For our Pioneer Plaque, we chose to do emojis. In order to communicate the concept of emojis, we chose to put two more realistic human faces on the page and then associated them with the simpler emoji faces using arrows. For the emotions, we chose a simple happy and sad. Then, in the middle of the page, we put a globe, with arrows reaching out of the sides that connect to smartphones. This part was necessary because it helped contextualize what the phones actually are, as the image shows two people on different parts of the planet simultaneously talking. The globe would be visible to the aliens themselves, so it would help quite a bit in giving them insight into what life was like physically on the planet. The two phones are being controlled by two humans, each with a specific sad or happy emotion. The happy person is sending smiley-face emojis, while the sad person is sending sad emojis back. I think that while emojis themselves are not a very important topic to teach to aliens, the content behind them is very beneficial to understanding our human emotions. The entire point of emojis is to easily communicate basic human emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, etc. so instead of trying to explain the complex subject of the human psyche to aliens, emojis could be used as a placeholder. I think that if I were to try to communicate what emojis are to the aliens, I would use the Pioneer Plaque in addition to a demonstration using real humans. I would first try to show the main idea on the Pioneer Plaque, then I would try and capture the real-life experiences of happiness and sadness. I would probably use some sort of physical action to communicate emojis. Although the aliens do not experience time linearly like we do, they still understand actions such as eating. This means that they do not inherently need to understand all aspects of an idea simultaneously, which is how their written language is supposed to work. In addition, at the end of the story, they participate in a gift exchange, so they clearly understand the value of gifts. I would probably act out giving a gift to another person, which sparks happiness in them. When they get happy, they then hold up the “smiley” emoji. I then could take the present away from them, making them sad. This would prompt the “sad” emoji. We then could branch out into a multitude of action/emotion pairs, if the aliens seem to understand the two most basic emotions.
Pioneer Plaque:
