Introduce Human Currency System to the Hepatods
By Bonnie Wang
We decided to introduce the currency system to heptapods in the story. In our human’s perception, a currency is money that circulates in a specific place at a certain time, functioning as the medium of exchange. It can be any form of money, like cash and digital money. But in order to make it easier for the hepatods to understand, here we just use cash to represent all kinds of currency.
First of all, we arrange the picture centralized with a cash symbol, with other kinds of goods on four sides connected to it. We design it this way so that it looks similar to hepatods’ writing language, where their “semagrams”(writing elements) combined. It is a nonlinear conglomeration.
Secondly, we choose four representatives of goods which are food, clothes, bags, and jewelry. The main idea is to convey the message to the heptapods that money can exchange for many things.
Last but not the least, we put dotted-line oval between the money with each object, trying to say that there can be circulation between the money and each object.
I would like to describe this plaque to the aliens in the following way. First introduce the cash symbol, explaining it as an object constantly moving between people for exchange. There might not be a forward direction for the cash flow because it can be exchanged for basically any other goods, including both basics like things to eat and things to wear, and fancy goods that makes people looks good and feel good. I will specify that not only people can get stuff by giving money to the goods owner, they can also earn money by giving stuff to other people.In this sense, there will be huge amounts of circulation in an area in a given time because people have different kinds of needs.
We choose the current system to introduce to the heptapods because we think it is a nonlinear system, which accords with their writing and thinking pattern that is always centered and everything is connected. Also, the existence of currency is purposive, which is to get things of needs for people. This can be easily understand for teleological creatures like heptapods. Additionally, we usually view the currency for certain duration to see the total amount of cash flow,which correspond to what Chiang describes in the story: “by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a …goal…and had to know the initial and final states to meet the goal”(28). As for currency, the goal is to meet different needs of people and the means is to exchange with money.
