Story of Your Life – Pioneer Plaque
Wendy Xu & Ling Lin
The Pioneer Plaque is a physical, symbolic message affixed to the exterior of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, which is a trial of humans’ sending messages to space. It is an interstellar courier, which bears the accumulated voice of every human, transcribed in, perhaps, the only common language in all the cosmos. The form of the Pioneer Plaque is rather explicit and simple but it contains the most important elements of human society and how we view the universe.
Similar to the Pioneer Plaque, as for an existing system or technology of human culture, me and my partner, Ling, decided to choose some common but significant technique. During our discussion, we came up with a lot of ideas, such as the internet, social network, and so on. Finally, we decided to introduce the mechanism of animation, which plays a pivotal part in human arts and amusement, to Heptapods.
Animation is a method in which figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. Sequential images were shown one by one in quick succession to form an optical illusion of motion pictures.
The invention of animation can show the aliens the human culture and human wisdom very well. It is based on the visual illusion of the human body, which might be different from the aliens. Also, it shows aliens how human beings transform 2D images into 3D videos, which tells aliens that human beings are living in a 3D world and we have a sense of dimensions. Therefore, we chose to introduce the mechanism of animation as a typical human technology to the aliens in the book Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang.
According to Story of Your Life,
the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like “action” or those other things defined by integrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conductive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and
final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.
In Heptapods’ world, there is no cause and effect since they can foresee the future and find an efficient way to get to the result. So as to better introduce ideas to them, we want our pioneer plaque to be straightforward, vivid, and easy to read. Maybe for Heotapods, there is no need to introduce Mathematics or Physics to them for the reason that they seem to be born with the knowledge of those theories that humans struggled with for a long time. I and Ling thought maybe introducing a human’s way of amusement and enjoyment would be the best choice. So we decided to design an animation of a horse, which is a normal animal on the earth.
We drew different forms of a running horse and put them together as one. And then we try to cut them into slices and move their directions accordingly to create the effect of visual illusion just as animation does. When looking at the picture, human eyes will consider it as a moving object instead of overlapping images. In the novel, Heptapods can immediately read the full information of the whole picture at the same time, which is helpful to understand the idea of our design. So we positively believe that this would be a good window for heptapods to take a glance at human culture.
Reference:
The Pioneer Plaque: Science as a universal language. The Planetary Society. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.planetary.org/articles/0120-the-pioneer-plaque-science-as-a-universal-language.