Pioneer Plaque Assignment
In the picture, there are three screens that show the imaging principle of LCD television. The screen on the right shows the basic element of LCD television imaging. They are red and green quantum dots and pure blue light sources. The middle screen shows the arrangement of three kinds of light sources. The left screen shows the pictures of flowers and houses, the result of the television imaging. There is a reason for the choice of these two objects. They respectively symbolize the natural environment and human environment of the earth, and to some extent show the connection between television and earth civilization. Two squares drawn with black lines between screens are polarizers, devices that enable the eye to receive light. On the left of the picture, there is one eye which means watching TV requires your eye. There is a man standing beside three screens. He is J.L.Baird, the inventor of television. We put him in the picture to show that the television is a human-made object.
There are two reasons we chose to use pictures that can be read in any order rather than words to show how television works. The first one is that it is difficult for aliens to understand the earth words which has explicit grammatical rules. Because according to Story of Your Life, “When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: Its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A “sentence” seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.” (16). It means that the alien language is a whole, very different from the orderly human language.
The other reason is that aliens have seven lidless eyes ringed the top of its body which means that it has no concept of order. This feature can be found in “Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be ‘forward.’” (5). So, such diagrams that can be understood from left to right or right to left are appropriate for aliens to understand. In addition, aliens see everything as a whole and understand things from a global perspective. For them, the concept of cause and effect does not exist. This character can be seen in “That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.”(23) and “The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams.”(23)