, harmony, and
the universe itself. To the Pythagoreans, ten
was the literal shape of divine perfection. So
what does this all mean? If you take a step back
and look at what we've just traversed. in this
deep dive. I mean, we have gone from cavemen
looking down at their hands and counting their
thumbs to the brutal mathematically calibrated
punishments of the Roman military. Right. We've
decoded the 1010 of binary computer language.
We've debated the flaws of dividing by three,
explored the flawless scales of the universal
metric system and ended up in the religious worship
of ancient Greek triangles. It is a remarkable
synthesis of human history, honestly. Ten is
not just an integer following nine. It is perhaps
the ultimate scale in a mechanism for human understanding.
It gives us a way to conceptualize immense stretches
of time through decades. It gives us the cognitive
tool to comprehend the vastness of the universe
through orders of magnitude. And it provides
a universal metric system that binds all of global
science together. It is the invisible scaffold
we built our entire modern reality on. This raises
an important question though about how entirely
dependent our modern world is on this single
framework. We are locked into a base 10 reality
because the evolution of our biology and we have
built a global infrastructure so reliant on it
that to change it now to a superior system like
base 12 would be fundamentally impossible. It's
completely baked into the code of human civilization
and that leads me to a final provocative thought
for you the listener. Throughout this whole deep
dive we've talked about how 10 is the universal
human language. The research actually highlights
that Wikipedia entries about the number 10 are
translated into 156 different human languages,
from Africans to Navajo to Zulu. It's everywhere.
Everywhere. Among humans, base 10 is our absolute
common ground. But imagine for a moment that
tomorrow We make first contact with an intelligent
alien species. Oh, wow. The ultimate test of
universal concepts. Exactly. We always assume
that mathematics is the universal language we
will use to communicate with extraterrestrials.
We beam binary code and prime numbers into deep
space expecting them to understand. But what
if those aliens evolved with, say, seven tentacles
or 12 digits? Their math would look entirely
different. Right. Their entire mathematical foundation,
their physics, their orders of magnitude, would
be built on a completely different base. Would
we even recognize their math as math? Or would
our supposedly universal language of base 10
get completely lost in biological translation?
So after you finish listening to this, I invite
you to just hold your hands out in front of you,
look at your own digits, and take a moment to
ponder how those specific 10 fingers not only
built the mathematical universe you live in today,
but might just be the very thing that isolates
us from the rest of the cosmos.