The pioneer plaque that I and Ziyi Zhu create is essentially a plaque to explain the decision of bringing an umbrella. As for heptapods, bringing an umbrella is a simple and determined behavior since they can see the future and the past. Yet what we want to ask the heptapods to think is: how do they reach that conclusion? By asking this, me and Ziyi Zhu want to introduce one of the most important parts in human’s culture: the culture of making assumptions.

We first present two pictures to the heptapods. In order to make them understand this better, we first present them a picture of their sentence(composed by different words) as an analogy to their time non-linear structure. By doing this, we show that heptapods can see weather of all different time, past, present and future, as they can see their whole sentence at the same time. 

 Then, next to it, we present a same circle while putting numerous blocks with numbers on them to show them how our time flows linearly, with a beginning and an end while each block represents a linear event or process that occurs on earth. For example, this human is looking at and can only see block 1, the weather at present time (the overcast). 

They will find this picture confusing, of course. Since this is as if someone cut part of human’s Chinese character, 口, and say that their time flow only from one beginning to another end.  (A, B, C, D  as shown in the picture) (We use the example of 口 here since this text is aimed for human reader: our professor. Since Chinese is the language that our professor’s native language, our professor can better understand how weird it is if we cut parts of 口 and mark linear direction on each part. Just as how aliens would feel if we cut their sentence to part and mark linear direction on each part.)

But confusing is the exact effect we want to achieve, because we want to introduce the assumption culture that is brought by our linear timeline, the culture we attempt to illustrate in this plague to the aliens.

Back to that question, why do we humans bring umbrellas with us? Here we zoom in more in the second picture and focus specifically on the process of rain on earth. Since humans cannot perceive the past nor the future, the only way they determine whether they want to bring an umbrella, is to see the weather report and feel it by themselves: whether there are clouds overcasted or there are the smell of water vapor. One thing to note here specifically about human culture, is that none of those mentioned above are absolutely correct. All people do are just making assumptions based on their own observations. Then, people start making decisions based on those assumptions. For example, if it is cloudy, people might bring an umbrella with them when they go out, if it is windy but also sunny, people might not bring one with them. Yet since human can only see part of the time circle (the present and presumably the past), the assumption they make and thus the decision they make might be false, but that is why this assumption culture of human is enticing. Because it means possibilities and surprises, something that the heptapods can never experience.