Pioneer Plaque – Annika & Rachel
[ I put the link to the original soundtrack of the movie Arrival here, Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack is perfect as background music while reading (?) ]
The thing we decide to explain to the heptapods is the history of currency. The reason why we chose it is that we wanted to show the aliens our human transaction mode. The mode obeys the equivalent exchange rules, showing the intelligence of humans, that we can create a convenient system for everyone to achieve the needs of exchange and trade and both buyers and sellers can be satisfied with what they get from the trades. Also, since the language system of the heptapods is special, we felt like they may already know the results before trading, so they don’t need any universal equivalent, but our human beings do need that. In this case, explaining the currency to them may help them understand more differences between the heptapods and humans.
Basically, we use a structure of comic strips to show the developing process. We use the numbers of dots replacing the numbers and noting them at the corner of each picture, not only showing the order of the pictures but also in case of the aliens don’t understand what literal numbers mean. For the content, we drew four pictures to describe four processes of the currency development – from using barter way to trade to create the universal equivalent (which is the currency), from trading with the heavy metal money to using the paper money, and then develop into the virtual transaction.
In the first picture in explaining the barter trade, we chose to draw two hands exchanging two goods, showing how humans reach the goal of exchange in early ages. The second picture is used to explain the emergence of money, where we used a balance to show that the value of commodities becomes equal to the shells and golden, which gradually develop into the currency. In the third picture, these shells and metal money changed into the paper money, and we used the falling down shells and golds to show the heaviness of it, which also explained the reason why people changed it into the paper one. In the last picture, we drew a hand sending the paper money into a screen full of 0 and 1, which we think the aliens may understand means a virtual world, thus we explained more and more money became a virtual form nowadays.
To make the pictures more convenient to understand, we continued to use some same icons between different pictures. For example, the apples used to exchange with meet in the first picture appeared in the second picture, where showed the apples are equal to the golds and shells. This makes the four pictures more consecutive, and also shows the continuity of the history.
We understand that human languages make no sense to the aliens, so there are no words in the pioneer plaque, and we all used abstract pictures to show the process. However, we did use a symbol to show that this is a history and intelligence from humans, that is the hand. Every picture maintained at least one human hand, showing that this is something created by us. Since the human biological structures are different from the aliens, we think adding the symbol of human hands would make the pioneer plaque more conspicuous that it is a piece of history that comes from the human. This also meets the important meaning of creating a pioneer plaque that belongs to humans.