Communication (first page)
Thu 20 Apr 2023
One of my pastimes is imagining concepts that could be the basis of a science fiction story. Occasionally these take form as a complete piece of writing but more often they drift in my memory and on notebook pages: too interesting to abandon but not creatively rich enough to be worth spending much time on. This is one of them.
It takes the form of a puzzle. As in the classic movie Forbidden Planet an exploring party has landed in an abandoned city and is trying to make sense of the culture, technology, and aspirations of the builders. They reason that there must be written records but nowhere can they find anything that looks like a word, symbol, or image. The city is well preserved and clearly designed to resist erosion and settlement. Its buildings are perfect, subtly multicolored, and convey to the visitors a powerful sense of peace and restfulness combined with an underlying feeling of intellectual depth. They explore, photograph, measure, examine, debate. Time passes.
One of the exploring party, a philologist perhaps, is learning Japanese in order to compare it to certain other hybrid pictographic systems. He notes to one of the others that the kanji – the drawn characters, based on Chinese writing – have a subset, the 1850 toyo kanji, which are the minimum required to write intelligibly and fluently. However there are many more, over fifty thousand, of increasing precision and obscurity. An educated Japanese person may know and use as many as ten thousand kanji; as a result expensive products in that culture are advertised using only characters that highly educated and presumably affluent professionals would know. In this way society is subtly stratified by levels of education; the inadequately literate simply can not understand messages not intended for them. He speculates that this may be the situation the exploring party faces; indeed worse, for they may not even recognize the symbols for words if they exist at all.
Such communication requires a shared base of concepts between the storage/transmission software and the decoder. For a JPG image, this is the basic patterns from which the image is built in square blocks, the quality and size of the image, and the way the image is built up from both. For a recipe, it includes basic ingredients, standardized cooking techniques and units, and a set of common kitchen tools, pans, and appliances for that culture. In language, it features words, syntax, and common cultural references; like a JPG image decoder, this ability is installed in each speaker through education and practice.
The explorer accepts that there can be no common cultural reference without a survivor being found – and being able to communicate with that survivor. But there may be recognizable words and syntax. He searches the landscape, finding only the same complex, perfect, subtly colored blocks that may be buildings or sculptures.
Tired at the end of one of the planet’s long days, he dozes in his bunk; half remembered scenes and objects blur in his sleep drugged mind. He recalls a colleague who collected slide rules, long abandoned devices which represented and manipulated numeric values through exponentially closer marks on sliding scales. A cabinet in a museum with examples of different types of maps, one of which was a carved piece of wood made by eastern Greenland Inuit representing the local coastline, and used while navigating it. He notes that representations of concepts also need not be symbolic, such as the knotted cords used by the Incas for recordkeeping and the Braille alphabet for the blind.
Staying in his bunk, the philologist instructs his computer to once more access the entire city’s measurements and attempt to find a pattern in the structures’ dimensions, forms, orientation, and relationships but this time guided by his suggestions. Together, they work through the hours of darkness as, deliberately half awake and half dreaming, he guides it down intuited pathways of potential meaning.
By morning an answer has emerged from the mist. The man and the machine agree that the only possible information storage medium in the city is the city itself. It is a machine that contains its own instructions, embedded and emblazoned in the dimensions, relations, and forms of the buildings themselves. A single word, a solitary concept might be enough to unlock the wealth of information it preserves.
An answer comes from the mathematical technique known as induction. The philologist must assume that the city’s form holds a message and that the message is intended for visitors who arrived after the builders had left – otherwise the quest is hopeless. There must be a key; looking again at the city he is struck by its rectangular forms except for building which is a perfect circle. Its uniqueness makes it the logical place to start and he realizes that it represents the universal value p, and from it the unit length of the city’s form can be found.
The vanished builders’ alphabet can only be ratio, sometimes known as proportion, as this is independent of measurement systems, culture, and any physical expansion or contraction of form due to temperature. It is also capable of increasing levels of subtlety depending on the accuracy of the reader’s instruments, similar to the level of education required to read abstruse Japanese characters. The philologist understands that what may be learned will depend on how much his civilization’s technology has learned compared to the builders.
Is he looking for a message where they may be none? Or is there indeed a message but one in which – like the DNA of our genetic code – different messages are superimposed and may be extracted independently depending on how much and how many of the decoding concepts one has access too. Does, in fact, everything have a message?