Story of Your Life – Pioneer Plaque Assignment
Story of Your Life – Pioneer Plaque Assignment
The instant camera – Polaroid
For the Pioneer Plaque assignment, the object that I chose to be my example to explain the history and life of a human to the alien is the instant camera or another name called Polaroid. One of the reasons I chose this specific object is because I partly want to show where the human race is now in the technological world. Although we have better technology for photo capturing, which is a digital camera or our smartphone, I feel like that would be too much information given. Since, in the story, the scientists were very aware of showing what humans are actually capable of and didn’t want to show the whole culture of humans, I’m now quite aware of that too. Another reason is that photo/picture capturing has been in our history for quite long, so I think I could use Polaroid to explain more about how and why we use this type of device to capture our moment and keep it as our memory.
I’ll first begin with what this object is for and why we use it in our life. First thing first, the instant camera or Polaroid is a device that captures the current moment in real life and prints it out as a piece of colored paper with a realistic display on it. And the reason why humans make this is because they want to capture that precious moment and make it last longer for us to remember. Some of the precious moments, like a family gathering or a party with friends, are moments that many humans cherish because those activities could give them happiness. However, photo capturing was invented many decades ago. It didn’t use to be like this back in the past, where you could take a photo and print it out immediately with the instant camera. Back in the past, it would take a longer and more complex process to get a picture of that moment captured to print out for the photo to be touchable and visible. However, as I had mentioned, moment capturing is something that was invented a long time ago. Still, back in the past, people would use drawing or painting to capture not only a precious moment but also some important moment of that area at that time, to be remembered for the learning process of our humanity and also to be honored by us people. For many centuries ago, the materials our people used for painting and drawing were the extracted color and materials from natural resources, such as trees and flowers. But in this current era where some technology has come into place, humans have invited the instant camera to make it easier for people to capture the moments they love.
Lastly, I would like to explain a bit more about our culture and why we need a moment-capturing device (if not the painting or drawing process). It’s mainly because, in the human world, people like to make themselves recognize an important or hard-to-come-by moment. It’s also like a tradition now in this present day how humans have to use a camera to capture those moments as just their habits. However, since moment capturing or photo taking is very popular and is in our everyday life, I hope this sample device and these explanations would help the aliens to know more about the technology in our world and understand more of our cultures.
- Ken Saengkla and You Wu